Minutes before first bell, Penny Núñez-Brandão scanned the crowd outside Glen Cove Elementary School, looking for familiar faces.
“I don’t see any,” the fifth grader told her mom one morning in August. “None of my friends are coming.”
The start of a new school year can be nerve-wracking under any circumstances. But for Penny and thousands of students across the U.S., this academic year brought the added difficulty of adjusting to an entirely new school after their previous ones shuttered. As U.S. birth rates continue a multidecade slide and state and federal education funding dries up, an increasing number of cash-strapped school districts around the country have resorted to closing campuses to save money.
A total of 1,156 schools closed during the last academic year — the highest number since the pandemic, according to an analysis of federal data by Big Local News at Stanford University. At the same time, new research shows student enrollment has fallen much faster than schools are closing, suggesting more painful financial choices lie ahead.
The Vallejo City Unified School District, a working-class district near San Francisco, serves half as many students as it did two decades earlier. District leaders have closed five campuses since 2025 — a quarter of its schools. They’ve also placed up to a third of all staff positions on the chopping block to help plug a staggering $36 million deficit.
Still, research shows closing schools rarely yields the financial relief districts hope for. Busing students to their reassigned schools, severance for pink-slipped staff and security for empty facilities often eat up any savings. School closures can also set students back academically and make it harder to attract teachers, who may worry the jobs aren’t stable.
Closing schools can also trigger a downward spiral, as frustrated families flee to charter or private schools or other districts. In Vallejo, some parents said they chose to homeschool this fall or were planning to sell their homes and move to neighboring districts.
“Families are literally packing up their kids and moving away,” said Penny’s mother, Kimberly Núñez-Brandão, who already moved her older son to a competing charter school. She recently attended Glen Cove’s curriculum night for families and shared her shock at learning Penny’s new teacher had 32 students in his first class.
“They already overwhelmed teachers with 30-plus students,” she said. “Who’s winning here?”
Fewer births, immigration crackdown and vouchers shrink school enrollment
Rubén Aurelio, superintendent for Vallejo schools, acknowledged cuts and closures can be hard for families but said they are necessary to correct for school districts and budgets designed for a different reality.
“We’re not just closing schools to close schools,” Aurelio said. “We’re right-sizing a district that was built for significantly more kids. And if we’re going to actually improve outcomes for the kids we still have, we need to concentrate resources.”
Nationwide, public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students, roughly 3%, between fall 2019 and 2024, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal education data collected by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee and sociologist Jaymes Pyne. The total number of schools has declined, too — but only to about pre-pandemic levels, the researchers found, suggesting closures are lagging enrollment declines.
Lower birth rates are the primary reason for enrollment decline, but a federal crackdown on immigration and the post-pandemic expansion of private school vouchers and homeschool options have contributed to the decline. Bellwether and WestEd, two research groups, recently estimated declining enrollment could cause schools to lose $11.5 billion in state revenue annually by 2030-2031, potentially prompting widespread layoffs, cuts to academic programs and school closures.
In Vallejo, a city still struggling to bounce back from the closure of a naval base in the 1990s, enrollment has tumbled from nearly 18,000 in the fall of 2006 to about 9,300, according to the district. California has recorded one of the nation’s most precipitous enrollment drops. But school districts throughout the country, including large systems in Cleveland, Houston and Philadelphia, are facing similar closures.
The enrollment and financial situation is unlikely to improve, said Lydia Rainey, research principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
“That’s extremely wishful thinking,” she said. “States aren’t about to open the coffers and swoop in with additional funds to save schools.”
Districts cut costs while trying to keep families
The Vallejo school district is no stranger to budget crises.
In the early 2000s, mismanagement brought Vallejo to the brink of bankruptcy. The state stepped in with a $60 million emergency bailout, which saved Vallejo’s schools from complete financial collapse but kept the district under state oversight until summer 2024. Around the time the state lifted the financial receivership, Aurelio took the helm as superintendent and soon recognized a new set of budget problems.
The district paid for staff salaries using COVID-19 relief money, one-time funding that evaporated early last year. Meanwhile, enrollment dipped below 10,000 students for the first time and was projected to fall further. Vallejo schools, on average, were only 46% full, the district says. Rising inflation and contractual pay hikes further strained the budget.
Aurelio and his team wasted no time in sharing the bad news with families. “I don’t think I ever said, ‘If we close schools.’ I started by saying, ‘When we close,’” he recalled.
In early 2025, the superintendent announced two rounds of closures: The first shuttered two K-8 schools at the end of that academic year. The school board also cut payroll and relocated a district-sponsored charter school to a vacated campus.
Aurelio also set a December 2025 deadline for the board to select three neighborhood schools to close in the second round and approve additional staff cuts.
School closures risk driving more families away
The tumult has left families wondering about their future in the district.
Caitlin Jackson and her husband, a facilities manager, moved to Vallejo with their toddler son, John, for the relatively affordable homes. But large class sizes and safety concerns dissuaded the new parents from enrolling John in a neighborhood school.
They’re taking a chance on the district-sponsored charter — for now.
“Trying to downsize a system while also trying to sustain it, that is just very difficult,” said Jackson. She said she hasn’t ruled out private school or homeschooling.
The sentiment reflects a real risk for districts that choose to close schools. The already painful cost-cutting measure may push even more families into competing charter networks, neighboring districts or private alternatives — further eroding the funding schools get per enrolled student.
So along with cutting budgets, Vallejo is renovating older campuses, hoping to draw younger parents who can’t afford to start a family in San Francisco. (That new spending has rankled some parents, including Núñez-Brandão.) The superintendent said he also plans to open a Tagalog-language school soon, targeting Filipino families from across the Bay Area.
The district has taken more aggressive steps to preserve its enrollment, too. It’s denied some requests from Vallejo families trying to transfer out. (Permission is required under state law.) It has also tried to preempt families’ departures by adding in-demand classes and offering tours of its remaining schools to showcase academic programs or extracurriculars they might have missed.
Jason Willis, a school finance expert with WestEd who has studied campus closures in the Bay Area, credited Vallejo for spreading the cuts and closures over several years and trying to show parents what Vallejo can offer. He likened the approach to the marketing that charter schools have long used to enroll students.
In its second wave of closures, earlier this year, the district shuttered three of its 10 elementary schools. A facilities committee will eventually decide what to do with the vacant campuses, but for now they are vulnerable to burglaries, forcing the district to spend more on security, said Marin Trujillo Cuevas, the district’s executive director for operations.
Students face crowded classrooms and lasting disruption
Inside the classrooms receiving extra students that first week of school, the logistical strain showed.
Ellen Baker-Valdez, a third grade teacher at Glen Cove, had 34 children assigned to her classroom. She’d jammed desks tightly together, their backpacks and lunch boxes piled in a rolling bin by the door.
Outside another classroom, a mother cornered Aurelio, demanding to know why her son’s disability records hadn’t followed him to his new school. The child’s teacher — a substitute, like 7% of Vallejo’s teachers that first day — struggled to answer her questions and attend to the many crying students in her class.
Marisa de la Torre, a managing director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, said instability created by school closures may last for a while. Studies from the University of Chicago show that academically, displaced students often suffer long-term drops in reading and math. That’s especially true when students end up at low-performing schools.
“It takes a while to recover, if they recover at all,” she said.
Núñez-Brandão isn’t sure she wants to stick around long enough to find out.
Five years ago, as her son prepared for his fifth grade year at Glen Cove, the district reassigned him along with Penny — then a kindergartner — to Highland Elementary due to scheduling difficulties during the pandemic.
“They’re doing it all over again,” Núñez-Brandão said of her daughter’s experience this year. “And I can promise you: More schools are going to close.”
Weeks into the new school year, Penny still struggled with the transition to Glen Cove. She started to make new friends and said she feels comfortable on campus. She also liked her teacher, a first-year educator who’d joined Vallejo’s teacher residency program, launched last year to attract new educators and improve retention.
But with 32 kids in the class, she said it’s hard to concentrate.
And then, on a Tuesday in October, Núñez-Brandão received a note in the Glen Cove parent portal: Penny’s teacher resigned, effective immediately. The school will rely on a long-term substitute for now, the district said.
That night, Núñez-Brandão decided to call a competing charter school in Vallejo — a campus she and Penny already toured — and ask if they still have room for her daughter.
A healthy person farts about 14 to 20 times each day. All together, that’s enough gas to fill a super stinky party balloon.
Farts are made of gases that are produced by trillions of tiny organisms called microbes, mostly bacteria, that live in your gut. These organisms have an important job: They help chew up food that your stomach cannot break down on its own. In the process, they act like mini chemical factories that provide you with nutrients while releasing waste gases into your gut. These gases mix with air you swallow and other gases that you make during digestion. After passing through the intestines, they come out in bursts as farts.
Anywhere from 20% to 90% of a fart’s volume consists of nitrogen, which makes up more than three quarters of air. Up to 10% of a fart is oxygen, which humans need in order to breathe. Up to 30% is carbon dioxide, up to 50% is hydrogen, and up to 10% is methane. Microbes produce most of the carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane, though some of the carbon dioxide is made when digestive juices mix with stomach acid.
But wait: These are not the gases that give farts their delightful array of aromas. What makes farts so malodorous is other gas molecules that contain the element sulfur. Pure sulfur has no smell on its own, but when combined with other elements it makes molecules that reek.
One key culprit is hydrogen sulfide, which is famous for smelling like rotten eggs. Others include methanethiol, which has a bouquet of cabbage, sewage or skunk spray, and dimethyl sulfide, which hits the nostrils with scents of cooked corn, algae or seafood.
Only tiny amounts are required: One molecule of hydrogen sulfide among 1 million other gas molecules has enough power to do the job. That’s equivalent to one kernel of corn in a truckload of about 1,250 ears, or 10 bricks out of all the bricks that make up the Empire State Building in New York City. Other sulfur-containing gasses can be sniffed out at even more minuscule amounts.
Food is a key source of amino acids, nutrients that build proteins the body needs to function and grow. Two amino acids, methionine and cysteine, contain sulfur, and they are plentiful in meat, dairy, eggs, and to a lesser degree, beans and grains. Some foods – most notably, vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower – contain other molecules that also have sulfur in them.
As you might know from experience, it’s impossible to hold in a fart until it goes away. It will come out somehow – sometimes at speeds up to 10 feet per second, according to back-of-the-envelope estimates, including my own. This rush of gas exiting the body makes the surrounding tissue vibrate, often causing an embarrassing noise.
But sometimes this natural body process can be a real bummer – like on an airplane. Cabin pressure in flight is often lower than normal air pressure on the ground, which can cause the gas in your gut to expand, spurring more farts. To protect the noses of travelers trapped together in the friendly skies, researchers designed seat cushions and blankets that contain sulfur-absorbing substances, such as activated charcoal. So far, no airlines have adopted these funk-reducing technologies, but you can buy them yourself.
Despite farts’ assault on the senses, your ability to detect them means your nose is doing exactly what evolution designed it to do: act as a chemical sensor for sulfur-containing gases. People can detect hydrogen sulfide and methanethiol at minuscule concentrations, even when there is less than one molecule of these compounds amid billions of other molecules.
These smells can signal the presence of rotting substances and bacterial activity that might harbor pathogens that can make you sick, or deadly environments such as swamps, stagnant caves and volcano vents that can suffocate and kill you.
So the next time you lay a fart that’s pungent enough to clear the room, don’t apologize – just say you’re conducting a live demonstration of natural chemistry that took eons of evolution to perfect.
DHS made a record buy of the FN303, a launcher with a 23-year trail of harm.
This story is published in partnership with the Human Rights Center at the University of California Berkeley.
On the evening of March 28, 2026, USC freshman Tucker Collins was attending a No Kings protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles when he suddenly collapsed, screaming and clutching his right eye. Initially, amidst the drums, shouts, and flags, only a few people noticed the young man with long blond hair go down, but as he was pulled to the curb by on-scene independent field medics, it quickly became clear that something was very wrong: he had been shot in the face by an officer monitoring the protests, and his eyeball was completely ruptured.
At the hospital, doctors removed jagged plastic fragments and metal shards from Collins’ eye socket. “When eventually we got to the hospital, and they told me, ‘We’re gonna have to remove your eye,’ I didn’t really know how to process it,” recalled Collins, an aspiring filmmaker. “I understood intimately that this is something that could happen. This is why I was there—to document these sorts of things happening.”
Video of the incident quickly circulated online, and one theory was that Collins had been blinded by a PepperBall round, fired from somewhere in the MDC. This turned out to be incorrect. The plastic fragments and small metal pellets doctors removed were actually fired from a lesser-known and more powerful weapon, the Fabrique Nationale 303 Less Lethal Launcher, or FN303.
A report produced by the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) reveals that the FN303 has been disproportionately responsible for some of the most severe injuries in recent immigration-related protests across the US. The report, titled “Charting the Crackdown,” used open-source methodologies to trace and document misuses of crowd control weapons at immigration related protests from June 2025 through May 2026. The researchers catalogued over 400 incidents of misuse, the vast majority of which were committed by Federal agents.
A peculiar pattern was hidden in the data: although the FN303 makes up only 12 of the 412 total cases of misuse (less than three percent) it was responsible for some of the grisliest and most debilitating injuries documented in the study. In fact, the FN303 was responsible for a higher proportion of severe injuries than those from any other single weapon. The report’s lead author, Dr. Rohini Haar, who is an emergency room doctor and an expert on crowd-control weapons, considered the discovery something of a surprise.“The FN303 is a unique example of something we were not looking for,” she said. “To be honest, even I didn’t know what an FN303 was.”
The FN303 has caused over half a dozen serious injuries between June 2025 and May 2026. But its history of severe, sometimes deadly injuries spans the launcher’s entire 23- year history. When asked about this pattern, Henry de Harenne, Head of Communications at FN Herstal declined to offer details saying that “the review of specific incidents is a matter for the agencies concerned and the competent authorities.”
Federal agencies have invested unprecedented amounts of funds in the FN303 in recent months; the Department of Homeland Security is the largest purchaser of the launcher in the Federal government. Though it’s unclear how much they paid per unit, local law enforcement records from California show launchers selling for $800 each, and according to government contracts, DHS has bought $2.2 million in weapons and projectiles since 2021 alone. The agency’s largest purchase, however, came in September 2025, during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, when they purchased more than $1 million of FN303 launchers and projectiles.
Marketed as highly safe and very accurate, this .68 caliber pneumatic launcher has been used by law enforcement agencies all over the world— from Belgium and Turkey, to Georgia and even Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, whose ministry of defense purchased 2000 launchers in 2009. Though it closely resembles a pepperball or paintball gun, with a plastic body and air tank affixed to the front, it fires a denser and faster-moving projectile that can cause debilitating injuries in crowd control settings. In some countries, Belgium and Georgia, for instance, deployments of the launcher have triggered national debates about its use in managing protests. But in the US, the FN303 has gone largely unnoticed, even as demonstrators continue to be injured. With the Trump administration pouring nearly $70 billion into the Department of Homeland Security through the 2029 fiscal year, the agency made the federal government’s single largest purchase on record of the weapon in September 2025—just as protests peaked across the country.
In 2003, within months of the FN303’s release by Belgian weapons manufacturer FN Herstal, the seriousness of the injuries it inflicts became controversial. On March 29, during protests against the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, Swiss police shot union organizer Denise Chervet in the temple with an FN303. She was hospitalized with metal pellets embedded dangerously close to nerve clusters in her face. Fearing permanent paralysis, her doctors refused to operate. Chervet would live with the remnant shards for the rest of her life.
The incident caused an uproar in Switzerland. An investigation conducted by the Council of State of Geneva found that officers had little training on how to safely deploy the FN303 prior to using it, and the cantons of Geneva and Zurich both immediately discontinued its use. A review of Swiss cantonal police agency data reveals that no law enforcement agency in Switzerland that deploys the FN303.
Chervet may have been the first to experience this weapon, but she was far from the last. A little over a year later, on October 21, 2004, celebrations turned to chaos in Boston after the Red Sox defeated the New York Yankees in the ALCS Championship. A responding officer, wielding the FN303, shot and killed Victoria Snelgrove, a 21-year-old journalism student. The investigation into Snelgrove’s death found that the department failed to properly train its officers in the safe deployment of the weapon. According to the report, Police Deputy Superintendent Robert O’Toole gave an FN303 to an officer who had not been trained or authorized to use it, saying, “Just pull the trigger.” In short, the investigation found that the department had misinterpreted FN Herstal’s claims about the weapon’s ability to penetrate the skin.
“The FN303 appeared to have been viewed by the Department to be not simply ‘less- lethal,’ but really non-lethal,” the report notes. “The fact that the rounds are advertised by the manufacturer as never causing a ‘perforation of the skin,’ which proved to be inaccurate, may have contributed to this misunderstanding.”
On the night of Snelgrove’s death, Boston police officers shot two other people in the head with FN303s in Fenway Park, injuring them and causing them to bleed from the face.
“It does not appear that the police immediately understood that these injuries were the result of FN303 projectiles. If they had, it would have alerted the police that there was a problem with the use of (the) FN303.”
“It does not appear that the police immediately understood that these injuries were the result of FN303 projectiles,” reads the report. “If they had, it would have alerted the police that there was a problem with the use of (the) FN303.”
Once the broader investigation was completed, which revealed that the weapon was far more dangerous than the department had been led to believe, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis ordered the FN303s destroyed.
Both Chervet’s injury and Snelgrove’s death sparked immediate and widespread reporting, but over two decades later, the FN303 remains largely unknown in the US. Recent reports of injuries involving FN303s frequently cite “rubber bullets” or the general category of “less lethal projectiles” as the culprit. American law enforcement often uses the weapon in much the same way as they would a PepperBall launcher. “PepperBall’s got certain ways that they build and assemble their delivery system versus FN,” says Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA), a nonprofit that trains over 14,000 law enforcement officers a year. “But at the end of the day, they are very, very similar in what type of ammunition they deliver.”
Alexandre Papy PhD, a lieutenant colonel and the Head of the Weapon Systems and Ballistics Department at the Belgian Royal Military Academy, says this comparison is understandable, but incomplete. “They are both expelling projectiles, impacting projectiles,” he explains, “but the magnitude is quite different.” This is because PepperBall rounds are simple plastic spheres filled with chemical irritants or marking paint. On the other hand, the FN303’s ammunition is composed of hard, transparent plastic, filled with bismuth pellets in a semi-spherical dome, with a cylindrical finned design in the back to stabilize the trajectory.
The theory behind this unusual design is that, upon impact, the round would break open and spread the heavy bismuth across a larger surface area, thus distributing the force of the projectile. Video materials marketing the launcher claim this feature gives the weapon system “sufficient energy to gain compliance from a suspect with minimal risk of skin penetration.”
Researchers like Papy stand by these claims. He views the FN303’s shattering projectile as extremely effective at preventing penetrative injury, even calling it “quite safe.” He does cite one major caveat. “If the projectile reaches the head, you have a problem,” he says. The reason for this, Dr. Haar of PHR explains, is that because there is less fat and tissue to absorb impact on the head or face, the debris of hard plastic and bismuth from the shattering projectile have a much higher chance of penetrating. “Any projectile with metal or anything composite with metal is more harmful,” she says.
FN Herstal said in a statement that all of their documentation and training emphasize that the FN303 should never be aimed at the head or neck. They also mark every unit of the FN303 with a label warning against aiming the weapon above the shoulders.
But even so, shots to the head with impact projectiles continue and data show that the FN303 is particularly problematic in this realm. The “Charting the Crackdown” database logged 73 incidents of head shots across all weapon types. This includes 34 head shots from PepperBall launchers and six from the FN303. Though more common, PepperBall launchers were far less likely to cause penetrative injuries than FN303s. Less than 10 percent of head shots from PepperBalls caused lacerations, while five out of six from the FN303 penetrated the body, causing lacerations and sometimes blindings.
By looking for its unique injury profile of skin penetration coupled with bismuth pellets and plastic shards, researchers at the Human Rights Center identified 16 instances of severe injuries caused by the weapon since 2003. All save one involved a shot to the head. “The fact that two young people are either dead or blind from the same weapon 20 years apart means we failed in identifying this as a risk,” Haar said, underscoring a systemic problem.
In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the FN303 was used by police departments across the country. On May 29, 2020, a Georgia State Trooper using the FN303 shot and permanently disfigured the face of journalism student and filmmaker Mikaela Dyett, who was filming a protest in downtown Atlanta. Like Chervet, Dyett will live with the debris from the round embedded in her face for the rest of her life. During a protest in Portland, Oregon, on June 30, an independent journalist covering it was shot in the groin by an FN303. His injury took over a month to heal. The following month, also in Portland, on July 25, 2020, a mother of three was shot in the forehead with the launcher, causing severe lacerations which required stitches.
A day later, on July 26, Portland-based journalist Trip Jennings was similarly shot. The round punctured the face shield of his gas mask, embedding pellets in his eyeball. Jennings had previously reported in the West Bank, where he had been hit with stun grenades, struck in the leg with a tear gas canister, and shot with pepperballs. “I got hit by all sorts of different munitions in the West Bank, and I can say very conclusively that this was the worst and most painful and longest impact,” Jennings recalled. The force of impact from the FN303 was so intense that he initially thought he had been hit by a shotgun shell.
In many of these cases—such as with Dyett and Jennings—the FN303 was not initially identified as the culprit.
For Scott Reynhout, a researcher who has spent the better part of a decade studying the use of crowd control weapons in protest settings with Physicians for Human Rights, this lack of awareness around the FN303’s potential for severe and even fatal injury is the clearest explanation for why it’s so dangerous.
“I was certainly guilty of failing to understand the nuances of this weapon in the past,” he admits. While working with PHR, he co-authored a study that cataloged injuries to the head and face caused by impact projectiles during the George Floyd protests in 2020. At the time, he made no distinction between this launcher and Pepperball guns. But six years later, in January 2026, as he began compiling a new database of crowd control weapon misuse, again with PHR, he saw a video of a DHS agent shooting 21-year-old Kaden Rummler in the eye at a demonstration in Santa Ana, California. At that point, he realized the FN303 was in a category of its own.
“It was something different, not just the severity of the injury, but also the types of injuries that you’re seeing,” Reynhout says. “If we think about the different types of less lethal weapons, there are a lot of different shapes and sizes, but not a lot of them can actually fit inside the orbit of the eye. Fewer still can fit inside the orbit of the eye and then carry enough energy with it to actually pass through the orbit and affect the brain.”
“I was certainly guilty of failing to understand the nuances of this weapon in the past.”
Now working independently, Reynhout visited the bullet-casing littered ground of Jawbone Canyon to better understand how the launcher works and to collect data on its ballistic qualities. This sun-baked valley located two hours outside of Los Angeles is commonly used as an improvised gun range by recreational shooters in the area. Crucially for Reynhout’s work, it’s a long, narrow canyon where he can set up targets up to 60 meters out without fear of striking passersby. His range consists of large cardboard and plywood targets to evaluate how far the projectiles drop over specific distance and doppler radars strategically placed to measure projectile velocity at the muzzle and at the target.
Reynhout extracts the FN303 from a large case and fires half a dozen rounds at a square of heavy-duty, reinforced plywood. The launcher makes a popping noise with each projectile, followed a split second later by a loud crack as the rounds collide with the wood. Shards of plastic explode outward. Even from 30 meters away, the dents are visible.
Almost immediately, the tests reveal the disparities with the claims made by FN Herstal. In the FN303 Armorer Training Manual from 2002, the only publicly available copy, the weapon is described as firing projectiles at 280-300 feet per second. In Reynhout’s testing, the velocity at the muzzle of the weapon reaches as high as 330 feet per second.
“The formula for kinetic energy is one half mass times velocity squared,” Reynhout says. He explains that in layman’s terms this means that “even small changes in velocity can have an outsize effect on the kinetic energy.” Though the additional 30 feet per second difference he measured versus FN Herstal’s claims represents only a 10 percent increase in projectile velocity, they translate to a 21 percent increase in energy delivered to the target.
More concerning is the fact that the disparity in velocity is not a surprise to Alexandre Papy of the Belgian Royal Military Academy. He says that the FN303 can be tuned to fire at higher velocities and explains that because “it’s compressed air, it’s just a question of changing the pressure threshold.” Law enforcement agencies can even make this request of FN Herstal on an entire order of launchers. Meaning launchers used on the street may well exceed the specifications listed in manufacturer documentation. When asked about the velocity of their own launchers, Customs and Border Protection responded that their internal test showed projectiles traveling at the advertised 280-300 feet per second.
By examining the gap between a point of aim and puncture holes made by the launcher’s projectiles in sheets of cardboard, Reynhout’s testing confirms what is already known, that the FN303 does not fire projectiles in a straight line but in an arcing trajectory. The round initially travels upward, going higher than the point of firing, only dropping as it nears the target. By collecting this data, Reynhout can determine exactly how much officers must adjust their aim at specific distances.
When aiming at a subject 30 meters away, the rounds will hit more or less exactly where intended, which is known as being “zeroed.” Between the 40 and 50 meters, Reynhout found that the rounds start to drop precipitously, requiring the user to aim over a foot higher than the target they had intended to hit. This introduces “a pretty significant hazard that is completely dependent upon the individual who’s firing the weapon’s ability to accurately judge distance,” Reynhout notes. “Even if a police officer is doing their due diligence…there’s still the possibility that these weapons could go errant and therefore strike someone in a place where they should not be struck.”
Because it is a specialty weapon, proper use of the FN303 is not typically taught in general use-of-force training. Instead, law enforcement agencies can request an instructor certification course from FN Herstal. Once certified, these instructors then bring lessons learned back to their departments. Police insiders have noted that this is part and parcel of the specialty less lethal weapons industry.
According to police training practitioners and use of force experts, these manufacturer-led, weapons-specific trainings typically focus on how to assemble, operate, and repair the weapon. Issues around tactics, use of force standards, and procedure are considered to be matters of internal department policy for individual agencies to manage independently. According to a statement from FN Herstal, the manufacturer “provides equipment, training and technical support but does not determine operational policies, rules of engagement or use-of-force doctrines.”
When asked for details about their training program, FN Herstal stated that though their curriculum covers “deployment procedures, engagement distances and target selection, including repeated instructions on the areas that must not be targeted,” namely the head and neck, “operators remain bound by their agency’s use-of-force policy.”
“(Manufacturers) will sometimes offer model policies,” said Roy Taylor, a former police chief and expert witness in use of force cases, “but they will never tell the agency what they should or shouldn’t do. That’s outside their bailiwick.”
“(Manufacturers) will sometimes offer model policies, but they will never tell the agency what they should or shouldn’t do. That’s outside their bailiwick.”
For Thor Eells of the NTOA, the lack of standards in training creates a gap in the landscape for US law enforcement.
“We have this duty to make sure that people are thinkers. So we spend more time on the case law,” said Eells of the NTOA’s approach to training. But on the national level, “There is no standard. None. And in fact, in policing as a whole, there are little or no standards in the United States.”
When it comes to speciality launchers like the FN303, the baseline for training tends to come from the manufacturer. “Unless that specific agency or entity providing the training chooses to go above and beyond,” Eells explained, “then the training tends to be the minimum as put forth by the manufacturer.”
When asked about their training program for the FN303, DHS sent a reply from Customs and Border Protection. The agency stated that CBP agents are required to complete a qualification course and yearly recertification to be authorized to use the launcher. The course includes “classroom instruction, written and practical assessments, familiarization, use of force instruction, and qualification.” Agents are also instructed not to “target the head, neck, spine, or groin unless deadly force is reasonable and necessary.”
The content of FN Herstal’s curriculum is not publicly available. There are state-level institutions, such as the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, known as POST, which is a government agency that sets standards for local law enforcement agencies. It has the power to decertify officers for serious misconduct, and oversees general use of force training curricula. Nonetheless, manufacturer-led specialty weapons trainings lay outside the purview of agencies like POST. Meaning there is virtually no oversight on what manufacturer-trained instructors actually share with their departments.
After measuring the arc, precision, and velocity of the launcher, Reynhout sets up one final test of the FN303’s real power. He removes the cardboard target, now fully dotted with holes, and replaces it with a box of ballistics clay, a polymer clay of a particular consistency that is often used to measure the force of the impact of different weapons. The box is about three inches deep and open on one side. Reynhout explains that though the clay is a poor proxy for the human body, he is able to measure the craters that projectiles leave on its surface to compare the energy that they deliver at any given distance. It’s a “visual representation of the numbers that I’m presenting,” he says.
First, Reynhout takes aim with a paintball gun loaded with rubber balls, the exact size and weight of a standard PepperBall. The force of this shot, he explains, should be roughly equivalent to that of a PepperBall launcher—the weapon that law enforcement consistently conflates with the FN303.
He fires from a distance of about seven meters and hits his target. The small yellow ball makes a nearly one-inch deep indentation, before popping out and bouncing away through the desert.
Reynhout then aims the FN303. The loud pop of the weapon reverberates through the canyon. In an instant, a crater appears in the clay. The round has bored a hole all the way through to the back of the box. Shards of plastic and thousands of bismuth pellets coat the inside of the crater.
This weapon is no PepperBall launcher.
The Los Angeles Police Department frequently has turned to the FN303 when responding to anti-ICE demonstrations. As protests raged last June, sparked by ICE raids in the LA area, LAPD cracked down hard. The department deployed tear gas and fired thousands of rounds from less lethal weapons. Uses of the FN303 peaked in the 8-day period between June 6 and June 14, 2025, when the department reported firing 244 FN303 rounds in response to immigration related protests.
The LAPD periodically releases summarized reports to the public of their use of less lethal weapons and the injuries caused by their activities. These documents noted a total of 12 injuries from their activity during this period, but documentation did not specify which weapons caused these injuries.
By the end of January 2026, the LAPD had shot at least three journalists with the FN303 and seriously injured a woman with the weapon, causing severe lacerations to her face. She is now suing the department. Despite its repeated, sometimes dangerous misuses of the launcher, the LAPD continued its use in February. After a federal judge banned the department from using 40mm impact rounds in January, citing safety concerns, Chief Jim McDonnell announced at a Board of Police Commissioners meeting that the FN303 was an alternative option. The LAPD declined to answer any questions about the number of FN303s the department has in use, or to provide information about their training program for the launcher.
DHS, too, has leaned into the FN303, investing historic amounts in purchases of the weapon in September 2025. The effects of this DHS investment can be seen in the Trump administration’s crackdown on the recent surge of protests. Of the 12 incidents of FN303 misuse identified by the HRC and PHR team this past year, eight were perpetrated by federal agents working for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or the Federal Protective Service (FPS). Tucker Collins and his attorney, V. James DeSimone, filed a $100 million tort claim as a result of the injury DHS caused. Following the incident, DHS issued a statement denying any wrongdoing.
This surge of FN303 use has resulted in a new wave of injuries, many of which are permanent. Collins was not the only person who was partially blinded by DHS officers wielding the FN303 this year. In January, Kaden Rummler was shot in the eye from roughly three feet away by an FPS agent outside a federal building in Santa Ana. Video of the incident shows agents dragging Rummler across the concrete and into the facility to arrest him, blood pouring down his face. Like Collins, he will never again see out of his left eye.
The Federal Protective Service, the DHS subagency responsible for the injuries to both Collins and Rummler, follows a use of force policy that classifies any impact projectile fired at the neck or head as a use of deadly force. That same policy limits deadly force to extreme circumstances. “An FPS (officer) may use deadly force only when the (officer) has reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to the (officer) or to another person,” the policy manual states.
The Human Rights Center and Physicians for Human Rights identified five incidents in which people were shot in the head by federal officers using the FN303 over the past year, and one by LAPD. Along with Collins and Rummler, an 84-year-old woman, a 25-year-old woman, and two other unidentified victims suffered injuries of varying degrees after being struck in the head or face by a projectile from an FN303.
Outside of the US, injuries of the same severity were enough to trigger national conversations about whether the FN303 should be permitted at all. In the early 2000s and 2010s, Georgia, Turkey, and Switzerland all saw serious injuries, including blinding from FN303s being used in crowd control settings. The incidents prompted debates, and parliamentary sessions. Beyond the limited uproar following Victoria Snelgrove’s death, the FN303 has never been meaningfully scrutinized in the US.
Recent American use of the FN303 has sparked a new debate in FN Herstal’s home country of Belgium. Members of the right-wing New Flemish Alliance party, such as Defense Minister Theo Francken, have held up the LAPD’s use of the FN303 as aspirational. They argue that the weapon, which is heavily regulated in Belgium and rarely used in crowd control settings, should be deployed more broadly against left-wing protesters.
In October 2025, Francken travelled on a Belgian economic mission to California, where he, along with the CEO of FN Browning Julien Compère, Belgium’s Princess Astrid, and Los Angeles’ Deputy Police Chief Steve Embrich, had attended a demonstration of FN Herstal’s new generation FN303 Tactical at an LAPD firing range. The group was presented not only with an updated model of the launcher but also with an AI camera system mounted to the muzzle that automatically locks the trigger if it detects the user pointing at a face.
Days after his visit to the US, Francken posted to X advocating for use of the FN303 against Belgian protesters, “Extreme-left antifa mobs wrecked the entrance hall of the Immigration Service and injured multiple staff members…The police should deploy the FN303 against this scum, just like the LAPD, the police in Los Angeles, does.”
“The use of FN303 is strictly regulated, and I want to keep it that way. There will be no change in the potential use of this weapon by police in policing protests.”
In Belgium, the use of the FN303 by law enforcement remains limited to special tactical units and is subject to approval from the Minister of the Interior, who is now Bernard Quintin. He has indicated he has no desire to change this anytime soon, telling journalists, “The use of FN303 is strictly regulated, and I want to keep it that way. There will be no change in the potential use of this weapon by police in policing protests.”
Rémy Farge is a researcher for the Belgian Human Rights League, a group that is advocating fiercely against any broader deployment of the FN303. In his opinion, “FN Herstal is making a sort of admission with the release of the ‘FN Smart Protector 303T,’ as if to cynically address the numerous cases of maiming and eye loss that these weapons have already caused.” As he sees it, the comparatively stringent regulations on less lethal weapons in Belgium fall far short of what is necessary. “If we take seriously the danger posed by this weapon,” he said, “then we must stop downplaying its effects and work toward reducing its use, particularly through stricter bans.”
Meanwhile, in the US, the FN303 remains in wide circulation, though it’s unclear exactly how wide. Each department at the municipal, county, state, and federal levels manages its own arsenal of approved weapons. With 18,000 police departments, before counting federal law enforcement agencies, the prospect of stronger standards regulating the use of a single weapon seems unlikely. As Reynhout points out, “The United States is not an ideal place to use the legislative cudgel to manage these weapons.”
For law enforcement, the decision of what to use then becomes a question of risk assessment and mitigation. “There is no magic threshold to say again, now that is lethal, that is non-lethal,” says Papy, “you can kill people with almost anything— including just your hands.”
Despite the established comparison with the Pepperball launcher, there is another weapon that shares features with the FN303 whose history may prove instructive: the beanbag round. Like the FN303’s bismuth-filled ammunition, it is a less lethal projectile filled with metal fragments. In this case, a kevlar sack filled with lead pellets.
These beanbags were used widely during the 2020 George Floyd protests, causing severe injuries by embedding in people’s bodies and cracking skulls. Since then, Reynhout notes, law enforcement has shifted away from using these projectiles, which caused so much harm six years ago. The data support his claim. The database compiled by Physicians for Human Rights and the Berkeley Human Rights Center found only one misuse of a beanbag round in over 400 incidents recorded from June 2025 through May 2026. But the question remains, why?
“To my knowledge, there wasn’t any sort of legislation that specifically targeted beanbag rounds that was passed,” says Reynhout “yet police departments of their own volition seem to have come to the same conclusion that we came to, that the risk is unacceptable.”
That assessment of risk doesn’t come on its own. For Haar of PHR, it comes down to public understanding of the dangers of the use of the FN303. “I think that’s kind of the goal,” she says. “You just got to push against it and increase the cost of buying that.” If that happens, then perhaps the FN303 could quietly go the way of the bean bag.
Our first story unraveled how billionaires like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos were able to amass some of the largest fortunes in history while paying remarkably little tax relative to their immense wealth. They did it in part by avoiding selling off their vast holdings of stock. The U.S. system taxes income. Selling stock generates income, so they avoid income as the system defines it. Meanwhile, billionaires can tap into their wealth by borrowing against it. And borrowing isn’t taxable. (Buffett said he followed the law and preferred that his wealth go to charity; the others didn’t comment beyond a “?” from Musk.)
2. The $5 Billion IRA
Other billionaires used less conventional ways to avoid income, we found. Tech mogul Peter Thiel amassed a $5 billion Roth IRA, a type of account that shields income from taxes and is intended to help low- and middle-class savers prepare for retirement. Back in 1999, Thiel stuffed low-valued shares of the company that would become PayPal into the account, a maneuver tax lawyers said risked running afoul of IRS rules. (It’s not clear if the government ever challenged the move.) He set himself up to reap billions in untaxed gains. (Thiel did not respond to questions for the original article.)
3. The $1 Billion Parlor Trick: Turning High-Tax-Rate Trading into Low-Tax-Rate Income
Even when tech billionaires do show income on their tax return, they tend to pay relatively low income tax rates. That’s because of the type of income they have: Gains from long-term investments, such as from stock sales, are taxed at a lower rate. But what do you do if you’re making over $1 billion every year, and it’s largely from short-term trading? Do you just accept that you’ll pay the higher rate on all that income? As we reported this week, Jeff Yass, head of one of the most profitable firms on Wall Street, did not meekly accept this fate. Instead, his firm, Susquehanna International Group, found creative ways to transform the wrong sort of income into the right kind, generating tax savings that exceeded $1 billion over just six years. (Susquehanna declined to comment but in a court case that centered on similar allegations, it maintained that it complies with the law.)
4: The Magic of Sports Ownership: Make Money While (Legally) Reporting Losses
The tax code offers business owners a slew of methods to erase income through deductions, none more awesome than buying a sports team, as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did with the Los Angeles Clippers. It doesn’t matter whether the team is actually profitable and growing in value. It can still be a write-off. (In some cases, we found, owners could effectively deduct a given player’s contract not once, but twice. They’re allowed to take deductions comparable to those for factory equipment that loses value as it ages, even as teams almost inevitably gain in value.) That’s one reason owners tend to pay far lower tax rates than the athletes they employ, or even the people serving beer in the team’s stadium. In our story, we found a Clippers arena worker who made $45,000 a year and paid a higher tax rate than the billionaire Ballmer. (Ballmer said he pays the taxes he owes.)
5. Build, Drill and Save: The Real Estate and Oil Businesses Can Both Be Tax Havens
6. Even a Billionaire’s Hobbies Can Pay Off at Tax Time
Deductions from hobbies and side projects, which the ultrawealthy can structure as businesses, are another fun option. For some billionaires, it’s race horses: We found that six owners of thoroughbreds at the 2021 Kentucky Derby had taken a combined $600 million in tax write-offs on their horse racing operations. For others, like Beanie Babies founder Ty Warner, it’s luxury hotels. The billionaire splurged on a couple of landmark Four Seasons locations and then went 12 years without paying any income tax. (Representatives for Warner did not respond to requests for comment.)
7. Think Your Taxes are Too High? Change the Tax Laws
Sometimes, it pays to fight for a new tax break. For the billionaires who contributed millions to Republican politicians, the payoff came in the form of Trump’s “big, beautiful tax cut” for passthrough businesses. We found the change sent $1 billion in tax savings in a single year to just 82 ultrawealthy households. Some business owners also boosted their savings with a trick: They slashed their own salaries and categorized the money instead as passthrough income.
8. Why Tech Billionaires Pay Less Than Hedge-Fund Managers
With so many options to reduce taxes, the richest Americans often manage low income tax rates. We analyzed the incomes and taxes of the country’s top 400 earners, those averaging over $110 million in income per year. Overall, the group paid relatively low rates, but certain segments (tech billionaires, heirs, private equity executives) stood out even within this elite population because they were able to draw on the sorts of techniques detailed above. (Also drawing on these techniques were wealthy politicians, like the governors of Colorado and West Virginia.)
9. Brother, Can You Spare a Stimulus Check?
But the real standouts were the billionaires who reported such low incomes that they qualified for government assistance. At least 18 billionaires received stimulus checks in 2020, because their tax returns placed them below the income cutoff ($150,000 for a married couple).
10. Trust This: How Wealthy Families Pass Billions to Heirs While Avoiding Taxes
The holes in the estate tax, we found, are even more remarkable. There are well-worn ways to make sure Uncle Sam doesn’t get his cut of a fortune being passed on to heirs, and the most common is through a trust. How common no one can say, but we found evidence that at least half of the nation’s 100 richest individuals had used estate-tax-dodging trusts. In another story,we followed three century-old dynasties down through the generations, showing how they used trusts to avoid taxes, so that a fortune could pass all the way from the original early 20th century tycoon to, for example, the great-great-granddaughter who recently collected $210 million before her 19th birthday.
On March 31, 2026, President Donald Trump was asked about plans for his presidential library, the archive that presidents build to house their administration’s records.
His was most likely going to be a hotel, he said, with “a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby.”
“I don’t believe in building libraries or museums,” he told reporters.
Trump’s comments reflect how he has diverged from the customary and expected presidential attitude toward libraries of all types. As an information science professor, I have analyzed statements by 17 presidents, beginning with Calvin Coolidge.
Combing their speeches, proclamations, messages and letters in the Public Papers of the Presidents, the American Presidency Project, the Federal Register and the American Library Association’s archives and publications, I have found that Trump has broken with a century-old tradition. Nearly all presidents of both parties since 1923 have described libraries, whether public, academic or presidential, as a prerequisite to a healthy democracy and as crucial to sustaining an informed citizenry.
Trump, however, has rarely spoken of libraries at all. When he has, he has dismissed them.
On March 31, 2026, President Donald Trump was asked about plans for his presidential library, the archive that presidents build to house their administration’s records.
His was most likely going to be a hotel, he said, with “a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby.”
“I don’t believe in building libraries or museums,” he told reporters.
Trump’s comments reflect how he has diverged from the customary and expected presidential attitude toward libraries of all types. As an information science professor, I have analyzed statements by 17 presidents, beginning with Calvin Coolidge.
Combing their speeches, proclamations, messages and letters in the Public Papers of the Presidents, the American Presidency Project, the Federal Register and the American Library Association’s archives and publications, I have found that Trump has broken with a century-old tradition. Nearly all presidents of both parties since 1923 have described libraries, whether public, academic or presidential, as a prerequisite to a healthy democracy and as crucial to sustaining an informed citizenry.
Trump, however, has rarely spoken of libraries at all. When he has, he has dismissed them.
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Libraries and democracy
In the 1920s, Republican Calvin Coolidge said that public libraries were “within the reach of almost everyone” and contained “the best books and authorities on any subject.” By using these institutions, he said, citizens could evaluate “current proposals for political improvement.”
Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt took up that theme as the U.S. edged toward World War II. In 1941, he opened his own presidential library, the first in what would become the National Archives’ system. At the dedication, FDR argued that libraries proliferated in democracies where citizens refuse to accept “so-called information as may be handed out to them by certain types of self-constituted leaders who decide what is best for them.”
The Cold War reinforced the emphasis on libraries as foundational to self-government.
Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower feared censorship during the Red Scare and urged a 1953 audience, “Don’t join the book burners.” He also set a precedent for federal library aid by signing the Library Services Act of 1956, which authorized up to US$7.5 million a year for developing public library services for rural Americans. Eisenhower’s successor, Democrat John F. Kennedy, likewise believed that “libraries should be open to all – except the censor.” Kennedy’s budgets continued funding public libraries.
That view outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1991.
In 1992, Republican George H.W. Bush said libraries provided the lifelong education each American needed “to remain a fully productive and fully participating citizen.” Campaigning for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president that same year, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton argued that libraries’ provision of equal access to information helped safeguard democracy.
As president, Democrat Barack Obama said in 2009 that “an informed and educated citizenry is essential to the functioning of our modern democratic society” and said libraries “can help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise.” Democrat Joe Biden subsequently called library services “essential to the well-being, health, vitality, and democracy of our Nation” in a 2022 executive order.
While presidents from Eisenhower onward had tied libraries to the freedom to read, Obama and Biden carried that tradition into the fight over banning books, often by or about people of color or LGBTQ people, especially in school and public libraries.
“Freedom begins with our capacity to share and access ideas, even ideas we may disagree with or find deeply offensive,” former President Obama wrote during 2022’s Banned Books Week.
During National Library Week in 2023, Biden thanked librarians and vowed to “stand with teachers and parents against politicians who try to score political points by banning books.”
One of Trump’s rare public comments on libraries came during his first term at a January 2019 Cabinet meeting. Complaining about U.S. allies’ contributions in Afghanistan, he ridiculed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “constantly telling (him) he built a library in Afghanistan.”
“A library! That’s like five hours of what we spend,” Trump said. “Don’t know who’s using (a library) in Afghanistan.”
Since returning to office, Trump has taken a series of actions affecting libraries. Just days after his second inauguration, in 2025, the Department of Education eliminated its so-called “book ban coordinator” position. The Biden administration had appointed that coordinator in the Office for Civil Rights in 2023 to address book bans in schools and provide guidance on when removing books from school libraries might violate civil rights. The Trump administration rescinded that guidance, ending what it called “Biden’s book ban hoax.”
Like fellow Republicans Richard Nixon and Reagan, Trump asked Congress every year in his first term to eliminate federal library aid. Congress rejected each president’s requests.
In March 2025, however, Trump took an unprecedented step: He bypassed Congress altogether, signing an executive order to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the chief federal funder of libraries and museums. Since 1996, the institute has run the library grant program that descended from the legislation that Eisenhower signed into law. A federal court blocked the order to dismantle the institute.
Two months later, Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and first African American to hold the position. Asked why Hayden was fired, then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to “quite concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”
Hayden, for her part, had made the Library of Congress into what she called “a library for everyone,” winning a $15 million Mellon Foundation grant to bring underrepresented communities into its collections.
“We like to say as librarians, ‘Free people read freely,’” Hayden said after her dismissal. “There’s been an effort recently to quelch that.”
At the September 2026 Republican midterm convention, Trump again mentioned libraries, this time alleging that some Democratic candidates want “to put the books of Lenin … and Stalin in every library for all our young children to read and study.”
1935: Almost all Republicans in Congress oppose the creation of Social Security.
1939: 75 percent of Republicans in Senate try to kill legislation providing Social Security benefits to dependents and survivors as well as retired workers.
1950: 79 percent of House and 89 percent of Senate Republicans vote against disability insurance to defeat it.
1956: 86 percent of Republicans in Senate oppose disability insurance; program approved nonetheless.
1964: Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and future president Ronald Reagan both suggest that Social Security be made voluntary.
1965: 93 percent of Republicans in House and 62 percent in Senate vote to kill Medicare.
1977: 58 percent of Senate votes against amendment to provide semiannual increases.
1977: 88 percent of Republicans in House and 63 percent in Senate vote against an increase in Social Security payroll tax needed to keep the system solvent.
1981: President Reagan proposes $35 billion in Social Security cuts over the next 5 years. The cuts would have included the elimination of student benefits, lump-sum death benefits, and a retroactive elimination of the $122 minimum benefit for three million recipients. (Congress ultimately enacted $24 billion of the proposed cuts.)
1981: Reagan administration begins a wholesale review of the Social Security Disability rolls, resulting in over 560,000 eligibility investigations in 1982 — 360,000 more than the year before. Ultimately, at least 106,000 families were removed from the rolls.
1981: 99 percent of Republicans in House and 98 percent in Senate vote for legislation containing $22 billion in Social Security and Medicare cuts.
1981: Reagan administration proposes a three-month delay in 1982 cost-of-living increases.
1981: Reagan administration proposes $200 billion in Social Security cuts between 1982 and 1990. The cuts include a reduction in early retirement benefit; tightened disability eligibility standards; delay in the 1982 cost-of-living adjustment and a 10 percent eventual reduction in benefits for all new retirees. (The U.S. Senate repudiated the President’s proposals by a vote of 96 to 0.)
1982: President Reagan and Senate Republicans propose $40 billion in benefit cuts over three fiscal years.
1985: Reagan administration backs attempts by Republican Senate leadership to eliminate the 1986 Social Security COLA. Vice President Bush casts the tie-breaking vote to eliminate COLA. (House defeats it – it was never enacted.)
1990s: Efforts to end Social Security took the form of appealing to younger workers to put “their” Social Security insurance payments into the stock market.
2005: A Labor-led fight against privatization saved Social Security for the time being.
2006: President George W. Bush, once again, includes privatization of Social Security in his 2007 budget.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s broad assertions about Arab contributions to humanity’s scientific and literary discoveries at a Republican campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have drawn criticism just days before midterm elections.
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don’t produce science,” Kennedy said on the campaign trail Monday. “They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
The health secretary’s comments — widely condemned overnight by critics as untrue and racially biased — were made while campaigning in a state with a large Arab American population.
An HHS representative did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.
Arab refers to an ethnic and linguistic identification, while Muslim refers to a religious identity. So while Arabs can be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or of another faith, the vast majority of Muslims worldwide are not Arab.
Here’s a closer look at Kennedy’s comments.
Arabs have won the Nobel Prize
__Egyptian law scholar Mohamed El Baradei, a diplomat and vice-president of Egypt, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency. Baradei and the IAEA, which he previously chaired, were awarded for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes.
__Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist, was a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to win the award.
Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American scientist, was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry.
__Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.
__Jordanian-born Omar M. Yaghi was one of three chemists awarded the Nobel Prize in 2025, and won the 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry.
_Sir Michael Atiyah, of Lebanese descent, was a Fields medalist in 1966.
__Yasser Arafat, the former head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, together with former Israeli Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East.” Arafat died in 2004.
__Former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 after they signed the Camp David Accords, which ended Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula
The background of his comments
Kennedy made the comments while campaigning for Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who has accused his opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.
El-Sayed, who has disavowed the group, has also been accused by President Donald Trump of being a Muslim Brotherhood member. Trump has also made racist comments about El-Sayed.
“Mike Rogers was talking about the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s something I can talk about,” Kennedy said. Kennedy argued that the world’s 500 million Arabs have not contributed to science or the humanities due to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, after he cited Islamic civilization’s contributions to literature in the 13th century.
“All that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Kennedy said. The U.S. has labeled several Middle Eastern branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. “They’ve created stagnant societies that do one, two things: hatred and war and victimization,” Kennedy said.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 but was banned after Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi was ousted in 2013. Jordan announced a sweeping ban on the organization last year. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain designated the organization as a terrorist group in 2014.
What critics are saying
Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse said in a statement that “this wasn’t the first time RFK Jr has trafficked in racism, but it may be his ugliest episode yet.” Woodhouse was referring to Kennedy’s comments on the “High Level Conversations” podcast in 2024, where he implied that Black children with ADHD and on medication should be “re-parented.”
Dr. Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital, posted on social media Monday evening that his former colleague, Nobel Prize winner Zewail, would disagree with Kennedy.
“God rest his soul he didn’t have to endure this, and of course RFK Jr forgets that it was the Arab scientists of the Middle Ages who kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down in the Renaissance.”
Kennedy is slated to serve as a special guest at the “Make Iowa Healthy Again Rally” in Des Moines on Wednesday.
