By MIKE CATALINI, Associated Press

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker carried an all-night speech in protest of President Donald Trump’s agenda into Tuesday morning.

Booker took to the Senate floor on Monday evening saying he would remain there as long as he was “physically able.” He was still on the floor more than 12 hours later.

“These are not normal times in our nation,” Booker said at the start of his speech. “And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate. The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent, and we all must do more to stand against them.”

Booker railed against cuts to Social Security offices and spoke to concerns that broader cuts to the social safety net could be coming, though Republican lawmakers say the program won’t be touched.

Donning and doffing reading glasses, Booker read what he said were letters from constituents. One writer was alarmed by the Republican president’s talk of annexing Greenland and Canada and a “looming constitutional crisis.”

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“I hear you. I see you, and I’m standing here in part because of letters like yours,” Booker said.

On Tuesday morning, Booker got some help from Democratic colleagues, who gave him a break from speaking to ask him a question. Booker said he would yield for questions but would not give up the Senate floor.

According to the Senate’s website, the record for the longest individual speech belongs to Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Booker, 55, is serving his second term in the Senate. He was an unsuccessful presidential candidate in 2020, when he launched his campaign from the steps of his home in Newark. He dropped out after struggling to gain a foothold in a packed field, falling short of a threshold to meet in a January 2020 debate.

Before taking to the national political stage, Booker was considered a rising star in the Democratic Party, serving as mayor of Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, from 2006 to 2013. A Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law, he started his career as an attorney for nonprofits. He served on the Newark City Council before becoming the city’s mayor.

He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013 during a special election held after the death of incumbent Democrat Frank Lautenberg. He won his first full-term in 2014 and then reelection in 2020.

Booker was at the helm in Newark when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million donation to improve the city’s schools in 2010. Roughly a decade ago, Zuckerberg told the AP a major lesson from Newark being applied in later donations was to make sure the desires of the public are considered.

Catalini reported from Trenton, N.J.

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — There are just two Planned Parenthood clinics in South Carolina, but every year they take hundreds of low-income patients who need things like contraception, cancer screenings and pregnancy testing.

The organization has long been at the center of the debate over abortion, but its clinics across the U.S. also provide a range of other services. In South Carolina, Medicaid patients often seek out Planned Parenthood because they often have difficulty finding a doctor who accepts the publicly funded insurance.

A case coming before the Supreme Court from South Carolina on Wednesday could upend that option. That’s because the state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, is pushing to block any public health care dollars from going to Planned Parenthood.

Federal law already prohibits Medicaid money from going to pay for abortions, with very limited exceptions, and South Carolina now bans almost all abortions around six weeks after conception.

“This case is not about abortion. This case is about general health care,” said Katherine Farris, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.

Still, Republican leaders in conservative-led states have long said that no public health care dollars should go to an organization that provides abortions, and states should instead be able to direct that money as they choose. A few states already have cut Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood and more could follow if South Carolina prevails.

“The people in this state do not want their tax money to go to that organization,” McMaster said.

The Trump administration is joining South Carolina for the arguments on Wednesday, which are playing out against the backdrop of a wider push by abortion opponents to defund Planned Parenthood.

Health care advocates, meanwhile, say the effects of the case transcend abortion. The legal question at its center is whether Medicaid patients can sue over their legal right to choose their own qualified provider.

The American Cancer Society and other public-health groups say in court papers that lawsuits are the only real way that patients can assert those rights. Losing the ability to go to court would hurt their access to care, especially in rural areas.

“If no one is able to enforce the statute or no one’s willing to enforce the statute at the federal level, then it’s a right on paper only,” said Julian Polaris, a lawyer who regularly advises state Medicaid programs and health care providers. States could also move to restrict access to treatments like gender-affirming care if the court sides with South Carolina, he said.

One in five American women of reproductive age is now enrolled in the Medicaid program, said Heidi Allen, an associate professor at Columbia University. This means that finding providers who can offer quality family planning services — a requirement for Medicaid — is crucial for meeting the needs of those patients.

“It’s concerning that states would eliminate a site of care for politically motivated reasons, “Allen said.

The case stretches back to 2018, before the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion, when McMaster first moved to cut Planned Parenthood funding in a fulfillment of a campaign promise. He signed an executive order removing Planned Parenthood from a list of providers for things like birth control, and sexually transmitted disease testing.

“There are plenty of good organizations that provide maternal health advice, counseling and care and we need more of those,” McMaster said last week.

His order was blocked in court, but since then judges have ruled in favor of similar moves in Texas and Missouri, said John Bursch, an attorney for the conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom.

“At the highest level, this case is about whether states have the flexibility to direct Medicaid moneys to best benefit low-income women and families,” he said.

He acknowledged that a win for South Carolina could curtail other Medicaid lawsuits, but suggested that could be good for the program overall because it would mean less money going to legal fees. There is also an administrative appeals process available, he said.

“No one is losing their access to health care clinics,” Busch said. If the state is allowed to cut off Planned Parenthood, Medicaid patients could go to one of 200 other publicly funded health care clinics in the state, he said.

In South Carolina, $90,000 in Medicaid funding goes to Planned Parenthood every year — a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the state’s total Medicaid spending.

Most counties in the state have already been federally designated as having too few primary care providers, said Amalia Luxardo, CEO of the South Carolina-based Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network. Fourteen of the state’s counties have no practicing OB-GYN physicians and five other counties have just one, she said, meaning many women already have to travel longer distances to find the right provider.

Planned Parenthood has flexible hours and can get appointments scheduled quickly, factors that bring in patients from around the state, she said.

“We are already in a health care crisis,” said Luxardo, whose group has filed court briefs supporting Planned Parenthood. “And when decisions like these negatively impact our constituents, the crisis is going to only increase.”

Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., and Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tenn., contributed to this report.

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Medical Writer

Employees across the massive U.S. Health and Human Services Department began receiving notices of dismissal on Tuesday in an overhaul ultimately expected to lay off up to 10,000 people. The notices come just days after President Donald Trump moved to strip workers of their collective bargaining rights at HHS and other agencies throughout the government.

At the National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading health and medical agency, the layoffs occurred as its new director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, began his first day of work.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan last week to remake the department, which, through its agencies, is responsible for tracking health trends and disease outbreaks, conducting and funding medical research, and monitoring the safety of food and medicine, as well as for administering health insurance programs for nearly half of the country.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during an event announcing proposed changes to SNAP and food dye legislation, Friday, March 28, 2025, in Martinsburg, W. Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

The plan would consolidate agencies that oversee billions of dollars for addiction services and community health centers under a new office called the Administration for a Healthy America.

The layoffs are expected to shrink HHS to 62,000 positions, lopping off nearly a quarter of its staff — 10,000 jobs through layoffs and another 10,000 workers who took early retirement and voluntary separation offers.

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At the NIH, the cuts included at least four directors of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers who were put on administrative leave, and nearly entire communications staffs were terminated, according to an agency senior leader, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

An email viewed by The Associated Press shows some senior-level employees of the Bethesda, Maryland, campus who were placed on leave were offered a possible transfer to the Indian Health Service in locations including Alaska and given until end of Wednesday to respond.

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington predicted the cuts will have ramifications when natural disasters strike or infectious diseases, like the ongoing measles outbreak, spread.

“They may as well be renaming it the Department of Disease because their plan is putting lives in serious jeopardy,” Murray said Friday.

Beyond layoffs at federal health agencies, cuts are beginning to happen at state and local health departments as a result of an HHS move last week to pull back more than $11 billion in COVID-19-related money. Local and state health officials are still assessing the impact, but some health departments have already identified hundreds of jobs that stand to be eliminated because of lost money, “some of them overnight, some of them are already gone,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Union representatives for HHS employees received a notice Thursday that 8,000 to 10,000 employees will be terminated. The department’s leadership will target positions in human resources, procurement, finance and information technology. Positions in “high cost regions” or that have been deemed “redundant” will be the focus of the layoffs.

Kennedy criticized the department he oversees as an inefficient “sprawling bureaucracy” in a video Thursday announcing the restructuring. He said the department’s $1.7 trillion yearly budget, “has failed to improve the health of Americans.”

“I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” Kennedy said.

The department on Thursday provided a breakdown of some of the cuts:

3,500 jobs at the Food and Drug Administration, which inspects and sets safety standards for medications, medical devices and foods.
2,400 jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for infectious disease outbreaks and works with public health agencies nationwide.
1,200 jobs at the NIH.
300 jobs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid.

At the CDC, most employees have not been unionized, but interest rose sharply this year as the Trump administration took steps to reduce the federal workforce. Roughly 2,000 CDC employees in Atlanta belonged to the American Federation of Government Employees local bargaining unit, with hundreds more who had petitioned to join in recent days being added.

But on Thursday night, Trump signed an executive order that would end collective bargaining for a large number of federal agencies, including the CDC and other health agencies.

The erosion of collective bargaining rights was decried by some Democratic lawmakers.

“President Trump’s brazen attempt to strip the majority of federal employees of their union rights robs these workers of their hard-fought protections,” Reps. Gerald Connolly and Bobby Scott, both of Virginia, said in a joint statement Friday.

“This will only give Elon Musk more power to dismantle the people’s government with as little resistance from dedicated civil servants as possible — further weakening the federal government’s ability to serve the American people.”

Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard, Amanda Seitz and Matthew Perrone in Washington and Mike Stobbe in New York contributed.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MATTHEW PERRONE, Associated Press Health Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration’s chief tobacco regulator has been removed from his post amid sweeping cuts at the agency and across the federal health workforce handed down Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter.

In an email to staff, FDA tobacco director Brian King said: “It is with a heavy heart and profound disappointment that I share I have been placed on administrative leave.”

King was removed from his position and offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service, according to a person familiar with the matter who did not have permission to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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Dozens of staffers in FDA’s tobacco center also received notices of dismissal Tuesday morning, including the entire office responsible for enforcing tobacco regulations.

King, who joined the agency in 2022, has been vigorously criticized by vaping lobbyists for ordering thousands of companies to remove their fruit and candy-flavored e-cigarettes from the market. During his time at FDA, teen vaping has fallen to a 10-year low.

His removal comes just days after FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks was forced out, citing health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s support for vaccine “misinformation and lies” in his resignation letter.

The latest changes mean that nearly all of FDA’s top leaders overseeing drugs, food, vaccines, medical devices and now tobacco products have resigned or retired in recent months.

The leadership vacuum comes as Kennedy moves to fire 3,500 FDA staffers and pushes ahead with plans to scrutinize ultra-processed foods, childhood vaccines, antidepressants and other long-established products.

The wave of departures means incoming FDA commissioner Marty Makary — who was confirmed last week— will inherit an agency without many of its top experts and a beleaguered workforce that has been rocked by weeks of layoffs and a chaotic return-to-office process. Only a handful of FDA employees are political appointees, with nearly all of the agency’s scientific reviews and decisions overseen by career officials.

Neither Makary nor Kennedy have said much about how tobacco policy fits into their plan to “Make America Healthy Again.” Despite historically low rates of smoking, tobacco-related diseases remain the nation’s leading preventable cause of death, blamed for more than 490,000 annually.

In recent years, the FDA’s tobacco center has been besieged by criticism from all sides including congressional lawmakers, anti-smoking advocates, and tobacco and vaping companies.

Politicians, parents and anti-tobacco groups want the FDA to do more to stamp out unauthorized vaping products that can appeal to teens, many of which are imported from China. Tobacco and vaping companies say the FDA has been too slow to approve newer products for adult smokers — including e-cigarettes — that generally carry much lower risks than traditional cigarettes.

Under King, the FDA rejected applications for millions of flavored e-cigarettes, citing insufficient data that the products would help adult smokers while not becoming popular with underage kids. Those rejections have resulted in multiple lawsuits against FDA from vape makers, including one that was argued before the Supreme Court in December.

The Vapor Technology Association, an industry group, has been running ads urging Trump to follow through on a campaign pledge he made to “save the flavored vaping industry.”

The FDA has authorized a handful of e-cigarettes for adults, mostly from major vaping brands owned by legacy tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynold’s Vuse and Altria’s Njoy.

Other recent FDA departures include:

Deputy commissioner for foods, Jim Jones, who resigned in February after dozens of his staffers were fired.
Director of FDA’s drug center, Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, who stepped down days before President Donald Trump took office.
The agency’s second-ranking official. Dr. Namandje Bumpus, who resigned late last year.
FDA’s longtime medical devices director, Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, who retired last summer.

Many deputies and senior scientists have also retired or stepped down in recent weeks.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.