In September, the Trump administration took what it called "bold actions" on autism that included touting the generic drug leucovorin as a promising treatment. In a news release, Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, claimed a "growing body of evidence suggests" the drug could be helpful. And at a White House press event, Makary suggested it might help "20, 40, 50 percent of kids with autism."

"Hundreds of thousands of kids, in my opinion, will benefit," he said at another point in the event.

The bold claims were apparently persuasive. A study published in The Lancet last week found that new outpatient prescriptions of leucovorin for children ages 5 to 17 shot up 71 percent in the three months after the Trump administration's actions.

But it became clear today that the rest of the FDA did not share Makary's and the other administration officials' view. In an announcement, the regulatory agency said it had approved leucovorin for a rare genetic condition—but not for autism.

In comments to the Associated Press, senior FDA officials said they found little evidence for expanding the drug's use to autism and, thus, narrowed its review to the treatment of the rare genetic condition, which is cerebral folate deficiency (CFD) in adults caused by a genetic mutation in the folate receptor 1 gene (CFD-FOLR1).

The FDA officials also noted that among the few studies supporting the use of leucovorin for autism treatment, one of the largest was retracted last month over errors in its data and statistical analysis. Reanalysis of the data was unable to reproduce the original positive findings.

Leucovorin, or folinic acid, is a reduced form of folic acid that's used to treat impaired folate metabolism. Such an impairment can occur as a side effect of certain chemotherapy drugs, such as methotrexate.

CFD is a neurological condition marked by abnormally low amounts of folate metabolites in the brain and includes symptoms such as developmental delays, seizures, and movement abnormalities, as well as others that can resemble autism. It affects fewer than 1 in a million in the US.

While some small, preliminary studies have suggested leucovorin could help ease autism symptoms in some patients, the findings are far from conclusive. Some researchers have hypothesized that some patients with autism may have low cerebral folate levels due to antibodies that block the vitamin from the brain. But, as the Autism Science Foundation noted in September, non-autistic family members of autistic individuals can also have these antibodies, suggesting they are not a cause of the condition.

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The inspector general's office of the Social Security Administration is investigating allegations of a security breach by a member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency operation spearheaded by Elon Musk. A whistleblower has claimed that a former software engineer from DOGE said he possessed two databases from the SSA, "Numident" and the "Master Death File." The person reportedly asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive "to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company]," an unnamed government contractor where he is currently employed. Those databases include personal information about more than 500 million living and deceased Americans. 

The Washington Post reported that the whistleblower complaint was filed with the inspector general in January. "When The Post contacted the agency and the company in January, both said they had not heard of the complaint. Both said they subsequently looked into the allegations and did not find evidence to confirm the claims," the publication said. It is unclear why the complaint is now being investigated and neither party offered comment this week for The Post's article. The SSA watchdog informed both members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office of its investigation. 

These allegations follow a different whistleblower complaint filed last August about DOGE access and mishandling of data from the SSA. Charles Borges, former chief data officer at the agency, claimed that a SSA database was stored in an unsecured cloud environment. "This is absolutely the worst-case scenario," Borges told The Post of the latest claims. "There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/social-security-watchdog-investigating-claims-that-doge-engineer-copied-its-databases-212722061.html?src=rss

sziring shares a report from Business Insider: Silicon Valley has long competed for talent with ever-richer pay packages built around salary, bonus, and equity. Now, a fourth line item is creeping into the mix: AI inference. As generative AI tools become embedded in software development, the cost of running the underlying models -- known as inference -- is emerging as a productivity driver and a budget line that finance chiefs can't ignore. Software engineers and AI researchers inside tech companies have already been jousting for access to GPUs, with this AI compute capacity being carefully parceled out based on which projects are most important. Now, some tech job candidates have begun asking about what AI compute budget they will have access to if they decide to join. "I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex," Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI's Codex, the startup's AI coding service, wrote on X recently. He added that usage per user is growing much faster than overall user growth, a sign that AI compute is becoming even scarcer and more valuable. That scarcity is reshaping how engineers think about their work and pay. "The inference compute available to you is increasingly going to drive overall software productivity," said OpenAI President Greg Brockman. The report cites a recent compensation submission from a software engineer that listed "Copilot subscription" as part of the pay and benefits. "OpenAI and Anthropic should create recruitment sites where their clients can advertise roles, listing the token budget for the job alongside the salary range," said Peter Gostev, AI capability lead at Arena, a startup that measures the performance of models. Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures predicts AI inference will be the fourth component of engineering compensation, alongside salary, bonus, and equity. "Will you be paid in tokens? In 2026, you likely will start to be," Tunguz said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer engineers and programmers have long relied on reverse engineering as a way to copy the functionality of a computer program without copying that program's copyright-protected code directly. Now, AI coding tools are raising new issues with how that "clean room" rewrite process plays out both legally, ethically, and practically.

Those issues came to the forefront last week with the release of a new version of chardet, a popular open source python library for automatically detecting character encoding. The repository was originally written by coder Mark Pilgrim in 2006 and released under an LGPL license that placed strict limits on how it could be reused and redistributed.

Dan Blanchard took over maintenance of the repository in 2012 but waded into some controversy with the release of version 7.0 of chardet last week. Blanchard described that overhaul as "a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite" of the entire library built with the help of Claude Code to be "much faster and more accurate" than what came before.

Speaking to The Register, Blanchard said that he has long wanted to get chardet added to the Python standard library but that he didn't have the time to fix problems with "its license, its speed, and its accuracy" that were getting in the way of that goal. With the help of Claude Code, though, Blanchard said he was able to overhaul the library "in roughly five days" and get a 48x performance boost to boot.

Not everyone has been happy with that outcome, though. A poster using the name Mark Pilgrim surfaced on Github to argue that this new version amounts to an illegitimate relicensing of Pilgrim's original code under a more permissive MIT license (which, among other things, allows for its use in closed-source projects). As a modification of his original LGPL licensed code, Pilgrim argues this new version of chardet must also maintain the same LGPL license.

"Their claim that it is a 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a 'clean room' implementation)," Pilgrim wrote. "Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights. I respectfully insist that they revert the project to its original license."

Whose code is it, anyway?

In his own response to Pilgrim, Blanchard admits that he has had "extensive exposure to the original codebase," meaning he didn't have the traditional "strict separation" usually used for "clean room" reverse engineering. But that tradition was set up for human coders as a way "to ensure the resulting code is not a derivative work of the original," Blanchard argues.

In this case, Blanchard said that the new AI-generated code is "qualitatively different" from what came before it and "is structurally independent of the old code." As evidence, he cites JPlag similarity statistics showing that a maximum of 1.29 percent of any chardet version 7.0.0 file is structurally similar to the corresponding file in version 6.0.0. Comparing version 5.2.0 to version 6.0.0, on the other hand, finds up to 80 percent similarity in some corresponding files.

"No file in the 7.0.0 codebase structurally resembles any file from any prior release," Blanchard writes. "This is not a case of 'rewrote most of it but carried some files forward.' Nothing was carried forward."

Blanchard says starting with a "wipe it clean" commit and a fresh repository was key in crafting fresh, non-derivative code from the AI. Credit: Dan Blanchard / Github

Blanchard says he was able to accomplish this "AI clean room" process by first specifying an architecture in a design document and writing out some requirements to Claude Code. After that, Blanchard "started in an empty repository with no access to the old source tree and explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code."

There are a few complicating factors to this straightforward story, though. For one, Claude did explicitly rely on some metadata files found in the previous versions of chardet, raising some direct questions about whether or not this version is actually "derivative."

For another, Claude's models are trained on reams of data pulled from the public Internet, which means it's overwhelmingly likely that Claude has ingested the open source code of previous chardet versions in its training. Whether that prior "knowledge" means that Claude's creation is a "derivative" of Pilgrim's work is an open question, even if the new code is structurally different from the old.

And then there's the remaining human factor. While the code for this new version was generated by Claude, Blanchard said he "reviewed, tested, and iterated on every piece of the result using Claude. ... I did not write the code by hand, but I was deeply involved in designing, reviewing, and iterating on every aspect of it." Having someone with intimate knowledge of earlier chardet code take such a heavy hand in reviewing the new code could also have an impact on whether this version can be considered a wholly new project.

Brave new world

All of these issues have predictably led to a huge debate over legalities of chardet version 7.0.0 across the open source community. "There is nothing 'clean' about a Large Language Model which has ingested the code it is being asked to reimplement," Free Software Foundation Executive Director Zoë Kooyman told The Register, bluntly.

But others think the "Ship of Theseus"-style arguments that can often emerge in code licensing dust-ups don't apply as much here. "If you throw away all code and start from scratch, even if the end result behaves the same, it’s a new ship," Open source developer Armin Ronacher said in a blog post analyzing the situation.

The legal status of AI generated code is still largely unsettled. Credit: Getty Images

Old code licenses aside, using AI to create new code from whole cloth could also create its own legal complications going forward. Courts have already said that AI can't be the author on a patent or the copyright holder on a piece of art but have yet to rule on what that means for the licensing of software created in whole or in part by AI. The issues surrounding potential "tainting" of an open source license with this kind of generated code can get remarkably complex remarkably quickly.

Whatever the outcome here, the practical impact of being able to use AI to quickly rewrite and relicense many open source projects—without nearly as much effort on the part of human programmers—is likely to have huge knock-on effects throughout the community.

"Now the process of rewriting is so simple to do, and many people are disturbed by this," Italian coder Salvatore "antirez" Sanfilippo wrote on his blog. "There is a more fundamental truth here: the nature of software changed; the reimplementations under different licenses are just an instance of how such nature was transformed forever. Instead of combatting each manifestation of automatic programming, I believe it is better to build a new mental model, and adapt."

Others put the sea change in more alarming terms. "I'm breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm!" open source evangelist Bruce Perens told The Register. "The entire economics of software development are dead, gone, over, kaput! ... We have been there before, for example when the printing press happened and resulted in copyright law, when the scientific method proliferated and suddenly there was a logical structure for the accumulation of knowledge. I think this one is just as large."

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In the Trump FCC's latest series of attacks on TV broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been threatening to enforce the equal-time rule on daytime and late-night talk shows. The interview portions of talk shows have historically been exempt from equal-time regulations, but Carr has a habit of interpreting FCC rules in novel ways to target networks disfavored by President Trump.

Critics of Carr point out that his threats of equal-time enforcement apply unequally since he hasn't directed them at talk radio, which is predominantly conservative. Given the similarities between interviews on TV and radio shows, Carr has been asked to explain why he issued an equal-time enforcement warning to TV but not radio broadcasters.

Carr's responses to the talk radio questions have been vague, even as he tangled with Late Show host Stephen Colbert and launched an investigation into ABC's The View over its interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. In a press conference after the FCC's February 18 meeting, Deadline reporter Ted Johnson asked Carr why he has not expressed "the same concern about broadcast talk radio as broadcast TV talk shows."

The Deadline reporter pointed out that "Sean Hannity's show featured Ken Paxton in December." Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is running for a US Senate seat in this year's election. Carr claimed in response that TV broadcasters have been "misreading" FCC precedents while talk radio shows have not been.

"It appeared that programmers were either overreading or misreading some of the case law on the equal-time rule as it applies to broadcast TV," Carr replied. "We haven't seen the same issues on the radio side, but the equal-time rule is going to apply to broadcast across the board, and we'll take a look at anything that arises at the end of the day."

Carr's radio claim "a bunch of nonsense"

Carr didn't provide any specifics to support his claim that radio programmers have interpreted precedents correctly while TV programmers have not. The most obvious explanation for the disparate treatment is that Carr isn't targeting conservative talk radio because he's primarily interested in stifling critics of Trump. Carr has consistently used his authority to fight Trump's battles against the media, particularly TV broadcasters, and backed Trump's declaration that historically independent agencies like the FCC are no longer independent from the White House.

Carr's claim that TV but not radio broadcasters have misread FCC precedents is "a bunch of nonsense," said Gigi Sohn, a longtime lawyer and consumer advocate who served as counselor to then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama era. Carr "was responding to criticism from people like Sean Hannity that the guidance would apply to conservative talk radio just as much as it would to so-called 'liberal' TV," Sohn told Ars. "It doesn’t matter whether a broadcaster is a radio broadcaster or a TV broadcaster, the Equal Opportunities law and however the FCC implements it must apply to both equally."

Sean Hannity during a Fox News Channel program on October 30, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Hannity, who hosts a Fox News show and a nationally syndicated radio show, pushed back against content regulation shortly after Carr's FCC issued the equal-time warning to TV broadcasters in January. “Talk radio is successful because people are smart and understand we are the antidote to corrupt and abusively biased left wing legacy media,” Hannity said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “We need less government regulation and more freedom. Let the American people decide where to get their information from without any government interference.”

Carr's claim of misreadings relates to the bona fide news exceptions to the equal-time rule, which is codified under US law as the Equal Opportunities Requirement. The rule requires that when a station gives time to one political candidate, it must provide comparable time and placement to an opposing candidate if an opposing candidate makes a request.

But when a political candidate appears on a bona fide newscast or bona fide news interview, a broadcaster does not have to make equal time available to opposing candidates. The exception also applies to news documentaries and on-the-spot coverage of news events.

Equal time didn't apply to Jay Leno or Howard Stern

In the decades before Trump appointed Carr to the FCC chairmanship, the commission consistently applied bona fide exemptions to talk shows that interview political candidates. Phil Donahue's show won a notable exemption in 1984, and over the ensuing 22 years, the FCC exempted shows hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer, Bill Maher, and Jay Leno. On the radio side, Howard Stern won a bona fide news exemption in 2003.

Despite the seemingly well-settled precedents, the FCC's Media Bureau said in a January 21 public notice that the agency's previous decisions do not "mean that the interview portion of all arguably similar entertainment programs—whether late night or daytime—are exempted from the section 315 equal opportunities requirement under a bona fide news exemption... these decisions are fact-specific and the exemptions are limited to the program that was the subject of the request.”

The Carr FCC warned that a program "motivated by partisan purposes... would not be entitled to an exemption under longstanding FCC precedent." But if late-night show hosts are "motivated by partisan purposes," what about conservative talk radio hosts? Back in 2017, Hannity described himself as "an advocacy journalist." In previous years, he said he's not a journalist at all.

"Remember when Sean Hannity used to claim he wasn't a journalist, then claimed to be an 'advocacy journalist'?" Harold Feld, a longtime telecom lawyer and senior VP of advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars. "Given that the Media Bureau guidance leans heavily into the question of whether the motivation is 'for partisan purposes' or 'designed for the specific advantage of a candidate,' it would seem that conservative talk radio is rather explicitly a problem under this guidance."

"To put it bluntly, Carr's explanation that shows that Trump has expressly disliked are 'misreading' the law, while conservative radio shows are not, strains credulity," Feld said.

Conservative radio boomed after FCC ditched Fairness Doctrine

Conservative talk radio benefited from the FCC's long-term shift away from regulating TV and radio content. A major change came in 1987 when the FCC decided to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, a decision that helped fuel the late Rush Limbaugh's success.

FCC regulation of broadcast content through the Fairness Doctrine had been upheld in 1969 by the Supreme Court in the Red Lion Broadcasting decision, which said broadcasters had special obligations because of the scarcity of radio frequencies. But the Reagan-era FCC decided 18 years later that the scarcity rationale "no longer justifies a different standard of First Amendment review for the electronic press" in "the vastly transformed, diverse market that exists today." The FCC made that decision after an appeals court ruled that the FCC acted arbitrarily and capriciously in its enforcement of the doctrine against a TV station.

Even where the FCC didn't eliminate content-based rules, it reduced enforcement. But after decades of the FCC scaling back enforcement of content-based regulations, Donald Trump was elected president.

Trump's first FCC chair, Ajit Pai, rejected Trump's demands to revoke station licenses over content that Trump claimed was biased against him. Pai and his successor, Biden-era FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, agreed that the First Amendment prohibits the FCC from revoking station licenses simply because the president doesn't like a network's news content.

After winning a second term, Trump promoted Carr to the chairmanship. Carr, an unabashed admirer of Trump, has said in interviews that “President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape” and that “President Trump ran directly at the legacy mainstream media, and he smashed a facade that they’re the gatekeepers of truth.” Carr describes Trump as "the political colossus of modern times."

President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell

Carr has led the charge in Trump's war against the media by repeatedly threatening to revoke licenses under the FCC's rarely enforced news distortion policy. Carr's aggressive stance, particularly in his attacks on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, even alarmed prominent Republicans such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Cruz said that trying to dictate what the media can say during Trump's presidency will come back to haunt Republicans in future Democratic administrations.

With both the news distortion policy and equal-time rule, Carr hasn't formally imposed any punishment. But his threats have an effect. Kimmel was temporarily suspended, CBS owner Paramount agreed to install what Carr called a "bias monitor" in exchange for a merger approval, and Texas-based ABC affiliates have filed equal-time notices with the FCC as a result of Carr's threats against The View.

Colbert said on his show that CBS forbade him from interviewing Talarico because of Carr’s equal-time threats. CBS denied prohibiting the interview but acknowledged giving Colbert “legal guidance,” and Carr claimed that Colbert lied about the incident.

Colbert did not put his interview with Talarico on his broadcast show but released it on YouTube, where it racked up nearly 9 million views. "Only a handful of people would've seen it if it had run live," Christopher Terry, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, told Ars. "But what is it up to, 8 million views on YouTube now? It's like the biggest thing, everybody in the world's talking about it now. CBS gave Talarico the best press they ever could have by not letting him on the air... Oldest lesson in the First Amendment handbook, the more you try to suppress speech, the more powerful you make it."

FCC misread its own rules, Feld says

Feld said the Carr FCC's public notice "misreads the law and ignores inconvenient precedent." The notice describes the equal-time rule as a public-interest obligation for broadcasters that have licenses to use spectrum, and Carr has repeatedly said the rule is only for licensed broadcasters. But Feld said the rule also applies to cable channels, which are referred to as community antenna television systems in the Equal Opportunities law as written by Congress.

Moreover, Feld said the FCC guidance "conflates two separate statutory exemptions," the bona fide newscast exemption and the bona fide news interview exemption. FCC precedents didn't find that Howard Stern and Jerry Springer were doing newscasts but that their interviews "met the criteria for a bona fide news interview," Feld said. Despite that, the Carr FCC's "guidance appears to require that Late Night Shows must be news shows, not merely host an interview segment," he said.

The FCC guidance describes the Jay Leno decision as an outlier that was "contrary" to a 1960 decision involving Jack Paar and "the first time that such a finding had been applied to a late night talk show, which is primarily an entertainment offering."

Feld pointed out that Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher was the first late-night show to receive the exemption in 1999, seven years before Leno. Maher's show was on ABC at the time. The FCC guidance also "fails to explain any meaningful difference" between late-night shows and afternoon shows like Jerry Springer's, Feld said.

Carr may label TV hosts as "partisan political actors"

At the February 18 press conference, Johnson asked Carr to explain how the FCC is "assessing whether a candidate appearance on a talk show is motivated by partisan purposes." The reporter asked if there were specific criteria, like a talk show host giving money to a political candidate or hosting a fundraiser.

"Yeah it's possible, all of that could be relevant," Carr said. Whether a program is "animated by a partisan political motivation" can be determined "through discovery," and "people can come forward with their own showings in a petition for a declaratory ruling, but this is something that will be explored," Carr said. "It's part of the FCC's case law, and the idea is that if you're a partisan political actor under the case law, then you're likely not going to qualify under the bona fide news exception. That's OK, it just means you have to either provide equal airtime to the different candidates or there's different ways you can get your message out through streaming services and other means for which the equal-time rule doesn't apply."

In a follow-up question, Johnson asked, "A partisan political actor would mean a talk show host or someone whose show it is?" Carr replied, "It could be that, yeah, it could be that."

Carr confirmed reports that the FCC is investigating The View over the show’s interview with Talarico. "Yes, the FCC has an enforcement action underway on that and we're taking a look at it," Carr said at the press conference.

We contacted Carr's office to ask for specifics about how TV programmers have allegedly misread the FCC's equal-time precedents. We also asked whether the FCC is concerned that talk radio shows may be misreading the Howard Stern precedent or other rulings related to radio and have not received a response.

Carr targeted SNL on Trump's behalf

Carr hasn't been truthful in his statements about the equal-time rule, Terry said. "Carr is just an obnoxious figure who needs attention, and remember he absolutely lied about the NBC/Kamala Harris equal-time thing," Terry said. Terry was referring to Carr's November 2024 allegation that when NBC put Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live before the election, it was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”

In fact, NBC gave Trump free airtime during a NASCAR telecast and an NFL post-game show and filed an equal-time notice with the FCC to comply with the rule. Terry filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails that showed Carr discussing NBC's equal-time notice on November 3, 2024, but Carr reiterated his allegation over a month later despite being aware of the steps NBC took to comply with the rule.

Terry said Carr has taken a similarly dishonest approach with his claim that talk shows don't qualify for the equal-time exception. "I think it's like a lot of things Carr says. Just because he says it doesn't mean it's true, right? It's nonsense," Terry told Ars. "Every precedent suggests that a show like The View or one of the talk shows at night is an interview-based talk show, and that's what the bona fide news exception was designed to cover."

Terry said applying Carr's "partisan purposes" test would likely require "a complete rulemaking proceeding" and would be difficult now that the Supreme Court has limited the authority of federal agencies to interpret ambiguities in US law. But it's up to broadcasters to stand up to Carr, he said.

"If one broadcaster was like, 'Oh yeah? Make us,' he'd lose in court. He would. The precedent is absolutely against this," Terry said.

Because the bona fide exemptions apply so broadly to TV and radio programs, the equal-time rule has applied primarily to advertising access for the past few decades, Terry said. If a station sells advertising to one candidate, "you have to make equal opportunities available to their opponents at the same price that reaches the same functional amount of audience," he said.

Terry said he thinks NBC could make a good argument that Saturday Night Live is exempt, but the network has decided that it's "easier just to provide time" to opposing candidates. Terry, a former radio producer, said, "I worked in talk radio for over 20 years. We never once even thought about equal time outside of advertising."

Howard Stern precedent ignored

Howard Stern debuts his show on Sirius Satellite Radio on January 9, 2006, at the network's studios at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Credit: Getty Images

Feld said the Carr FCC's guidance "says the exact opposite" of what the FCC's 2003 ruling on Howard Stern stated "with regard to how this process is supposed to work. The Howard Stern decision expressly states that licensees don't need to seek permission first."

The 2003 FCC's Stern ruling said, "Although we take this action in response to [broadcaster] Infinity’s request, we emphasize that licensees airing programs that meet the statutory news exemption, as clarified in our case law, need not seek formal declaration from the Commission that such programs qualify as news exempt programming under Section 315(a)."

By contrast, the Carr FCC encouraged TV programs and stations "to promptly file a petition for declaratory ruling" if they want "formal assurance" that they are exempt from the equal-time rule. "Importantly, the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption," the notice said.

The Lerman Senter law firm said that before the Carr FCC issued its public notice, broadcasters that met the criteria for the bona fide news interview exemption generally did not seek an FCC ruling. Because of the public notice, "stations can no longer rely on FCC precedent as to applicability of the bona fide news interview exemption," the law firm said. "Only by obtaining a declaratory ruling, in advance, from the FCC can a station be assured that it will not face regulatory action for interviewing a candidate without providing equal opportunities to opposing candidates."

This is "quite a switch," Feld said. If this is the new standard, "then conservative talk radio hosts should also be required to affirmatively seek declaratory rulings," he said.

FCC is "licensing speech"

Berin Szóka, president of think tank TechFreedom, told Ars that "the FCC is effectively creating a system of prior restraints, that is, licensing speech. This is the greatest of all First Amendment problems. What's worse, the FCC is doing this selectively, discriminating on the basis of speakers."

TechFreedom has argued that the FCC should repeal the news distortion policy that Carr has embraced, and Szóka is firmly against Carr on equal-time enforcement as well. As Szóka noted, the Supreme Court has made clear that “laws favoring some speakers over others demand strict scrutiny when the legislature’s speaker preference reflects a content preference.”

"That's exactly what's happening here," Szóka said. "Carr is imposing a de facto requirement that TV broadcasters, but not radio broadcasters, must file for prior assessment as to their 'news' bona fides." Ultimately, it means that TV broadcasters "can no longer have political candidates on their shows without offering equal time to all candidates in that race unless they seek prior pre-clearance from the FCC as to whether they qualify as providing bona fide news," he said.

Carr's enforcement push was applauded by Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, a group that has supported Trump's claims of media bias. The group filed bias complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations that were dismissed during the Biden era, but those complaints were revived by Carr in January 2025.

“This major announcement from the FCC should stop one-sided left-wing entertainment shows masquerading as ‘bona fide news,'” Suhr wrote on January 21. “The abuse of the airwaves by ABC & NBC as DNC-TV must end. FCC is restoring respect for the equal time rules enacted by Congress.”

Suhr later argued in the Yale Journal on Regulation that Carr's approach is consistent with FCC rulings from 1960 to 1980, before the commission started exempting the interview portions of talk shows.

"From 1984 to 2006, conversely, the Commission took a broader view that included less traditional shows," Suhr wrote. "The Commission suggested a more traditional view in 2008, and again in 2015, each time qualifying a show because it 'reports news of some area of current events, in a manner similar to more traditional newscasts.'"

But both decisions mentioned by Suhr granted bona fide exemptions and did not upend the precedents that broadcasters continued to rely on until Carr's public notice. Suhr also argued that the Carr approach is supported by the Supreme Court's 1969 decision upholding the Fairness Doctrine, although the Reagan-era FCC decided that the court's 1969 rationale about scarcity of the airwaves could no longer be justified in the modern media market.

Don't like a show? Change the channel

With the FCC having a 2-1 Republican majority, Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez has been the only member pushing back against Carr. Gomez has also urged big media companies to assert their rights under the First Amendment and reject Carr's threats.

When asked about Carr threatening TV broadcasters but not radio ones, Gomez told Ars in a statement that "the FCC’s equal-time rules apply equally to television and radio broadcasters. The Communications Act does not vary by platform, and it does not vary by politics. Our responsibility is to apply the law consistently, grounded in statute and precedent, not based on who supports or challenges those in power."

FCC enforcement in the Trump administration has been "driven by politics rather than principle," with decisions "shaped by whether a broadcaster is perceived as a critic of this administration," Gomez said. "That is not how an independent agency operates. The FCC is not in the business of policing media bias, and it is wholly inappropriate to wield its authority selectively for political ends. When enforcement is targeted in this way, it damages the commission’s credibility, undermines confidence that the law is being applied fairly and impartially, and violates the First Amendment.”

Gomez addressed the disparity in enforcement during her press conference after the recent FCC meeting, saying the rules should be applied equally to TV and radio. She also pointed out that viewers and listeners can easily find different programs if one doesn't suit their tastes.

"There's plenty of content on radio I'm not particularly fond of, but that's why I don't listen to it," Gomez said. "I have plenty of other outlets I can go to."

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While lifesaving vaccines face a relentless onslaught from the Trump administration—with fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge—scientific literature is building a wondrous story: A vaccine appears to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer's, and may even slow biological aging.

For years, study after study has noted that older adults vaccinated against shingles seemed to have a lower risk of dementia. A study last month suggested the same vaccine appears to slow biological aging, including lowering markers of inflammation.

"Our study adds to a growing body of work suggesting that vaccines may play a role in healthy aging strategies beyond solely preventing acute illness," study author Eileen Crimmins, of the University of Southern California, said.

Another study this month suggested the positive findings against dementia from the past may even be underestimates of the vaccination's potential, with a newer vaccine against shingles providing even more protection.

Shingles

If the dementia protection is real, it's a fluke. The vaccine was designed for the entirely unrelated task of keeping the varicella-zoster virus—the cause of chickenpox (varicella)—from reactivating and causing an agonizing rash.

Anyone who suffered the itchy childhood affliction carries the virus with them for the rest of their lives, largely dormant in their nerve cells. But, if it awakens, it causes a painful, itchy rash—aka shingles (herpes zoster). The rash develops fluid-filled blisters and crusts over, lasting for days to several weeks. For some, it can be intensely painful, and the pain can linger for months or even years after the rash fades. If it occurs near the eye, it can cause permanent vision damage; near the ear, it can cause permanent hearing and balance problems.

Shingles is thought to be triggered by a fault in the immune response that keeps the latent virus in check, often from age-related decline. That's where a vaccine comes in. The first was Zostavax, released by Merck in 2006, which delivers a hefty dose of a live, but weakened, version of the varicella-zoster virus. This spurs the immune system to shore up defenses to prevent the virus from reigniting. Studies found the vaccine cut the risk of shingles by 51 percent.

In 2017, a new vaccine hit the scene: Shingrix, a recombinant, adjuvanted vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline. Instead of a whole, live virus vaccine like Zostavax, Shingrix delivers only a key protein found on the outside of the varicella-zoster virus particle (glycoprotein e) that re-primes the immune system. The shot also contains an adjuvant—an extra ingredient that stimulates the immune system—to ensure a vigorous response. Trials found that the response to Shingrix is indeed vigorous, with the vaccine being 90 to 97 percent effective at preventing shingles in adults age 50 and up.

With its superior efficacy, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its vaccine advisors switched its recommendation in 2018, ditching Zostavax for the more effective Shingrix.

In the meantime, researchers noted that since Zostavax's debut, vaccinated adults seemed to be at lower risk of dementia than their unvaccinated peers. But studies comparing the vaccinated to the unvaccinated raise the question of whether the data is simply pointing to a background difference between the two groups; perhaps people who seek vaccination are generally healthier—a problem called healthy-user bias.

Natural experiments

In the past few years, studies have been putting that concern to rest. Instead of comparing vaccinated versus unvaccinated, researchers took advantage of vaccine rollouts in different countries, including Australia, Canada, and Wales. The vaccine introductions created clear cutoffs for people who were suddenly eligible for the vaccine and people who were permanently ineligible. These "natural" experiments lessened the concern of people being able to self-select their group.

So far, the results of these studies have consistently supported the finding that shingles vaccination is linked to a lower risk of dementia. The study in Wales, for instance, published in Nature in April 2025, looked at outcomes in over 280,000 older people after the September 1, 2013, debut of Zostavax. At the time, people 71 to 78 years old progressively became eligible for the vaccine, while those who were 80 at the start of the rollout were ineligible and never became eligible. Researchers looked at dementia diagnoses over a seven-year follow-up period and found that vaccination among the eligible reduced the relative rate of dementia cases by 20 percent compared with the ineligible group.

That same month, researchers published a study in JAMA that followed over 18,000 older people in Australia after the November 1, 2016, rollout of Zostavax. People 70 to 79 at that date were eligible for a free Zostavax dose. But everyone age 80 or older was permanently ineligible. After a 7.4-year follow-up period, the researchers found that 5.5 percent of the ineligible people were diagnosed with dementia, while only 3.7 percent of those in the eligible category were diagnosed with the condition, a 1.8 percentage point drop.

A third natural study out this month in The Lancet Neurology found a similar 2 percentage-point drop in dementia rates in Canada after the Zostavax rollout there.

Newer vaccine

As Eric Topol, a molecular medicine expert at Scripps Research Institute, noted, if a drug were found to cut the risk of dementia by 20 percent, it would be considered a breakthrough. But data on the shingles vaccine has been met with no such fanfare.

Still, further data suggests that vaccination may be even better than it already appeared—the rosy findings so far may be an underestimate based on the now-outdated Zostavax vaccine. With Shingrix, which is significantly more effective against shingles, the protective effect against dementia may be even larger.

In 2024, researchers reported another natural experiment comparing dementia rates among over 200,000 people in the US vaccinated before or after the switch from Zostavax to Shingrix. The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that compared with Zostavax, vaccination with Shingrix was linked to a 17 percent relative increase in dementia-free time.

A study published in Nature Communications this month by researchers in California went further. They compared dementia rates among nearly 66,000 people who received the Shingrix vaccine and over 260,000 unvaccinated matched controls. The researchers found that the vaccinated group had a 51 percent lower risk of dementia compared to the unvaccinated controls.

Lingering questions

Of course, these consistent findings on dementia prevention raise the question of how exactly the vaccine is preventing cases. Unfortunately, researchers still don't know. However, many have speculated that by fortifying immune responses against the varicella-zoster virus and preventing reactivation, the vaccine reduces overall brain inflammation that could contribute to the development of dementia.

Another lingering question from the data so far is that several studies have found that women see more benefit from the vaccine than men in terms of dementia risk. It's unclear why this would be the case, but researchers have noted that there are some potentially related associations: Women are more likely to develop dementia than men, and they're also more likely to get shingles.

The study published last month, looking at biological aging after shingles vaccination, tried to address some of these questions. The study, published in the Journal of Gerontology and led by Crimmins and Jung Ki Kim, looked at blood and health markers from over 3,800 adults, about half of whom were vaccinated and half not. The researchers used tests to examine markers for inflammation, immune response, cardiovascular health, signs of neurodegenerations, and gene activity. They also created a composite biological aging score for participants.

The results suggest that vaccinated people had lower signs of inflammation and molecular aging as well as better composite aging scores. The data also hinted that vaccinated women had better results on some of the molecular aging testing.

Kim noted that chronic, low-level inflammation can contribute to age-related health conditions, including cardiovascular disease and dementia. "By helping to reduce this background inflammation—possibly by preventing reactivation of the virus that causes shingles, the vaccine may play a role in supporting healthier aging," she suggested.

Of course, additional studies will need to confirm the findings. And if they do, the results could also be even better in follow-up studies. In Kim and Crimmins' study, the participants were vaccinated with Zostavax, the older vaccine, not the newer, more effective Shingrix.

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