By MICHAEL R. BLOOD

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California Democrats’ rush to schedule an emergency election to remake U.S. House districts and counter rival moves by Texas Republicans has created a dilemma for county officials who are being urged to plan for an election that hasn’t been scheduled and might never happen.

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Orchestrating an election in a state of nearly 23 million registered voters across 58 counties is a time-consuming and costly endeavor under any circumstances, but Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-dominated Legislature already have blown past deadlines intended to give local officials adequate time for organizing everything from printing mail ballots in multiple languages to lining up staff and securing locations for in-person voting.

Democrats are considering new political maps that could slash five Republican-held House seats in the liberal-leaning state while bolstering Democratic incumbents in other battleground districts. If Democrats succeed, that could leave Republicans with four House seats in the state among 52 overall.

Those revised maps could be formally unveiled as soon as next week, in advance of a Nov. 4 election.

The office of the state’s chief elections overseer, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, met Monday with local election officials to discuss planning for the pending election. Though an election has not been called, “staff around the state need to begin preparing for the possibility of a special election,” Weber spokesperson Jim Patrick said in an email.

Meanwhile, it’s not known if the state will cover the cost of the potential November election or if counties — many cash-strapped — will be saddled with the bill. A 2021 special election in which Newsom beat back a recall attempt cost over $200 million to conduct.

“We are going to be under some tight time pressures,” said Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page, whose office is rapidly planning for the proposed election.

“We really can’t lose all or most of August by waiting” for the Legislature and the governor to act, Page added. “It’s a risk I have to take.”

Los Angeles County Clerk Dean Logan, who oversees elections in the county of nearly 10 million people, warned that “without upfront state funding and a clearly defined calendar, counties can face challenges meeting the demands of an election.”

“Ensuring voters are served accurately, securely, and equitably must remain the top priority, and that takes preparation,” Logan added in a statement.

Texas and California — the two most populous U.S. states — are the leading actors in a back-and-forth push to remake the balance of power in the U.S. House, kicked off when President Donald Trump called for Texas to redraw district lines with the GOP’s fragile House majority imperiled in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

The party that controls the White House is typically punished by voters in midterm elections.

“We are entitled to five more seats” in Texas, Trump insisted Tuesday in a CNBC interview. He pointed to California’s existing maps, which are drawn by an independent commission unlike the Texas maps crafted by a partisan legislature: “They did it to us.”

Other states — including New York, Florida and Indiana — could get into the power struggle that’s emerging as a national proxy war for control of Congress.

Newsom has said he would only move forward with the election if Texas succeeds in recasting its own House maps. The Texas push is on hold, after Democrats fled the state to prevent a legislative vote on the Republican redistricting plan.

In an online post, Page wrote that state rules require the governor to issue a proclamation calling a statewide election at least 148 days before the date of the election — that would have been June 9. As part of any action, the Legislature would have to waive that requirement this year.

He warned of a possible enforcement action by the U.S. Justice Department if ballots for members of the U.S. Military and overseas voters are not issued by Sept. 20.

Page said if he waited for the Legislature and the governor to formally call the election, “it would be too late for me to actually conduct the election.”

If it goes through, “We are going to make this work,” Page added.

By Sarah Jane Tribble, KFF Health News, Henry Larweh, KFF Health News

A little-known federal agency that sends more than $12 billion annually to support community health centers, addiction treatment services, and workforce initiatives for America’s neediest people has been hobbled by the Trump administration’s staffing purges.

The cuts are “just a little astonishing,” said Carole Johnson, who previously led the Health Resources and Services Administration. She left the agency in January with the administration change and has described the sweeping staff cuts as a “big threat” to the agency’s ability to distribute billions of dollars in grants to hospitals, clinics, nonprofits, and other organizations nationwide.

Since February, about a quarter of workers at HRSA — including analysts, auditors, scientists, grant managers, and nursing consultants — have left, according to a KFF Health News analysis.

The agency, headquartered in a nondescript gray-and-glass office building tucked into side streets in Rockville, Maryland, employed about 2,700 staffers in early 2025. Employees worked behind the scenes to manage and monitor thousands of projects nationwide that fund primary health providers, HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, maternal and child care programs, rural hospitals, and workforce training.

On the ground, HRSA’s grants have helped create telehealth initiatives for mothers in rural New Mexico, funded workforce training for Indigenous nurses in South Dakota, and supported Healthy Start programs for expectant mothers and babies in places like rural Georgia.

Ryan Alcorn, a co-founder and the chief executive of GrantExec, a company that helps organizations match and apply for funding, said every American benefits from the programs HRSA’s funding supports: “When the safety net fails, hospitals become overwhelmed, unpaid costs rise, and premiums go up for everyone.”

Carole Johnson, former administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, speaks during a maternal health event at the agency’ s Rockville, Maryland, headquarters in January. (Sarah Jane Tribble/KFF Health News/TNS)

Several former HRSA leaders, who have been in touch with employees, confirmed the magnitude of the cuts estimated by KFF Health News. Johnson said she believes the actual number of workers lost is larger.

More than 700 workers were fired or chose to leave from February through the end of June. The analysis is based on data from the HHS employee directory, which may not include workers who opted out of being listed, and may not be an exact count of the worker roster, which is in flux.

Johnson, who is now a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and several other former employees interviewed by KFF Health News said they are concerned that specific programs will be eliminated, but also that reduced staffing could affect ongoing program oversight. The agency’s workforce ethos, Johnson said, is one in which “if there were two people left at HRSA, they would work around the clock to try to get the money out.”

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For at least one program, revealed during a tense moment on Capitol Hill in July, money to help low-income and minority students has already stopped flowing to colleges and universities. The Scholarship for Disadvantaged Students program, established through congressional legislation, helped schools pay for students to train to become dentists, physician assistants, midwives, and nurses — all of whom are in short supply in rural and some urban areas. Candice Chen, acting associate administrator of HRSA’s health workforce bureau, confirmed the agency “did have competitions that were canceled.”

When U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., asked whether they were canceled by the Trump administration, Chen paused before speaking again: “Well, the funding decisions were made across the administration.”

Asked about the canceled funding, officials from several schools declined to comment. Patrick Gonzales, a spokesperson for the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, said in an emailed statement that the school is “helping students navigate this transition with clarity and care.”

U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., has called for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s resignation or firing, “whichever one comes first,” saying there was “no defensible answer” to eliminating thousands of workers across federal agencies.

In April, nearly a dozen Democratic senators sent a letter to Kennedy demanding answers about the mass firings, noting HRSA is the “primary agency tasked with improving access to health care for vulnerable populations.”

HHS did not respond to the senators’ letter. Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services “has refused to answer basic questions about why the administration conducted mass firings in this office,” said Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del.

President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal 2026 budget eliminates HRSA as well as some of its programs, including grants to rural hospitals, workforce training, Ryan White HIV/AIDS programs, and emergency medical services for children. HRSA spokesperson Andrea Takash said in an emailed response that HHS is “undertaking organizational changes that support multiple goals while ensuring continuity of essential services.”

HRSA continues to process new funding announcements and awards for the health centers, workforce programs, child and maternal health initiatives, and “many more of our critical programs and services,” Takash said.

HRSA’s largest bureau supports thousands of community health centers that serve over 31 million people nationwide. Before the end of September, the agency’s grants are still scheduled to pay out billions more to health clinics and other organizations nationwide.

Cuts to health centers could come under more scrutiny because their funding has “a lot of bipartisan” support, said Celli Horstman, a senior research associate at the Commonwealth Fund, a health research nonprofit. HRSA’s funding, which includes Section 330 grants, goes to “keeping the doors open” at federally qualified health centers nationwide, Horstman said.

An additional 42% of health center funding comes from Medicaid, a federal and state insurance program that covers people with low incomes and those with disabilities, she said. Congress recently voted to reduce Medicaid funding.

Joe Stevens, spokesperson for the Virginia Community Healthcare Association, said health centers are rethinking “how they do business” because of the Medicaid cuts and the increased administrative challenges faced when processing their HRSA grants, which have been more challenging to obtain since February. Virginia’s health clinics treat about 400,000 people annually, Stevens said.

“It’s a system that’s been in place for 50-plus years, and this is the first time they’re having issues receiving their funds,” he said, noting that clinics now must also provide an itemized list of how the money is to be used after grants have been approved.

“Our health centers are understaffed, so having somebody to have to enter that information every two weeks is just more time,” Stevens said.

For months, HRSA staff across all departments have worked through changes to their technology systems and transitioned work to others as employees left their jobs. Workers have continued to process grants despite an executive order that froze federal funding and a March announcement that HHS would lay off 10,000 workers and shut down entire agencies — including HRSA.

One former employee said that, at this point, “all we’re doing now is keeping the lights on.”

Michael Warren, who left the agency in June, ran HRSA’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau. Warren described the bureau’s staffing cuts as “substantial.” The bureau awarded more than $628 million in grants between Oct. 1, 2024, and July 22, 2025, to programs that included providing block grants to states and funding home visiting programs, through which trained staffers work with families with young children.

Warren, who is now the chief medical and health officer for the March of Dimes, said America faces a crisis as one of the “most dangerous places in the world to give birth among other high-income countries, and that shouldn’t be the case.”

With tears brimming, Warren said his former employees “wake up every morning, they work all day, and they go to sleep every night thinking about what they can do for mothers, children, and families.”

Methodology

For this article, KFF Health News calculated workforce reductions at the Health Resources and Services Administration using public information from the Department of Health and Human Services directory posted online. We compared the number and type of employees listed with HRSA in February to those in early July. Our employee totals exclude people listed as interns, fellows, student trainees, or volunteers. The directory is not an official count of HRSA employees, but it offers detailed snapshots of trends so far this year. Reporters also cross-checked the estimates with former employees.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By DASHA LITVINOVA

Bilateral meetings between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterparts were a regular occurrence early in his tenure.

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But as tensions mounted between Moscow and the West following the illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and allegations of meddling with the 2016 U.S. elections, those became increasingly less frequent, and their tone appeared less friendly.

Here’s what to know about past meetings between Russian and U.S. presidents:

Putin and Joe Biden

Putin and Joe Biden met only once while holding the presidency –- in Geneva in June 2021.

Russia was amassing troops on the border with Ukraine, where large swaths of land in the east had long been occupied by Moscow-backed forces; Washington repeatedly accused Russia of cyberattacks. The Kremlin was intensifying its domestic crackdown on dissent, jailing opposition leader Alexei Navalny months earlier and harshly suppressing protests demanding his release.

FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and U.S President Joe Biden shake hands in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, Pool, File)

Putin and Biden talked for three hours, but no breakthroughs came out of the meeting. The two exchanged expressions of mutual respect, but firmly restated their starkly different views on all of the above.

They spoke again via videoconference in December 2021 as tensions heightened over Ukraine. Biden threatened sanctions if Russia invaded Ukraine, and Putin demanded guarantees that Kyiv wouldn’t join NATO –- something Washington and its allies said was a nonstarter.

Another phone call between the two came in February 2022, less than two weeks before the full-scale invasion. Then the high-level contacts stopped cold, with no publicly disclosed conversations between Putin and Biden since the invasion.

Putin and Donald Trump

Putin met Trump met six times during the American’s first term -– at and on the sidelines of G20 and APEC gatherings — but most famously in Helsinki in July 2018. That’s where Trump stood next to Putin and appeared to accept his insistence that Moscow had not interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and openly questioned the firm finding by his own intelligence agencies.

His remarks were a stark illustration of Trump’s willingness to upend decades of U.S. foreign policy and rattle Western allies in service of his political concerns.

“I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said. “He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Putin and Barack Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama met with Putin nine times, and there were 12 more meetings with Dmitry Medvedev, who served as president in 2008-12. Putin became prime minister in a move that allowed him to reset Russia’s presidential term limits and run again in 2012.

FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, listens to U.S. President Barack Obama in Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, Monday, Sept. 5, 2016. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Obama traveled to Russia twice — once to meet Medvedev in 2009 and again for a G20 summit 2013. Medvedev and Putin also traveled to the U.S.

Under Medvedev, Moscow and Washington talked of “resetting” Russia-U.S. relations post-Cold War and worked on arms control treaties. U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton famously presented a big “reset” button to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a meeting in 2009. One problem: instead of “reset” in Russian, they used another word meaning “overload.”

After Putin returned to office in 2012, tensions rose between the two countries. The Kremlin accused the West of interfering with Russian domestic affairs, saying it fomented anti-government protests that rocked Moscow just as Putin sought reelection. The authorities cracked down on dissent and civil society, drawing international condemnation.

Obama canceled his visit to Moscow in 2013 after Russia granted asylum to Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower.

In 2014, the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies responded with crippling sanctions. Relations plummeted to the lowest point since the Cold War.

The Kremlin’s 2015 military intervention in Syria to prop up Bashar Assad further complicated ties. Putin and Obama last met in China in September 2016, on the sidelines of a G20 summit, and held talks focused on Ukraine and Syria.

Putin and George W. Bush

Putin and George W. Bush met 28 times during Bush’s two terms. They hosted each other for talks and informal meetings in Russia and the U.S., met regularly on the sidelines of international summits and forums, and boasted of improving ties between onetime rivals.

FILE- Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and U.S. President George W. Bush look on during their news conference in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, southern Russia, Sunday, April 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

After the first meeting with Putin in 2001, Bush said he “looked the man in the eye” and “found him very straightforward and trustworthy,” getting “a sense of his soul.”

In 2002, they signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty -– a nuclear arms pact that significantly reduced both countries’ strategic nuclear warhead arsenal.

Putin was the first world leader to call Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attack, offering his condolences and support, and welcomed the U.S. military deployment on the territory of Moscow’s Central Asian allies for action in Afghanistan.

He has called Bush “a decent person and a good friend,” adding that good relations with him helped find a way out of “the most acute and conflict situations.”

Associated Press writer Yuras Karmanau contributed.

By CHEYANNE MUMPHREY

A big increase in the tax on university endowments is adding to financial uncertainty for the wealthiest colleges in the U.S., leading several already to lay off staff or implement hiring freezes.

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Spending more endowment money on taxes could also lead colleges to reduce financial aid, cutting off access to elite institutions for lower-income students, colleges and industry experts have warned. President Donald Trump signed the tax increase into law last month as part of his signature spending bill.

The new tax rates take effect in 2026, but colleges such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford already are citing the tax as one of many reasons for making cuts across their universities. Each will be on the hook to pay hundreds of millions more in taxes, while also navigating reductions in research grants and other threats to funding by the Trump administration.

A tax on college endowments was introduced during Trump’s first administration, collecting 1.4% of wealthy universities’ investment earnings. The law signed by Trump last month creates a new tiered system that taxes the richest schools at the highest rates.

The new tax will charge an 8% rate at schools with $2 million or more in assets for each enrolled student. Schools with $750,000 to $2 million will be charged 4%, and schools with $500,000 to $750,000 will continue to be charged the 1.4% rate.

The tax applies only to private colleges and universities with at least 3,000 students, up from the previous cutoff of 500 students.

“The tax now will really solely apply to private research universities,” said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations for the American Council on Education. “It’s going to mean that these schools are going to have to spend more money under the tax, taking it away from what they primarily use their endowment assets for — financial aid.”

This small group of wealthy colleges faces a tax increase

The law will increase the endowment tax for about a dozen universities, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are expected to pay the 8% rate next year. The schools facing the 4% rate include Notre Dame, Dartmouth College, Rice University, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University.

FILE – This aerial image shows the Princeton University campus in Princeton, N.J., Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File)

Some universities are on the edge of the law’s parameters. Both Duke and Emory, for instance, were shy of the $750,000-per-student endowment threshold based on last fiscal year.

Endowments are made up of donations to the college, which are invested to maintain the money over time. Colleges often spend about 5% of their investment earnings every year to put toward their budgets. Much of it goes toward scholarships for students, along with costs such as research or endowed faculty positions.

Despite the colleges’ wealth, the tax will drastically impact their budgets, said Phillip Levine, an economist and professor at Wellesley College.

“They’re looking for savings wherever possible,” Levine said, which could impact financial aid. “One of the most important things they do with their endowment is lower the cost of education for lower- and middle-income students. The institutions paying the highest tax are also the ones charging these students the least amount of money to attend.”

For example, at Rice University in Houston, officials anticipate the college will need to pay $6.4 million more in taxes. That equates to more than 100 student financial aid packages, the university said, but Rice officials will explore all other options to avoid cutting that support.

How colleges are adjusting to financial pressures

In the meantime, some universities are going forward with staff cuts.

Yale University says it will have to pay an estimated $280 million in total endowment taxes, citing the tax in a campus message implementing a hiring freeze. Stanford University announced plans to reduce its operating budget by $140 million this upcoming school year, which included 363 layoffs and an ongoing hiring freeze. The university spent months trying to determine where to reduce its budget, but said it would continue to support undergraduate financial aid and funding for Ph.D. students.

Research universities are under increasing financial pressure from reductions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies.

No university knows this pressure better than Harvard, the country’s wealthiest college. Its $53 billion endowment puts it at the top of the list for the new tax, but it’s also seeing massive portions of research funding under threat in its ongoing battle with the White House.

The federal government has frozen $2.6 billion in Harvard’s research grants in connection with civil rights investigations focused on antisemitism and Harvard’s efforts to promote diversity on campus. But the impact of other administration policies on the university could approach $1 billion annually, Harvard said in a statement.

FILE – People walk between buildings on Harvard University campus, Dec. 17, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

“It’s not like Harvard is going to go from one of the best institutions in the world to just a mediocre institution. That’s probably not going to happen,” Levine said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be a bad thing — that there won’t be pain and that students won’t suffer.”

Mumphrey reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer Sharon Lurye in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.