The federal government has drastically scaled back the number of recommended childhood immunizations, sidelining six routine vaccines that have safeguarded millions from serious diseases, long-term disability, and death.
Just three of the six immunizations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it will no longer routinely recommend — against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and rotavirus — have prevented nearly 2 million hospitalizations and more than 90,000 deaths in the past 30 years, according to the CDC’s own publications.
Vaccines against the three diseases, as well as those against respiratory syncytial virus, meningococcal disease, flu, and covid, are now recommended only for children at high risk of serious illness or after “shared clinical decision-making,” or consultation between doctors and parents.
The CDC maintained its recommendations for 11 childhood vaccines: measles, mumps, and rubella; whooping cough, tetanus, and diphtheria; the bacterial disease known as Hib; pneumonia; polio; chickenpox; and human papillomavirus, or HPV.
Federal and private insurance will still cover vaccines for the diseases the CDC no longer recommends universally, according to a Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet; parents who want to vaccinate their children against those diseases will not have to pay out-of-pocket.
Experts on childhood disease were baffled by the change in guidance. HHS said the changes followed “a scientific review of the underlying science” and were in line with vaccination programs in other developed nations.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist, pointed to Denmark as a model. But the schedules of most European countries are closer to the U.S. standard upended by the new guidance.
For example, Denmark, which does not vaccinate against rotavirus, registers around 1,200 infant and toddler rotavirus hospitalizations a year. That rate, in a country of 6 million, is about the same as it was in the United States before vaccination.
“They’re OK with having 1,200 or 1,300 hospitalized kids, which is the tip of the iceberg in terms of childhood suffering,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a co-inventor of a licensed rotavirus vaccine. “We weren’t. They should be trying to emulate us, not the other way around.”
Public health officials say the new guidance puts the onus on parents to research and understand each childhood vaccine and why it is important.
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Here’s a rundown of the diseases the sidelined vaccines prevent:
RSV. Respiratory syncytial virus is the most common cause of hospitalization for infants in the U.S.
The respiratory virus usually spreads in fall and winter and produces cold-like symptoms, though it can be deadly for young children, causing tens of thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths a year. According to the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, roughly 80% of children younger than 2 who are hospitalized with RSV have no identifiable risk factors. Long-awaited vaccines against the disease were introduced in 2023.
Hepatitis A. Hepatitis A vaccination, which was phased in beginning in the late 1990s and recommended for all toddlers starting in 2006, has led to a more than 90% drop in the disease since 1996. The foodborne virus, which causes a wretched illness, continues to plague adults, particularly people who are homeless or who abuse drugs or alcohol, with a total of 1,648 cases and 85 deaths reported in 2023.
Hepatitis B. The disease causes liver cancer, cirrhosis, and other serious illnesses and is particularly dangerous when contracted by babies and young children. The hepatitis B virus is transmitted through blood and other bodily fluids, even in microscopic amounts, and can survive on surfaces for a week. From 1990 to 2019, vaccination resulted in a 99% decline in reported cases of acute hepatitis B among children and teens. Liver cancer among American children has also plummeted as a result of universal childhood vaccination. But the hepatitis B virus is still around, with 2,000-3,000 acute cases reported annually among unvaccinated adults. More than 17,000 chronic hepatitis B diagnoses were reported in 2023. The CDC estimates about half of people infected don’t know they have it.
Rotavirus. Before routine administration of the current rotavirus vaccines began in 2006, about 70,000 young children were hospitalized and 50 died every year from the virus. It was known as “winter vomiting syndrome,” said Sean O’Leary, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado. “It was a miserable disease that we hardly see anymore.”
The virus is still common on surfaces that babies touch, however, and “if you lower immunization rates it will once again hospitalize children,” Offit said.
Meningococcal vaccines. These have been required mainly for teenagers and college students, who are notably vulnerable to critical illness caused by the bacteria. About 600 to 1,000 cases of meningococcal disease are reported in the U.S. each year, but it kills more than 10% of those it sickens, and 1 in 5 survivors have permanent disabilities.
Flu and covid. The two respiratory viruses have each killed hundreds of children in recent years — though both tend to be much more severe in older adults. Flu is currently on the upswing in the United States, and last flu season the virus killed 289 children.
What is shared clinical decision-making?
Under the changes, decisions about vaccinating children against influenza, covid, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, and hepatitis A and B will now rely on what officials call “shared clinical decision-making,” meaning families will have to consult with a health care provider to determine whether a vaccine is appropriate.
“It means a provider should have a conversation with the patient to lay out the risks and the benefits and make a decision for that individual person,” said Lori Handy, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
In the past, the CDC used that term only in reference to narrow circumstances, like whether a person in a monogamous relationship needed the HPV vaccine, which prevents a sexually transmitted infection and certain cancers.
The CDC’s new approach doesn’t line up with the science because of the proven protective benefit the vaccines have for the vast majority of the population, Handy said.
In their report justifying the changes, HHS officials Tracy Beth Høeg and Martin Kulldorff said the U.S. vaccination system requires more safety research and more parental choice. Eroding trust in public health caused in part by an overly large vaccine schedule had led more parents to shun vaccination against major threats like measles, they said.
The vaccines on the schedule that the CDC has altered were backed up by extensive safety research when they were evaluated and approved by the FDA.
“They’re held to a safety standard higher than any other medical intervention that we have,” Handy said. “The value of routine recommendations is that it really helps the public understand that this has been vetted upside down and backwards in every which way.”
Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Orange County, California, said the change in guidance will cause more confusion among parents who think it means a vaccine’s safety is in question.
“It is critical for public health that recommendations for vaccines are very clear and concise,” Ball said. “Anything to muddy the water is just going to lead to more children getting sick.”
Ball said that instead of focusing on a child’s individual health needs, he often has to spend limited clinic time reassuring parents that vaccines are safe. A “shared clinical decision-making” status for a vaccine has no relationship to safety concerns, but parents may think it does.
HHS’ changes do not affect state vaccination laws and therefore should allow prudent medical practitioners to carry on as before, said Richard Hughes IV, an attorney and a George Washington University lecturer who is leading litigation against Kennedy over vaccine changes.
“You could expect that any pediatrician is going to follow sound evidence and recommend that their patients be vaccinated,” he said. The law protects providers who follow professional care guidelines, he said, and “RSV, meningococcal, and hepatitis remain serious health threats for children in this country.”
CES 2026 is in full swing in Las Vegas, with the show floor open to the public after a packed couple of days occupied by press conferences from the likes of Nvidia, Sony, and AMD and previews from Sunday’s Unveiled event.
As has been the case for the past two years at CES, AI is at the forefront of many companies’ messaging, though the hardware upgrades and oddities that have long defined the annual event still have their place on the show floor and in adjacent announcements. We’ll be collecting the biggest reveals and surprises here, though you can still catch the spur-of-the-moment reactions and thoughts from our team on the ground via our live blog right here.
Let’s dive right in, starting with some of Monday’s biggest players.
Nvidia reveals AI model for autonomous vehicles, showcases Rubin architecture
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered an expectedly lengthy presentation at CES, taking a victory lap for the company’s AI-driven successes, setting the stage for 2026, and yes, hanging out with some robots.
The Rubin computing architecture, which has been developed to meet the increasing computation demands that AI adoption creates, is set to begin replacing Blackwell architecture in the second half of this year. It comes with speed and storage upgrades, but our Senior AI Editor Russell Brandom goes into the nitty-gritty of what distinguishes Rubin.
AMD’s keynote highlights new processors and partnerships
AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su delivered the first keynote of CES, with a presentation that featured partners including OpenAI President Greg Brockman, AI legend Fei-Fei Lei, Luma AI CEO Amit Jain, and more.
Boston Dynamics and Google partner on Atlas robots
Hyundai’s press conference focused on its robotics partnerships with Boston Dynamics, but the companies revealed that they’re working with Google’s AI research lab rather than competitors to train and operate existing Atlas robots, as well as a new iteration of Atlas that was shown on stage. Transportation Editor Kirsten Korosec has the full rundown.
On the Ring front, Consumer Reporter Ivan Mehta runs through the many announcements, from fire alerts to an app store for third-party camera integration, and more.
Razer joins the AI deluge with Project AVA and Motoko
Then there’s Project AVA, which puts the avatar of an AI companion on your desk. We’ll let you watch the concept video for yourself.
Lego Smart Bricks mark the company’s first CES appearance
Lego joined CES for the first time to hold a behind-closed-doors showcase of its Smart Play System, which includes bricks, tiles and Minifigures that can all interact with each other and play sounds, with the debut sets both having a Star Wars theme. Senior Writer Amanda Silberling has all the details here.
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Trending on the Timeline: Is Google AI Listening & Pastor Jamal Bryant – Page 3
Rumors swirl about Google’s AI spying, as Pastor Jamal Bryant sparks discussion.
Published on
January 6, 2026
Source: ione nicole thomas / IONE, VIA NICOLE THOMAS
From tech scandals to relationship drama, the timeline is buzzing, and we’ve got the scoop. Dive into Google’s controversial AI practices and a candid conversation with Pastor Jamal Bryant that has everyone talking.
Here’s a closer look at the stories that had everyone talking about:
Google’s Gemini AI: Reading Your Emails? First up, Google is under fire for allegedly letting its AI, Gemini, read your emails to train its system. While Gemini’s quick search results might save you from endless scrolling, the idea of your private emails being used without explicit consent has people side-eyeing the tech giant. DJ Misses didn’t hold back, pointing out that we’re already paying for email services—so why is Google all up in our inboxes? And let’s not even get started on what they might stumble across in those emails. Privacy, anyone?
Pastor Jamal Bryant Sparks Debate on Forgiveness Next, Pastor Jamal Bryant is making waves after a candid conversation on Willie Moore Jr.’s Love You More Podcast. The topic? Forgiveness in public. Pastor Bryant opened up about his past infidelity and the arrogance that followed, admitting his ex-wife didn’t leave because of the cheating but because of his attitude afterward. His transparency was refreshing, but the way Willie framed the question had some listeners raising eyebrows. Pastor Bryant’s response, though? Bold and unapologetic. “I gave it a story for the story,” he said, owning his mistakes while challenging others to either stand by him or move on. The timeline is split, some are applauding his honesty, while others are questioning the delivery.
Follow your girl on the ‘Gram (@djmisses) and check out Posted On The Corner for more updates.
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Recruiting teams are, in many ways, ground zero for AI disruption. A plethora of tasks historically performed by recruiters can now be performed by AI technology. But…with a world of possibilities at one’s fingertips, it can be difficult to know where to begin.
Real estate tech giant Zillow has launched several AI tools for recruitment since it began experimenting in late 2023. HR Brew recently sat down with Roz Harris, Zillow’s VP of talent acquisition, engagement, and belonging, to discuss how her recruitment team has identified and adopted AI solutions.
Where to begin? In November 2023, Harris’s team started looking into how AI could be used by recruiters.
“We started looking at the possibility of AI. And what we found was, when you look at the role of a recruiter and what they do, about 80% of our jobs were what you would hear in the conferences about the mundane tasks” that AI could replace, she told HR Brew.
To help ease recruiters’ fear of being replaced by AI, Harris and her team experimented with AI with prompt-a-thons.
Zillow already used hackathons to develop consumer-facing features and products; Harris’s team adopted the practice for its internal AI use. For example, prompt-a-thon teams expressed a desire for more coaching on having difficult conversations with hiring managers. They devised a prompt that could be used on ChatGPT, including capturing details about the issue, as well as emphasizing soft skills like maintaining a rapport or trust with hiring managers. The result: solutions devised by recruiters themselves, not a top-down edict from leadership.
“The problems that they would go to tackle were ones that, I think, if I had to put my leadership team in a room and say, ‘Let us go do this,’ we wouldn’t have come up with the same questions and challenges at all,” Harris said.
After identifying the problems and solutions, Harris would bring in, what she called, the cavalry—the legal, enterprise tech, engagement and belonging, and TA teams—to assess the tools and determine usability.
Prompt-a-thons have so far resulted in six AI recruitment tools, Harris said. Some were developed in-house, but most are vendor tools that Harris’s team were either early adopters of or helped develop. Harris said she hasn’t yet been told “no” by the cavalry, largely because she has followed their best practices, such as avoiding decision-making tools and personal identifiers (like race, gender, or identifying keywords) to assess candidates.
“Luckily, I’ve been around for a while, and so has my leadership team. We kind of always knew we didn’t want AI to make decisions,” she said. “We stayed away from tools and things that did that.”
Measuring success. The tools used by Harris’s team focus both on assisting recruiters and improving the candidate experience.
On the job-seeker side, Zillow’s AI tools include assistants that help candidates find and apply to roles, and schedule and prepare for interviews. On the recruiter side, recruitment marketing software or LinkedIn Recruiter help source high-quality candidates, while another tool analyzes and provides feedback on interviews.
“If you’re applying to a job at Zillow, you can have assistance in helping you do that, and it’ll help match you to some roles as well. We also then use AI to help the recruiter,” Harris said.
Zillow’s AI-powered interview scheduler is intended to speed up hiring and alleviate recruiters’ workloads, which are huge; some roles, such as sales or marketing specialists, receive 4,000+ applications within a day of being posted.
“As someone who started their career as a recruiting coordinator, I think it’s the scheduling tool that’s actually my favorite,” Harris said.
In the past, Harris said recruiting coordinators would spend over a week coordinating schedules for interviews. Now, candidates receive a text or email with a link that shows the interviewer’s availability, and schedules a meeting, which has cut time spent scheduling an interview to 30 minutes—a 97% reduction saving recruiters as many as 450 hours per month.
For any recruiting coordinator sweating at the sight of that stat, Harris shared good news: “They’ve upgraded their skills. They all still work at Zillow.”
Many former coordinators now work in Zillow’s employee service center, or in executive assistant or program manager roles; others help manage the scheduling tool. (And, when the October AWS outage crippled the internet, those former coordinators helped manually schedule interviews.)
Zillow has also leveraged AI to recruit candidates from a wider geographic area.
After embracing its remote-first work model, called Cloud HQ, Zillow found it wasn’t a well-known employer in some cities. Harris’s team used tools, including newsletters and targeted actions to drive applications, as well as LinkedIn Recruiter to save time sourcing better candidates, Appcast, a recruitment advertising technology provider that Zillow said helped recruit across regions. Using those three channels, 558 hires were made in 2025 through mid-December.
“We had a reputation in those areas where we had offices. Well, when you flip that on the head and say, we’re going to be a Cloud HQ and we’re going to be able to hire across the country, we don’t have a reputation everywhere,” she said. “AI helped us build reputation.”
The city of San Marcos is taking steps to further preserve a 248-acre property on the west side of town. Fencing was recently added to prevent trespassing and disturbance of the environment.
Habitat Conservation Plan Manager Mark Enders said The Millican Tract was purchased by the city in 2018 and is located off Old Ranch Road 12 within the Ed- wards Aquifer Recharge Zone.
According to previous reporting by the Daily Record, that plot of land is part of the 18-mile contiguous greenbelt that the San Marcos River Foundation has been looking to preserve for years now. The SMRF helped the city obtain a special loan from the federal Clean Water Fund to purchase the land ensuring perpetual protection, and this was the first loan of its kind in the state of Texas.
Enders said the property is located within the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone.
“[It] contains many karst features, including caves, faults and fractures, which are known to readily infiltrate and transmit rainfall and stormwater runoff into the underlying Edwards Aquifer,” Enders said. “Due to the property being situated within the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone and proximal to San Marcos springs, rainfall and stormwater runoff generated on the property likely has a short transit time through the aquifer to the springs.”
Enders added that the property is also located upstream from the San Marcos River springs and the headwaters at Spring Lake within the Sink Creek/Upper San Marcos River watershed.
“Conservation of the property reduces the potential for stormwater pollutants to enter Sink Creek and the San Marcos River via surface runoff and through the springs,” Enders said. “Ultimately, the conservation of this property helps to protect water quality of the San Marcos River, which is important for ecosystem protection.”
Enders said the project included planning, land acquisition and fencing improvements for a total of $3.2 million. The Texas Water Development Board through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund provided a low-interest loan for 60% and 40% principal forgiveness in the form of the grant.
Enders said that no further improvements are deemed necessary to protect the property, and the city has no current plans to purchase additional conservation sites.
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Coordinators Kliff Kingsbury and Joe Whitt Jr. are both gone from head coach Dan Quinn’s staff with the Washington Commanders after a 5-12 season, a team official with knowledge of the moves told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because the staff changes had not yet been announced.
Kingsbury, the offensive coordinator, and Whitt, who had been in charge of the defense until being stripped of play-calling duties during the season, both arrived in Washington with Quinn before the 2024 season.
According to the person who described Tuesday’s decisions to the AP, Quinn and Kingsbury met in the morning to talk about the future of the team’s offense, which stars quarterback Jayden Daniels.
Quinn and Kingsbury then mutually agreed to part ways, the official said.
Whitt was dismissed, which was not surprising given his earlier demotion and just how bad Washington’s defense was this season. One data point: No team in the NFL allowed opponents to gain more yards.
In another change, Bobby Johnson is out as Washington’s offensive line coach.
But Daniels kept getting hurt this season, managing to start only seven games and getting shut down in December after a series of injuries to his left knee, right hamstring and left elbow.
“I love working with Kliff. Me and him have a special relationship. We’ve built that over the past two years,” Daniels said Monday, when players cleared out their lockers at the team facility in Ashburn, Virginia. “I wish I was out there more to play for him this past year.”
At their end-of-season joint news conference Monday, Quinn and general manager Adam Peters did not provide answers about possible changes to the coaching staff.
But Peters did make clear whose choices those would be.
“I’m not involved in whatever decision it is,” Peters said. “It’s always DQ’s call and I have his back on whatever he wants to do.”
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Great Job Howard Fendrich, Associated Press & the Team @ KSAT San Antonio Source link for sharing this story.
The Atlantic contributor and renowned foreign-policy scholar Robert Kagan will discus the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela with the Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama. In this virtual event just for subscribers, Kagan and Salama will explore the political fallout of the ousting and capture of Nicolás Maduro, the United States’ complicated history of regime changes, and how the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela can serve as a warning for other world leaders. Subscribers can submit questions in advance for Kagan and Salama here.
As we’ve come to understand year after year, day after day, death is an inevitable part of life—a universal truth that spares no one. Yet, despite its certainty, the weight of loss never becomes easier to bear, nor does the act of processing its impact. For those within Black culture, where community and shared experiences often serve as pillars of strength, the pain of losing someone resonates deeply, cutting through the collective spirit like a sharp blade.
Reporting on such losses carries its own emotional toll, as it means confronting the fragility of life while also grappling with the systemic inequities that often exacerbate these tragedies. Whether it’s the passing of a beloved figure or the untimely loss of a community member, the grief is compounded by the cultural significance of their contributions and the void they leave behind. Each story of loss becomes a reminder of the resilience required to navigate a world that often feels unrelenting, and yet, it also underscores the importance of honoring those who have left an indelible mark on the lives they touched.
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UPDATED: 3:30 pm EST, January 6th, 2026
Dr. Janell Green-Smith
Dr. Janell Green-Smith, a devoted midwife and advocate for Black maternal health, tragically passed away due to complications following childbirth. Her untimely death has sent shockwaves through the medical and advocacy communities, highlighting the persistent disparities Black women face in maternal healthcare.
Dr. Green-Smith, based in South Carolina, dedicated her life to empowering and educating Black women about the journey of motherhood. Her work extended beyond her practice, as she contributed to the nonprofit Hive Impact Fund, which provides resources to improve maternal healthcare. Her passion and expertise touched countless lives, as evidenced by heartfelt tributes from those she helped. One grieving mother described her as an “angel” who provided unwavering support during a challenging labor.
The American College of Nurse-Midwives expressed their sorrow and outrage, emphasizing the systemic racism and failures in care that disproportionately affect Black women, regardless of their professional expertise or socioeconomic status. Dr. Green-Smith’s passing underscores the urgent need for equitable and respectful maternal healthcare.
Temperatures are forecast to become more January-like by Saturday
Record challenging heat for many across South-Central Texas (Copyright KSAT-12 2025 – All Rights Reserved)
FORECAST HIGHLIGHTS
RECORD HEAT: Mid-80s will put us in record territory today
RAIN CHANCES: Small chances ahead of a cold front
COLDER AIR: Arrives with gusty winds by the weekend
FORECAST
RECORD CHALLENGING HEAT
While clouds continue to thin out allowing temperatures to climb quickly. Highs today should reach the mid-80s, putting us within range of a record (84, 1989).
Peak temperatures today (Copyright KSAT-12 2026 – All Rights Reserved)
RAIN RETURNS
The changing weather brings more than just cooler air. Rain is expected to start Thursday and last into Friday afternoon. The rain is likely to be scattered, and mainly signals the shift to much cooler weather to follow
Rain chances increase with incoming cold front (Copyright 2026 by KSAT – All rights reserved.)
CHILLY WEEKEND
It’s trending cooler for both Saturday and Sunday, with highs potentially staying in the 50s. Gusty north winds will be an issue on Saturday and may kick up mountain cedar. The other concern would be near-freezing temperatures on Sunday and Monday mornings. As of now, the forecast calls for temperatures to be just above that mark, however, cloud cover will play a big role on just how low we go. We’ll keep you posted.
7 Day Forecast (Copyright KSAT-12 2026 – All Rights Reserved)
Daily Forecast
KSAT meteorologists keep you on top of the ever-changing South Texas weather.
Justin Horne is a meteorologist and reporter for KSAT 12 News. When severe weather rolls through, Justin will hop in the KSAT 12 Storm Chaser to safely bring you the latest weather conditions from across South Texas. On top of delivering an accurate forecast, Justin often reports on one of his favorite topics: Texas history.
Shelby Ebertowski joined KSAT 12 News in January 2025. She came to San Antonio from Fargo, North Dakota via the University of North Dakota, where she learned the ropes as a weekend forecaster over two years at KVLY. Her love of weather love began after experiencing Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Great Job Justin Horne, Shelby Ebertowski & the Team @ KSAT San Antonio for sharing this story.
After spending the first 16 years of her federal government career focused on the impacts of climate change, Libby Jewett hoped to wrap up her time at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration working on solutions.
So in 2023, the marine ecologist gave up her post as the founding director of NOAA’s ocean acidification program, moved from Washington, D.C., to New England, and joined the agency team working on the permitting of offshore wind energy. Technically, it was a demotion, since she no longer was a manager, but Jewett was eager to help tackle the slew of projects proposed on the Atlantic Coast during President Joe Biden’s administration.
But that work, and Jewett’s career as a public servant, came to an abrupt halt soon after President Donald Trump took office. Amid the upheaval early last year as Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed the federal workforce and Trump ordered a stop to U.S. offshore wind development, Jewett, 62, opted to retire.
DOGE was quietly disbanded in November after falling far short of its budget-cutting goals. Trump has escalated his war on offshore wind, citing unspecified secret national security risks, in an effort to maintain a halt on all projects in the face of a federal judge’s Dec. 8 ruling that such a ban was illegal. And the tumult of the first year of Trump’s second term lingers, destined to have a lasting impact on NOAA, in large part because of the exodus of experts like Jewett.
As Jewett looks ahead to continuing her work on climate change—including as an author on the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment—she also is reflecting on the work she and her colleagues did at NOAA. After a year of attacks on the federal workforce, Jewett hopes to help foster better public understanding of how government works and what agencies like NOAA do.
“I feel like the way that government functions well is that you have teams of people who are dedicated to the mission of the organization, and you listen to them, and you collectively come up with a better answer than if you tried to do it on your own,” Jewett said.
She had a chance to assemble such a team when evidence first emerged that greenhouse gases were transforming the chemistry of the oceans, putting at risk the nation’s $3 billion-a-year shellfish industry, the coral reefs that act as natural barriers against storms and support a quarter of all marine life and the millions of people who rely on healthy seas.
A Son’s Inspiring Field Trip
Jewett did not start out as a scientist, and instead had what she describes as a “meandering career” in public service. After growing up in the Washington, D.C., area—her father was general counsel for the Inter-American Development Bank—she majored in Latin American studies at Yale, then earned a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.
She worked on childcare issues for a nonprofit in Boston, then moved to an organization that assisted Central American refugees and later became a fundraiser for an environmental group focused on conservation initiatives in the Great Lakes. While working among environmentalists, she found herself longing for a better understanding of the science that informed their work.
At this point, Jewett and her husband, a doctor, had two children. Unexpectedly, she became even more drawn to science through her experiences as a parent. “I think it was on one of my son’s kindergarten field trips, and we were out doing something in streams,” Jewett said. “What I remember is thinking, ‘Oh my God, I love this.’”
In retrospect, she believes that exploring the water resonated with her because of her childhood summers spent in Maine. Her large family (she was one of six children) would pack provisions into a small boat and head to an uninhabited island to camp for two weeks in the outdoors, with activities and timing of their travel to the mainland dictated by the surrounding waters and weather. “When I started thinking about getting a Ph.D. in science, and about what kind of science that would be,” Jewett said, “there was never any doubt that it would be marine science.”
She enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Maryland, sometimes taking her children with her while she did her field work. They’d help her lift panels that she had lowered into the York River, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, to see what type of organisms would attach themselves to the surfaces over time. Analysis of these so-called “fouling communities” of barnacles, algae and other organisms can tell much about the health of an ecosystem, including the impact of non-native species.
While commuting to the laboratory from her home each day, Jewett passed a large bronze work of art: an upturned hand releasing four gulls. It was the statue outside the Silver Spring, Maryland, headquarters of NOAA.
“The Hand of NOAA,” a sculpture created by Raymond Kaskey, sits outside NOAA’s Silver Spring, Md., headquarters. Credit: NOAA Heritage
Jewett decided to apply to work at the agency, at first because it seemed like a convenient commute from home. Her academic colleagues warned her that joining a government agency would mean doing less science and attending more meetings. But in 2006, the year after earning her Ph.D., she became a contractor with NOAA’s National Ocean Service, working on the problems of harmful algal blooms. Jewett soon found that she had landed in precisely the work she had been seeking all along—applying science to benefit the public.
“The interface between policy and science was my dream, exactly,” Jewett said.
She helped develop a harmful algal bloom forecast for the coast of Texas, which informs coastal communities and industries about the location, size and movement of fast-growing cyanobacteria. These blooms, often caused by warm water, sunlight and excess nutrients from fertilizer runoff and other pollutants, release toxins that can harm people, pets and wildlife. Soon, Jewett became a full-time government employee and program manager for NOAA’s work on hypoxia, or low-oxygen episodes, a problem also tied to runoff pollution.
In addition to the work itself, Jewett enjoyed getting together with colleagues at NOAA to talk about new science. So she organized a “journal club.” It was kind of like a book club, but instead of books, members identified interesting scientific research papers to read and talk about over lunch. “It was something we did for fun on the side,” Jewett said, laughing.
For one lunch session, Jewett picked out new research that was being spearheaded by one of NOAA’s own scientists, Richard Feely, at the agency’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. It was about a threat to shelled creatures like the ones that would attach themselves to the panels Jewett had studied near the Chesapeake Bay. In a series of studies beginning in 2004, Feely and his team had documented how carbon dioxide was changing not only the atmosphere, but the chemistry of the oceans, posing great risk to a wide variety of sea life.
An Industry “Scared to Death”
That journal club meeting, and a fortuitous meeting between Jewett and Feely, would begin a collaboration that, over time, launched NOAA’s work on ocean acidification. Feely got word that a group at NOAA headquarters was discussing his research and he reached out to Jewett. He and his team of scientists were convinced that ocean acidification already was a problem that required more than the research they were doing. It was a problem they believed that NOAA needed to act on.
In the Pacific Northwest beginning in 2005, oyster larvae in hatcheries had begun dying and production was plummeting due to what the farmers suspected was a bacterial disease. The industry, which supports 3,200 jobs in coastal Washington, had invested in sanitizing tanks to kill bacteria, but the problems persisted.
As a senior scientist at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Richard Feely focused on carbon cycling and ocean acidification. Credit: NOAA
Feely suspected that Pacific oysters were the earliest known victims of ocean acidification. He met with farmers to explain how the seas were absorbing one quarter to one third of the carbon pollution generated each year by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels. The resulting chemical reaction causes the water to become more acidic and reduces the available calcium carbonate that is essential for the formation of shells and skeletons in marine life.
The problem was exacerbated on the West Coast because of upwelling patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Even though the oceans are vast enough to take in massive amounts of carbon, Feely led a research cruise survey of the western continental shelf in 2007 that confirmed that the most acidic waters from the deep were welling up regularly near the Pacific coast of North America. Previously, scientists had projected that carbon dioxide would cause problematic acidity in oceans “over the next several hundred years.” But Feely told the farmers his research indicated that levels were corrosive enough to interfere with oyster development now.
“They were flabbergasted,” Feely recalled recently. “And they were scared to death.”
But NOAA did more than deliver the bad news. The agency would provide help. Today, oyster growers—as well as fisheries and communities on all U.S. coasts, continental and island—rely on NOAA’s Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), a network of buoys and sensors, to provide real-time data on ocean acidity. The Pacific Northwest oyster industry has been able to dramatically improve survival rates by taking steps such as chemical buffering or avoiding filling tanks with seawater at times when acidity levels are too high.
Feely credits Jewett with leading what he describes as “the visionary work” to make it happen. She helped assemble a NOAA team to develop the strategic research plan that became the blueprint for the agency’s ocean acidification work.
“She was the coordinating person who brought everybody together, kept expanding and kept making sure that everybody was well organized and well structured,” Feely said. “Just an amazing leader. She had a great way of making people feel comfortable working together. She was so encouraging, always very positive and always seeing where the future could lie.”
Darcy Dugan, who led the development and launch of Alaska’s ocean acidification network and is now its director, agrees. “When I think of Libby, I just think of this ray of light, and her warmth and her curiosity and her commitment to collaboration,” Dugan said. “She was super-committed to science and was very pioneering. She also cared about relationships and had a way of always making you feel valued.”
Part of NOAA’s job was communicating to Congress the national economic implications of the threats to premium species in U.S. fisheries, like lobsters, crabs and sea scallops. Even though shellfish accounted for just 17 percent of U.S. commercial fishery landings in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, they provided 51 percent of the $5.9 billion value of the industry’s catch.
Feely testified repeatedly before Congress as Jewett and her team worked behind the scenes. With urging from the shellfish industry and state officials, Congress passed the first law in the world to address the problem, the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act (FOARAM), in 2009. Jewett would become NOAA’s first ocean acidification program director, and the first female director in the agency’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research division. Under her leadership, NOAA chaired an interagency working group of 14 federal agencies engaged on the issue. And the work extended beyond the U.S. borders. The United States was instrumental in the launching of the Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network (GOA-ON) in 2012, now involving 114 countries.
Richard Feely stands on the deck of a ship operated by Oregon State University during a 2007 research cruise studying ocean acidification. Credit: NOAA
Ocean climate scientist Sarah Cooley first worked with Jewett when she was a NOAA outside research partner, based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Cooley remembers being impressed at how Jewett made sure NOAA’s ocean acidification program was not just academic but rooted in the needs of communities reliant on the sea.
“I would say one of the things that Libby really did that was very unique was she saw how to bring together the natural systems piece of the research and the social systems piece of the research,” Cooley said. “And I think that’s very unusual in a program in NOAA’s OAR. A lot of those research programs are very natural-systems focused. But Libby really led bringing in that community-needs focus.”
Jewett credits her team with bringing that emphasis to the human dimensions of the ocean acidification problem. They realized it was lacking in early versions of the plan, she said. “At some point, pretty early on, my staff came to me and said, ‘We need to rethink this,’” she recalled. Instead of starting out trying to figure out all the marine organisms that were vulnerable, they urged that NOAA’s program first consider the people. “We need to consider how humans are vulnerable to ocean acidification either through the food they eat, cultural practices or places they visit,” Jewett recalled. From there, NOAA could work backward to assess the marine species, considering them as part of a socio-ecological system.
“This was a turning point for the program,” Jewett said. “Being challenged by my staff was good for the program and something any good leader should receive humbly and consider seriously.”
NOAA’s ocean acidification plan therefore emphasized the need for local and regional studies, recognizing, for instance, that some Indigenous communities rely on vulnerable species for subsistence, and that a coastal community relying exclusively on tourism related to a coral reef ecosystem might be more culturally and economically vulnerable than a community with a highly diversified economic base.
NOAA’s work has helped the industry and coastal communities better cope with ocean acidification, but the problem is far from solved. A NOAA-funded University of Washington study published last year showed that owners and operators of Pacific Northwest shellfish aquaculture facilities now view ocean acidification as a lower-priority concern than marine heat waves, disease and harmful algal blooms. The researchers said more effort was needed to communicate how all of these stressors are interconnected, and how solutions such as diversification of species could help with all these challenges.
One of the final things that Jewett worked on as program manager was a review of all the federal government had accomplished on ocean acidification and all that was left to do. The U.S. Ocean Acidification Action Plan, released by the Biden administration in 2023, called for further advances in research and monitoring, including through the use of artificial intelligence, and researching promising strategies for mitigating acidification—for example, through seagrasses and other plant life that can take up excess carbon dioxide from seawater. The plan also called for accelerating research into nascent ideas for marine carbon removal technology—both their promise and their potential risks.
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The idea of focusing more on climate solutions appealed to Jewett, especially the most important solution—reducing the carbon pollution from fossil fuels. NOAA had new and important work in this area—the environmental analysis on offshore wind. After working on a temporary detail with NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, she decided to join that team on a permanent basis.
Finding a successor for Jewett as director of the ocean acidification program was a lengthy process, not that unusual for a government leadership position. After a nationwide search, the post went to Cooley, who by then had spent a decade at the Ocean Conservancy, including as director of its ocean acidification program and more recently as its senior director for climate science. Cooley took the helm of the program in August 2024.
But Jewett’s work in NOAA’s offshore wind program, Cooley’s leadership of the agency’s ocean acidification program and indeed, the future of all the federal government’s climate work, were thrown into chaos soon after Trump took office in January 2025.
“A Psychological Push to Get Us Out”
For Jewett, the new administration brought an abrupt stop to 18 months of running full speed to keep up with the burgeoning offshore wind business. “It was really crazy, fast-paced work, because there was a big push on the part of the Biden administration,” she said. There were no commercial wind energy projects in U.S. waters when Biden took office; his administration had approved 11 by the end of 2024 and proposals for more were under consideration.
NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center was tasked with providing the scientific data and environmental reviews to ensure that marine ecosystems, fisheries and coastal communities were protected amid the drive to deploy offshore wind. Working with that team, Jewett was drawing on her experience launching the agency’s ocean acidification research portfolio, “trying to be thoughtful about how we were investing the money we had,” she said.
Libby Jewett outside her Vermont home in September 2025. Credit: Marianne Lavelle/Inside Climate News
But on his first day in office, Trump signed two executive orders that were “the first blow and the second blow” that knocked Jewett out of her career at NOAA. He withdrew all federal offshore areas from leasing for wind energy, and began a review of all the offshore wind decisions that had already been made, signaling his plan to terminate them.
At the same time, Trump ordered a termination of all remote work arrangements. Jewett and her husband had settled in Vermont and she had been working remotely from her home, coming into the NOAA office in Rhode Island as was needed—essentially, every two weeks. To stay with the federal government would mean both personal upheaval and professional uncertainty.
NOAA also quickly became a particular target of Musk and the DOGE team, and soon hundreds of agency workers were being laid off.
“There was kind of this psychological push to get us out,” Jewett said. “They wanted as many people as possible to retire and, in fact, they kind of dangled this idea that if enough people left then earlier career scientists might not have to leave. And I felt like I’m OK with that trade-off, because I’ve gotten to know these incredible scientists who are early in their career, and they’re doing great science. They should stay and be the future of the agency.”
Jewett retired on April 30, but the future of the agency looked even more uncertain when the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal came out the following month. NOAA’s fisheries and ecosystem science programs would get a 25 percent cut, with the offshore wind work phased out altogether, even though the agency’s job was to help minimize marine life impacts—at times, Trump’s stated issue with the industry.
Jewett’s old program, ocean acidification, also was going through turmoil. Cooley, in her position as program leader for less than a year, was one of thousands of probationary employees across the federal government who were laid off in February. “I just couldn’t believe this was happening,” Jewett said.
Cooley, who will take over as executive director of the nonprofit Earth Science Information Partners in January, said she realized she was vulnerable at the start of Trump’s second term. Even though her deputy told her she was being “morbid,” she said she made sure she had another colleague with her at every meeting so there would be continuity.
“I started building redundancy into our program so that the work could continue,” Cooley said.
On paper, NOAA’s ocean acidification program is, indeed, continuing. But in reality, it is hobbled by cutbacks, according to those familiar with its work. Fewer research grants are being issued than in previous years. And there are local impacts. For instance, instruments at NOAA’s remote Kodiak, Alaska, site that were designed to provide continuous monitoring of ocean acidity conditions couldn’t be used last year because the technician position was eliminated, said Dugan of Alaska’s Ocean Observing System.
Although the Trump administration’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal would continue the Congressionally mandated ocean acidification program, it would zero out the funding that flows to the regional ocean observing systems like Alaska’s that do the monitoring that are a linchpin of the program. There’s bipartisan opposition to deep cuts at NOAA, but no final decisions have been made, and the agency is operating with stopgap funding through January.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations about, ‘How do we navigate this?’,” Dugan said. “And some of the scenarios were pretty bleak. We’ve felt a sense of relief for this [fiscal] year’s funding, but it’s hard to be in this space of uncertainty.”
Another linchpin of the ocean acidification program, pioneering scientist Richard Feely, also is gone. He retired in September after 51 years at the agency. Eligible to retire much earlier—Jewett said Feely was talking about retirement from the day she met him—Feely, 78, stayed long enough to see his science make a positive difference in people’s lives, he told the representatives of the Pacific Northwest fisheries industry and coastal community who attended his retirement party.
“I said the reason I stayed so long is because you guys responded to the research that we provided you,” Feely said. “I saw how our community changed because of the research, and I couldn’t walk away from it.”
He is especially proud of the U.S. leadership that led to the growth of ocean acidification research and monitoring around the world. “Most people say that the fisheries management in the United States is the best there is,” Feely said. “And I think that is because such good coordination occurs, because of the impact of NOAA science and the fisheries research efforts that have occurred in this country.”
Although Jewett is at peace with her own departure from NOAA, she is worried about the long-term impact of the past year’s mass exodus from NOAA. “It’s like the institutional memory of the organization,” she said. “All these leaders of things who’ve been around for a long time and know how it operates, we’re kind of moving on.”
In August, Jewett got word that she has been selected to serve as one of about 50 U.S. authors who will be working on the next assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She’ll be working on the so-called “Working Group II” report—back to assessing the impacts of climate change, rather than helping deploy the solutions, as she hoped to be doing now. “I am proud to carry the torch for all the NOAA scientists who cannot serve on this round of the assessment,” Jewett said in a post announcing the news on LinkedIn.
NOAA has lost close to 2,000 of its 11,800 employees through layoffs and retirements since Trump took office, according to members of Congress. If these numbers are true, agency staffing is at its lowest level since the agency’s creation in 1970.
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Marianne Lavelle is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.
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