WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s promises on affordability in 2024 helped propel him to a second term in the White House.

Since then, Trump says, the problem has been solved: He now calls affordability a hoax perpetrated by Democrats. Yet the high cost of living, especially housing, continues to weigh heavily on voters, and has dragged down the president’s approval ratings.

In a poll conducted this month by the New York Times and Siena University, 58% of respondents said they disapprove of the way the president is handling the economy.

How the economy fares in the coming months will play an outsize role in determining whether the Democrats can build on their electoral success in 2025 and seize control of one or both chambers of Congress.

With housing costs so central to voters’ perceptions about the economy, both parties have put forward proposals in recent weeks targeting affordability. Here is a closer look at their competing plans for expanding housing and reining in costs:

How bad is the affordability crisis?

Nationwide, wages have barely crept up over the last decade — rising by 21.24% between 2014 and 2024, according to the Federal Reserve. Over the same period, rent and home sale prices more than doubled, and healthcare and grocery costs rose 71.5% and 37.35%, respectively, according to the Fed.

National home price-to-income ratios are at an all-time high, and coastal states like California and Hawaii are the most extreme examples.

Housing costs in California are about twice the national average, according to the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, which said prices have increased at “historically rapid rates” in recent years. The median California home sold for $877,285 in 2024, according to the California Assn. of Realtors, compared with about $420,000 nationwide, per Federal Reserve economic data.

California needs to add 180,000 housing units annually to keep up with demand, according to the state Department of Housing. So far, California has fallen short of those goals and has just begun to see success in reducing its homeless population, which sat at 116,000 unsheltered people in 2025.

What do the polls say?

More than two-thirds of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll last month said they felt the economy was getting worse, and 36% expressed approval for the president — the lowest total since his second term began.

The poll found that 47% of U.S. adults now describe current economic conditions as “poor,” up from 40% just a month prior and the highest since Trump took office. Just 21% said economic conditions were either “excellent” or “good,” while 31% described them as “only fair.”

An Associated Press poll found that only 16% of Republicans think Trump has helped “a lot” in fixing cost of living problems.

What have the Democrats proposed?

The party is pushing measures to expand the supply of housing, and cut down on what they call “restrictive” single-family zoning in favor of denser development.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats plan to “supercharge” construction through bills like California Sen. Adam Schiff’s Housing BOOM Act, which he introduced in December.

Schiff said the bill would lower prices by stimulating the development of “millions of affordable homes.” The proposal would expand low-income housing tax credits, set aside funds for rental assistance and homelessness, and provide $10 billion in housing subsidies for “middle-income” workers such as teachers, police officers and firefighters.

The measure has not been heard in committee, and faces long odds in the Republican-controlled body, though Schiff said inaction on the proposal could be used against opponents.

And the Republicans?

A group of 190 House Republicans this month unveiled a successor proposal to the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the sprawling tax and spending plan approved and signed into law by Trump in July.

The Republican Study Committee described the proposal as an affordability package aimed at lowering down payments, enacting mortgage reforms and creating more tax breaks.

Leaders of the group said it would reduce the budget deficit by $1 trillion and could pass with a simple majority.

“This blueprint … locks in President Trump’s deregulatory agenda through the only process Democrats can’t block: reconciliation,” said Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, who chairs the group. “We have 11 months of guaranteed majorities. We’re not wasting a single day.”

Though the proposal has not yet been introduced as legislation, Republicans said it would include a mechanism to revoke funding from blue states over rent control and immigration policy, which they calculated would save $48 billion.

President Trump has endorsed a $200-billion mortgage bond stimulus, which he said would drive down mortgage rates and monthly payments. And the White House, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the two enterprises that back most U.S. mortgages — continues to push the idea of portable and assumable mortgages.

Trump said the move would allow buyers to keep their existing mortgage rate or enable new homeowners to assume a previous owner’s mortgage.

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, has launched a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the Fed’s renovation costs, as Trump bashed him over “his never ending quest to keep interest rates high.”

The president also vowed to revoke federal funding to states over a wealth of issues such as child care and immigration policy.

“This is not about any particular policy that they think is harmful,” California Democratic Rep. Laura Friedman said. “This is about Trump’s always trying to find a way to punish blue states.”

Is there any alignment?

The two parties are cooperating on companion measures in the House and Senate.

The bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act seeks to expand housing supply by easing regulatory barriers. It passed the Senate unanimously and has support from the White House, but House Republicans have balked, and it has yet to receive a floor vote.

A bipartisan proposal — the Housing in the 21st Century Act — was approved by the House Financial Services Committee by a 50-1 vote in December. It also has yet to receive a floor vote.

The bill is similar to its twin in the Senate, with Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) working across the aisle with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles). If approved, it would cut permitting times, support manufactured-housing development and expand financing tools for low-income housing developers.

There was also a recent moment of unusual alignment between the president and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who both promised to crack down on corporate home buying.

What do the experts say?

Housing experts recoiled at GOP proposals to bar housing dollars from sanctuary jurisdictions and cities that impose rent control.

“Any conditioning on HUD funding that sets up rules that explicitly carve out blue cities is going to be really catastrophic for California’s larger urban areas,” said David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

More than 35 cities in California have rent control policies, according to the California Apartment Assn. The state passed its own rent stabilization law in 2019, and lawmakers approved a California sanctuary law in 2017 that prohibits state resources from aiding federal immigration enforcement.

The agenda comes on the heels of a series of HUD spending cuts, including a 30% cap on permanent housing investments and the end of a federal emergency housing voucher program that local homelessness officials estimate would put 14,500 people on the streets.

In Los Angeles County, HUD dollars make up about 28% of homelessness funding.

“It would undermine a lot of the bipartisan efforts that are happening in the House and the Senate to move evidence-backed policy to increase housing supply and stabilize rents and home prices,” Garcia said.

The president’s mortgage directives also prompted skepticism from some experts.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were pressed to get into the riskier parts of the mortgage market back in the housing bubble and that was a part of the problem,” said Eric McGhee, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, Oona Zenda, KFF Health News

Lydia Romero strained to hear her husband’s feeble voice through the phone.

A week earlier, immigration agents had grabbed Julio César Peña from his front yard in Glendale, California. Now, he was in a hospital after suffering a ministroke. He was shackled to the bed by his hand and foot, he told Romero, and agents were in the room, listening to the call. He was scared he would die and wanted his wife there.

“What hospital are you at?” Romero asked.

“I can’t tell you,” he replied.

Viridiana Chabolla, Peña’s attorney, couldn’t get an answer to that question, either. Peña’s deportation officer and the medical contractor at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center refused to tell her. Exasperated, she tried calling a nearby hospital, Providence St. Mary Medical Center.

“They said even if they had a person in ICE custody under their care, they wouldn’t be able to confirm whether he’s there or not, that only ICE can give me the information,” Chabolla said. The hospital confirmed this policy to KFF Health News.

Family members and attorneys for patients hospitalized after being detained by federal immigration officials said they are facing extreme difficulty trying to locate patients, get information about their well-being, and provide them emotional and legal support. They say many hospitals refuse to provide information or allow contact with these patients. Instead, hospitals allow immigration officers to call the shots on how much — if any — contact is allowed, which can deprive patients of their constitutional right to seek legal advice and leave them vulnerable to abuse, attorneys said.

Hospitals say they are trying to protect the safety and privacy of patients, staff, and law enforcement officials, even while hospital employees in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon, cities where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted immigration raids, say it’s made their jobs difficult. Hospitals have used what are sometimes called blackout procedures, which can include registering a patient under a pseudonym, removing their name from the hospital directory, or prohibiting staff from even confirming that a patient is in the hospital.

“We’ve heard incidences of this blackout process being used at multiple hospitals across the state, and it’s very concerning,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, the deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center, an advocacy group.

Some Democratic-led states, including California, Colorado, and Maryland, have enacted legislation that seeks to protect patients from immigration enforcement in hospitals. However, those policies do not address protections for people already in ICE custody.

More detainees hospitalized

Peña is among more than 350,000 people arrested by federal immigration authorities since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. As arrests and detentions have climbed, so too have reports of people taken to hospitals by immigration agents because of illness or injury — due to preexisting conditions or problems stemming from their arrest or detention.

ICE has faced criticism for using aggressive and deadly tactics, as well as for reports of mistreatment and inadequate medical care at its facilities. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told reporters at a Jan. 20 news conference outside a detention center he visited in California City that he spoke to a diabetic woman held there who had not received treatment in two months.

While there are no publicly available statistics on the number of people sick or injured in ICE detention, the agency’s news releases point to 32 people who died in immigration custody in 2025. Six more have died this year.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to a request for information about its policies or Peña’s case.

According to ICE’s guidelines, people in custody should be given access to a telephone, visits from family and friends, and private consultation with legal counsel. The agency can make administrative decisions, including about visitation, when a patient is in the hospital, but should defer to hospital policies on contacting next of kin when a patient is seriously ill, the guidelines state.

Asked in detail about hospital practices related to patients in immigration custody and whether there are best practices that hospitals should follow, Ben Teicher, a spokesperson for the American Hospital Association, declined to comment.

David Simon, a spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, said that “there are times when hospitals will — at the request of law enforcement — maintain confidentiality of patients’ names and other identifying characteristics.”

Although policies vary, members of the public can typically call a hospital and ask for a patient by name to find out whether they’re there, and often be transferred to the patient’s room, said William Weber, an emergency physician in Minneapolis and medical director for the Medical Justice Alliance, which advocates for the medical needs of people in law enforcement custody. Family members and others authorized by the patient can visit. And medical staff routinely call relatives to let them know a loved one is in the hospital, or to ask for information that could help with their care.

But when a patient is in law enforcement custody, hospitals frequently agree to restrict this kind of information sharing and access, Weber said. The rationale is that these measures prevent unauthorized outsiders from threatening the patient or law enforcement personnel, given that hospitals lack the security infrastructure of a prison or detention center. High-profile patients such as celebrities sometimes also request this type of protection.

Several attorneys and health care providers questioned the need for such restrictions. Immigration detention is civil, not criminal, detention. The Trump administration says it’s focused on arresting and deporting criminals, yet most of those arrested have no criminal conviction, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and several news outlets.

Taken outside his home

According to Peña’s wife, Romero, he has no criminal record. Peña came to the United States from Mexico in sixth grade and has an adult son in the U.S. military. The 43-year-old has terminal kidney disease and survived a heart attack in November. He has trouble walking and is partially blind, his wife said. He was detained Dec. 8 while resting outside after coming home from dialysis treatment.

Initially, Romero was able to find her husband through the ICE Online Detainee Locator System. She visited him at a temporary holding facility in downtown Los Angeles, bringing him his medicines and a sweater. She then saw he’d been moved to the Adelanto detention center. But the locator did not show where he was after he was hospitalized.

When she and other relatives drove to the detention facility to find him, they were turned away, she said. Romero received occasional calls from her husband in the hospital but said they were less than 10 minutes long and took place under ICE surveillance. She wanted to know where he was so she could be at the hospital to hold his hand, make sure he was well cared for, and encourage him to stay strong, she said.

Shackling him and preventing him from seeing his family was unfair and unnecessary, she said.

“He’s weak,” Romero said. “It’s not like he’s going to run away.”

ICE guidelines say contact and visits from family and friends should be allowed “within security and operational constraints.” Detainees have a constitutional right to speak confidentially with an attorney. Weber said immigration authorities should tell attorneys where their clients are and allow them to talk in person or use an unmonitored phone line.

Hospitals, though, fall into a gray area on enforcing these rights, since they are primarily focused on treating medical needs, Weber said. Still, he added, hospitals should ensure their policies align with the law.

Family denied access

Numerous immigration attorneys have spent weeks trying to locate clients detained by ICE, with their efforts sometimes thwarted by hospitals.

Nicolas Thompson-Lleras, a Los Angeles attorney who counsels immigrants facing deportation, said two of his clients were registered under aliases at different hospitals in Los Angeles County last year. Initially, the hospitals denied the clients were there and refused to let Thompson-Lleras meet with them, he said. Family members were also denied access, he said.

One of his clients was Bayron Rovidio Marin, a car wash worker injured during a raid in August. Immigration agents surveilled him for over a month at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a county-run facility, without charging him.

In November, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to curb the use of blackout policies for patients under civil immigration custody at county-run hospitals. In a statement, Arun Patel, the chief patient safety and clinical risk management officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said the policies are designed to reduce safety risks for patients, doctors, nurses, and custody officers.

“In some situations, there may be concerns about threats to the patient, attempts to interfere with medical care, unauthorized visitors, or the introduction of contraband,” Patel said. “Our goal is not to restrict care but to allow care to happen safely and without disruption.”

Leaving patients vulnerable

Thompson-Lleras said he’s concerned that hospitals are cooperating with federal immigration authorities at the expense of patients and their families and leaving patients vulnerable to abuse.

“It allows people to be treated suboptimally,” Thompson-Lleras said. “It allows people to be treated on abbreviated timelines, without supervision, without family intervention or advocacy. These people are alone, disoriented, being interrogated, at least in Bayron’s case, under pain and influence of medication.”

Such incidents are alarming to hospital workers. In Los Angeles, two health care professionals who asked not to be identified by KFF Health News, out of concern for their livelihoods, said that ICE and hospital administrators, at public and private hospitals, frequently block staff from contacting family members for people in custody, even to find out about their health conditions or what medications they’re on. That violates medical ethics, they said.

Blackout procedures are another concern.

“They help facilitate, whether intentionally or not, the disappearance of patients,” said one worker, a physician for the county’s Department of Health Services and part of a coalition of concerned health workers from across the region.

At Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, nurses publicly expressed outrage over what they saw as hospital cooperation with ICE and the flouting of patient rights. Legacy Health has sent a cease and desist letter to the nurses’ union, accusing it of making “false or misleading statements.”

“I was really disgusted,” said Blaire Glennon, a nurse who quit her job at the hospital in December. She said numerous patients were brought to the hospital by ICE with serious injuries they sustained while being detained. “I felt like Legacy was doing massive human rights violations.”

Handcuffed while unconscious

Two days before Christmas, Chabolla, Peña’s attorney, received a call from ICE with the answer she and Romero had been waiting for. Peña was at Victor Valley Global Medical Center, about 10 miles from Adelanto, and about to be released.

Excited, Romero and her family made the two-hour-plus drive from Glendale to the hospital to take him home.

When they got there, they found Peña intubated and unconscious, his arm and leg still handcuffed to the hospital bed. He’d had a severe seizure on Dec. 20, but no one had told his family or legal team, his attorney said.

Tim Lineberger, a spokesperson for Victor Valley Global Medical Center’s parent company, KPC Health, said he could not comment on specific patient cases, because of privacy protections. He said the hospital’s policies on patient information disclosure comply with state and federal law.

Peña was finally cleared to go home on Jan. 5. No court date has been set, and his family is filing a petition to adjust his legal status based on his son’s military service. For now, he still faces deportation proceedings.

©2026 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Ever since Larry Wilkewitz retired more than 20 years ago from a wood products company, he’s had a commercial Medicare Advantage plan from the insurer Humana.

But two years ago, he heard about Peak Health, a new Advantage plan started by the West Virginia University Health System, where his doctors practice. It was cheaper and offered more personal attention, plus extras such as an allowance for over-the-counter pharmacy items. Those benefits are more important than ever, he said, as he’s treated for cancer.

“I decided to give it a shot,” said Wilkewitz, 79. “If I didn’t like it, I could go back to Humana or whatever after a year.”

He’s sticking with Peak Health. Members of Medicare Advantage plans, a privately run alternative to the government’s Medicare program, can change plans through the end of March.

Now entering its third year, Peak Health has tripled its enrollment since last year, to “north of 10,000,” said Amos Ross, its president. It expanded from 20 counties to 49, he said, and moved into parts of western Pennsylvania for the first time.

Although hospital-owned plans are only a sliver of the Medicare Advantage market, their enrollment continues to grow, reflecting the overall increase in Advantage members. Of the 62.8 million Medicare beneficiaries eligible to join Advantage plans, 54% signed up last year, according to KFF, the health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. While the number of Advantage plans owned by hospital systems is relatively stable, Mass General Brigham in Boston and others are expanding their service areas and types of plan offerings.

Health systems have dabbled in the insurance business for years, but it’s not for everyone. MedStar Health, serving the greater Washington, D.C., area, said it closed its Medicare Advantage plan at the end of 2018, citing financial losses.

“It’s a ton of work,” said Ross, who spent more than a decade in the commercial health insurance industry.

Like any other health insurer, hospitals entering the business need a back-office infrastructure to enroll patients, sign up providers, fill prescriptions, process claims, hire staff, and — most importantly — assure state regulators they have a reserve of money to pay claims. Once they get a state insurance license, they need approval from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to sell Medicare Advantage policies. Some systems affiliate with or create an insurance subsidiary, and others do most of the job themselves.

Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit health system by revenue, started an experimental Medicare plan in 1981 and now has nearly 2 million people enrolled in dozens of Advantage plans in eight states and the District of Columbia. The Justice Department announced Jan. 14 that KP had agreed to pay $556 million to settle accusations that its Advantage plans fraudulently billed the government for about $1 billion over a nine-year period.

Last year, UCLA Health introduced two Medicare Advantage plans in Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States. Other new hospital-owned plans have cropped up in less profitable rural areas.

“These are communities that have been very hard for insurers to move into,” said Molly Smith, group vice president for public policy at the American Hospital Association.

But Advantage plans offered by hospitals have a familiar, trusted name. They don’t have to move into town, because their owners — the hospitals — never left.

Bad Breakups

Medicare Advantage plans usually restrict their members to a network of doctors, hospitals, and other clinicians that have contracts with the plans to serve them. But if hospitals and plans can’t agree to renew those contracts, or when disputes flare up — often spurred by payment delays, denials, or burdensome prior authorization rules — the health care providers can drop out.

These breakups, plus planned terminations and service area cuts, forced more than 3.7 million Medicare Advantage enrollees to make a tough choice last year: find new insurance for 2026 that their doctors accept or, if possible, keep their plan but find new doctors.

About 1 million of these stranded patients had coverage from UnitedHealthcare, the country’s largest health insurer. In a July earnings update for financial analysts, chief financial officer John Rex blamed the company’s retreat on hospitals, where “most encounters are intensifying in services and costing more.”

The turbulence in the commercial insurance market has upset patients as well as their providers. Sometimes contract disputes have been fought out in the open, with anxious patients in the middle receiving warnings from each side blaming the other for the imminent end to coverage.

When Fred Neary, 88, learned his doctors in the Baylor Scott & White Health system in central and northern Texas would be leaving his Medicare Advantage plan, he was afraid the same thing could happen again if he joined a plan from another commercial insurer. Then he discovered that the 53-hospital system had its own Medicare Advantage plan. He enrolled in 2025 and is keeping the plan this year.

“It was very important to me that I would never have to worry about switching over to another plan because they would not accept my Baylor Scott & White doctors,” he said.

Eugene Rich, a senior fellow at Mathematica, a health policy research group, said hospital systems’ Medicare Advantage plans offer “a lot of stability for patients.”

“You’re not suddenly going to discover that your primary care physician or your cardiologist are no longer in the plan,” he said.

A Health Affairs study that Rich co-authored in July found that enrollment in Advantage plans owned by hospital systems grew faster than traditional Medicare enrollment for the first time in 2023, though not as rapidly as the overall rise in sign-ups for all Advantage plans.

The massive UCLA Health system introduced its two Medicare Advantage plans in Los Angeles County in January 2025, even though patients already had a list of more than 70 Advantage plans to choose from. Before rolling out the plan, the University of California Board of Regents discussed its merits at a November 2024 meeting. The meeting minutes offer rare insight into a conversation that private hospital systems would usually hold behind closed doors.

“As increasing numbers of Medicare-enrolled patients turn to new Medicare Advantage plans, UC Health’s experience with these new plans has not been good, either for patients or providers,” the minutes read, summarizing comments by David Rubin, executive vice president of UC Health.

The minutes also describe comments from Jonathon Arrington, CFO of UCLA Health. “Over the years, in order to care for Medicare Advantage patients, UCLA has entered numerous contracts with other payers, and these contracts have generally not worked out well,” the minutes read. “Every two or three years, UCLA has found itself terminating a contract and signing a new one. Patients have remained loyal to UCLA, some going through three iterations of cancelled contracts in order to remain with UCLA Health.”

Costs to Taxpayers

CMS pays Advantage plans a monthly fixed amount to care for each enrollee based on the member’s health condition and location. In 2024, the federal government paid Advantage plans an estimated $494 billion to care for patients, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which monitors the program for Congress.

The commission said this month that it projects insurers in 2026 will be paid 14%, or about $76 billion, more than it would have cost government-run Medicare to care for similar patients.

Many Democratic lawmakers have criticized overpayments to Medicare Advantage insurers, though the program has bipartisan congressional support because of its increasing popularity with Medicare beneficiaries, who are often attracted by dental care and other coverage unavailable through traditional Medicare.

Whenever Congress threatens cuts, insurers claim these generous federal payments are essential to keep Medicare Advantage plans afloat. UCLA Health’s Advantage plans will need at least 15,000 members to be financially sustainable, according to the meeting minutes. CMS data indicates that 7,337 patients signed up in 2025.

A study published in JAMA Surgery in August compared patients in commercial Medicare Advantage who had major surgery with those covered by Medicare Advantage plans owned by their hospital. The latter group had fewer complications, said co-author Thomas Tsai, an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Smith, of the American Hospital Association, isn’t surprised. When insurers and hospitals are not on opposite sides, she said, care delivery can be smoother. “There’s more flexibility to manage premium dollars to cover services that maybe wouldn’t otherwise be covered,” Smith said.

But Tsai warns seniors that hospital-owned Medicare Advantage plans operate under the same rules as those run by commercial health insurance companies. He said patients should consider whether the extra benefits of Advantage plans “are worth the trade-off of potentially narrow provider networks and more utilization management than they would get from traditional Medicare.”

In Texas, Neary hopes the closer relationship between his doctors and his insurance plan means there’s less of a chance that bills for his medical care will be kicked back.

“I don’t think I would run into a situation where they would not provide coverage if one of their own doctors recommended something,” he said.

©2026 Kaiser Health News. Visit khn.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. ©2026 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Space-themed Lego models — rotating ride vehicles that are customized by passengers and a next-generation animatronic named Biff Dipper — are prominent parts of the indoor coaster.

Near the entrance is a brick-by-brick and way-bigger-than-life model of Lego set 918, a spaceship introduced in 1979.

It’s “a classic ship, but it’s got some extra flourishes that you only really find in the Legoland park,” says Rosie Brailsford, senior project director for Merlin Magic Making, the creative arm of Merlin Entertainments.

About four years ago, Brailsford was instructed to work with Lego Group to develop an attraction that would work on a global platform, she says.

“They have a line, kind of from the ’70s and various different iterations of that, which is what you will find in Lego Galaxy,” she says. “So, it’s kind of a merge of past and present and opportunity for future iterations as well.”

Brailsford guided the Orlando Sentinel on an exclusive walk-through — no riding yet — of the attraction, which opens to the public Feb. 27.

What’s outside

The new coaster is on the site of the Flying School ride that was closed in August 2023. The exterior queue looks down at the park’s Driving School attraction. There are two entrances, including one from Legoland’s water park.

The spaceship is surrounded by Lego characters, including photo opportunities. The Alien Tourist figure — outfitted in a floral shirt, red shorts, aqua hat and big old-school camera — takes snaps of a green and antennaed alien family. A Duplo play area dubbed Tot Spot and designed for the youngest visitors, includes a Lego Shuttle. (A shade structure is being added.) Nearby are large Lego space flowers and a robot dog.

Early on, potential riders meet Capt. Olivia on screen.

“She’s welcoming you to the Lego Galaxy, telling you about a little snippet of the mission that you’re going to go on,” Brailsford says.

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A large screen televises a 10-minute loop of details about what’s coming up.

“There are little moments of backstory here, so that if you are milling around in the land, you’ve already started to absorb in your subconscious what’s going on,” Brailsford says.

What’s going on? In the Galacticoaster universe, they are bracing for “the asteroid of probable destruction.”

What’s inside

The front lobby features a large blocky version of the Lego Galaxy logo, which is a bit interplanetary and a bit NASA meatball. Below it are actual assembled Lego models on display, some of which are vintage and difficult to find, Brailsford says.

A series of halls and customized posters lead to a big Briefing Room with animatronic Biff Dipper, the chief engineer. He’s about 4 feet tall and standing on an elevated platform. His arms, legs and head move, and his face is animated below the visor of his space helmet. He greets future riders — there can be as many as 80 people in the room — and explains the goal. It’s us versus the asteroid.

“Most of our minifigures in our Legoland are static, smooth minifigures. … Biff is essentially next generation of how we want to do that on a show basis,” Brailsford says. They partnered with Engineered Arts of Cornwall, United Kingdom, to create this figure, which sports 45 facial animations, Legoland says.

Merlin is “working really closely with Lego to make sure all of that motion that they do is true to how a minifigure would move, and we’re not just making them do random things,” she says.

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Other on-screen characters give ride instructions and advance the storyline of how to deal with that asteroid. Plans A and B (one involving a giant net) were flops, and they need help with Plan C. It involves “separator swarms.”

The room includes interesting visuals such as a blueprint for vehicle options and a sign that reads “Interested in time travel? Meet here last Monday, 2 p.m.”

From here, Biff sends riders into a room where ride vehicle options are selected. Riders pick design features for wings, tail, nose and such. The choices range from practical to fanciful — add-ons such as hamburger wings and disco balls. The console allows 15 seconds for each selection, and then the total look is uploaded onto an RFID-enabled bracelet. There are more than 600 possible combinations.

The idea, we’re told, is to make the spacecraft “so awesome that it grabs the separators’ attention like nothing else.” Also, don’t let them catch you.

Next stop: the Galacticoaster loading bay.

The ride stuff

Passengers navigate a moving sidewalk to the in-real-life vehicles, which seat four passengers across and have lap bars that lower from overhead.

The ride moves into an airlock space, and there “you’ll see yourself in your awesome creation,” Brailsford says. You’ll linger for about 10 seconds, “then you will launch, up to 40 miles an hour, off on your adventure,” she says.

“And you have your kind of save-the-day moment on the ride.”

The Sentinel walk-through did not include a ride-through. Brailsford said the experience is smooth and the launch makes it punchy, probably more intense than the Dragon coaster, its Legoland Florida sister attraction. The height requirement is 36 inches for riders accompanied by an adult. Unaccompanied visitors must be at least 48 inches tall.

“It’s not like terrifying or anything, but being indoors, we do feel like they’ll get a little bit more of that thrill factor as well,” she says. “Because it’s dark, you don’t necessarily quite know where you’re going.”

The spinning is programmed, she said. “It’s not like a free spinning.”

Legoland’s website says to expect “Special effects, synchronized lighting and surprise appearances from classic Lego Space characters.”

Ride time is about 1 minute and 30 seconds, and, per theme park tradition, the exit is through the gift shop (official name: Orbital Outpost).

Another Galacticoaster is under construction that’s set to open March 6 at Legoland California, and, in theory, there could be more. There are also Legoland theme parks in New York, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Malaysia, Dubai, Japan, South Korea and China.

“We have, like, a base story and land concept that we can adjust and tweak if we were to roll a version of it out,” Brailsford says. “It might not necessarily be this ride. It might be a different ride with another story from the world.”

Email me at dbevil@orlandosentinel.com. BlueSky: @themeparksdb. Threads account: @dbevil. X account: @themeparks. Subscribe to the Theme Park Rangers newsletter at orlandosentinel.com/newsletters.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Savannah Guthrie told the potential kidnappers of her mother Nancy Guthrie on Saturday that the family is prepared to pay for her safe return, as the frantic search for the 84-year-old Arizona resident has entered a seventh day.

“We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her,” she said in a video posted on social media, flanked by her siblings. “This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay.”

The “Today” show host was referencing a message that was sent to the Tucson-based television station KOLD on Friday afternoon, according to Kevin Smith, a spokesperson for the FBI office in Phoenix.

KOLD said it received an email related to the Guthrie case on social media that day but declined to share specific details about its contents as the FBI conducted its review.

The station was one of multiple press outlets that received alleged ransom letters during the week. At least one letter made monetary demands and established Thursday evening and the following Monday evening as deadlines.

In a news conference Thursday, law enforcement officials declined to affirm that the letters were credible but said all tips were being investigated seriously. They also said one letter referenced Nancy Guthrie’s Apple watch and a specific feature of her property.

The video released Saturday was the third this week that pleaded with potential kidnappers.

No suspects identified

Investigators think Nancy Guthrie was taken against her will from her home just outside Tucson last weekend. DNA tests showed blood on Guthrie’s front porch was a match to her, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos has said. Authorities have not identified any suspects or ruled anyone out.

The sheriff said Friday that he was frustrated that a camera at Nancy Guthrie’s home was not able to capture images of anyone the day she went missing.

Investigators have found that the home’s doorbell camera was disconnected early Sunday and that software data recorded movement at the home minutes later. But Nancy Guthrie did not have an active subscription, so none of the images were able to be recovered.

“It is concerning, it’s actually almost disappointing, because you’ve got your hopes up,” Nanos told The Associated Press in an interview. “OK, they got an image. ‘Well, we do, but we don’t.’”

President Donald Trump, speaking on Air Force One on Friday, said the investigation was going “very well.”

“We have some clues that I think are very strong,” Trump said, while en route to his Florida estate. “We have some things that may be coming out reasonably soon.”

Investigators return to scene

They were back in Nancy Guthrie’s neighborhood on Friday.

The sheriff’s department posted on social media to say access was restricted to the road in front of the home to give investigators space. Journalists staked out there were directed to move.

The Catalina Foothills Association, a neighborhood group, told residents in a letter that authorities were resuming searches in the area immediately.

“I know we all stand together in our collective disbelief and sadness and greatly appreciate your willingness to speak with law enforcement, share camera images and allow searches of your properties,” the association president said in the letter.

The sheriff said Thursday that investigators have not given up on trying to retrieve camera recordings.

“I wish technology was as easy as we believe it is, that here’s a picture, here’s your bad guy. But it’s not,” Nanos told the AP. “There are pieces of information that come to us from these tech groups that say ‘this is what we have and we can’t get anymore.’”

The sheriff also said he had no new information about the note to the TV station or other purported ransom letters sent to some media outlets, saying the FBI is handling that side of the investigation.

Meanwhile concern about Nancy Guthrie’s health condition has grown, because authorities say she needs vital daily medicine. She is said to have a pacemaker and have dealt with high blood pressure and heart issues, according to sheriff’s dispatcher audio on broadcastify.com.

“Her conditions, I would imagine, are worsening day by day,” Nanos said. “She requires medication. And I have no way of knowing whether they’re getting that medication to her.”

The kidnapping has captured the attention of Americans, including Trump, who said he was directing federal authorities to help investigate.

___ Weber reported from Los Angeles.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — For days, Luis Ramirez had an uneasy feeling about the men dressed as utility workers he’d seen outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis.

They wore high-visibility vests and spotless white hard hats, he noticed, even while parked in their vehicle. His search for the Wisconsin-based electrician advertised on the car’s doors returned no results.

On Tuesday, when their Nissan returned to the lot outside his restaurant, Ramirez, 31, filmed his confrontation with the two men, who hide their faces as he approaches and appear to be wearing heavy tactical gear beneath their yellow vests.

“This is what our taxpayer money goes to: renting these vehicles with fake tags to come sit here and watch my business,” Ramirez shouts in the video.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to inquiries about whether the men were federal immigration officers. But encounters like Ramirez’s have become increasingly common.

As the sweeping immigration crackdown in Minnesota continues, legal observers and officials say they have received a growing number of reports of federal agents impersonating construction workers, delivery drivers and in some cases anti-ICE activists.

Not all of those incidents have been verified, but they have heightened fears in a state already on edge, adding to legal groups’ concerns about the Trump administration’s dramatic reshaping of immigration enforcement tactics nationwide.

“If you have people afraid that the electrical worker outside their house might be ICE, you’re inviting public distrust and confusion on a much more dangerous level,” said Naureen Shah, the director of immigration advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is what you do if you’re trying to control a populace, not trying to do routine, professional law enforcement.”

A ‘more extreme degree’ of deception

In the past, immigration authorities have sometimes used disguises and other deceptions, which they call ruses, to gain entry into homes without a warrant.

The tactics became more common during President Donald Trump’s first term, attorneys said, prompting an ACLU lawsuit accusing immigration agents of violating the U.S. Constitution by posing as local law enforcement during home raids. A recent settlement restricted the practice in Los Angeles. But ICE deceptions remain legal elsewhere in the country.

Still, the undercover operations reported in Minnesota would appear to be a “more extreme degree than we’ve seen in the past,” said Shah, in part because they seem to be happening in plain sight.

Where past ruses were aimed at deceiving immigration targets, the current tactics may also be a response to the Minnesota’s sprawling networks of citizen observers that have sought to call attention to federal agents before they make arrests.

At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, the city’s central hub of ICE activity, activists told The Associated Press they had seen agents leaving in vehicles with stuffed animals on their dashboards or Mexican flag decals on their bumpers. Pickups with lumber or tools in their beds were also frequently spotted.

In recent weeks, federal agents have repeatedly shown up to construction sites dressed as workers, according to Jose Alvillar, a lead organizer for the local immigrant rights group, Unidos MN.

“We’ve seen an increase in the cowboy tactics,” he said, though he noted the raids had not resulted in arrests. “Construction workers are good at identifying who is a real construction worker and who is dressing up as one.”

Using vintage plates

Since the start of the operation in Minnesota, local officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, have said ICE agents had been seen swapping license plates or using bogus ones, a violation of state law.

Candice Metrailer, an antiques dealer in south Minneapolis, believes she witnessed such an attempt firsthand.

On Jan. 13, she received a call from a man who identified himself as a collector, asking if her store sold license plates. She said it did. A few minutes later, two men in street clothes entered the shop and began looking through her collection of vintage plates.

“One of them says, ‘Hey, do you have any recent ones?’” Metrailer recalled. “Immediately, an alarm bell went off in my head.”

Metrailer stepped outside while the men continued browsing. A few doors down from the shop, she saw an idling Ford Explorer with blacked out windows. She memorized its license plate, then quickly plugged it into a crowdsourced database used by local activists to track vehicles linked to immigration enforcement.

The database shows an identical Ford with the same plates had been photographed leaving the Whipple building seven times and reported at the scene of an immigration arrest weeks earlier.

When one of the men approached the register holding a white Minnesota plate, Metrailer said she told him that the store had a new policy against selling the items.

Metrailer said she had reported the incident to Minnesota’s attorney general. A spokesperson for DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

A response to obstruction

Supporters of the immigration crackdown say the volunteer army of ICE-tracking activists in Minneapolis has forced federal agents to adopt new methods of avoiding detection.

“Of course agents are adapting their tactics so that they’re a step ahead,” said Scott Mechkowski, former deputy director of ICE enforcement and operations in New York City. “We’ve never seen this level of obstruction and interference.”

In nearly three decades in immigration enforcement, Mechkowski said he also hadn’t seen ICE agent disguising themselves as uniformed workers in the course of making arrests.

Earlier this summer, a spokesperson for DHS confirmed a man wearing a high-visibility construction vest was an ICE agent conducting surveillance. In Oregon, a natural gas company published guidance last month on how customers could identify their employees after reports of federal impersonators.

In the days since his encounter, Ramirez, the restaurant worker, said he has been on high alert for undercover agents. He recently stopped a locksmith who he feared might be a federal agent, before quickly realizing he was a local resident.

“Everybody is on edge about these guys, man,” Ramirez said. “It feels like they’re everywhere.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump wants to keep home prices high, bypassing calls to ramp up construction so people can afford what has been a ticket to the middle class.

Trump has instead argued for protecting existing owners who have watched the values of their homes climb. It’s a position that flies in the face of what many economists, the real estate industry, local officials and apartment dwellers say is needed to fix a big chunk of America’s affordability problem.

“I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes, and they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump told his Cabinet on Jan. 29.

That approach could bolster the Republican president’s standing with older voters, a group that over time has been more likely to vote in midterm elections. Those races in November will determine whether Trump’s party can retain control of the House and Senate.

“You have a lot of people that have become wealthy in the last year because their house value has gone up,” Trump said. “And you know, when you get the housing — when you make it too easy and too cheap to buy houses — those values come down.”

But by catering to older baby boomers on housing, Trump risks alienating the younger voters who expanded his coalition in 2024 and helped him win a second term, and he could wade into a “generational war” in the midterms, said Brent Buchanan, whose polling firm Cygnal advises Republicans.

“The under-40 group is the most important right now — they are the ones who put Trump in the White House,” Buchanan said. “Their desire to show up in an election or not is going to make the difference in this election. If they feel that Donald Trump is taking care of the boomers at their expense, that is going to hurt Republicans.”

The logic in appealing to older voters

In the 2024 presidential election, 81% of Trump’s voters were homeowners, according to AP VoteCast data. This means many of his supporters already have mortgages with low rates or own their homes outright, possibly blunting the importance of housing as an issue.

Older voters tend to show up to vote more than do younger people, said Oscar Pocasangre, a senior data analyst at liberal think tank New America who has studied the age divide in U.S. politics. “However, appealing to older voters may prove to be a misguided policy if what’s needed to win is to expand the voting base,” Pocasangre said.

Before the 2026 elections, voters have consistently rated affordability as a top concern, and that is especially true for younger voters with regard to housing.

Booker Lightman, 30, a software engineer in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, who identifies politically as a libertarian Republican, said the shortage of housing has been a leading problem in his state.

Lightman just closed on a home last month, and while he and his wife, Alice, were able to manage the cost, he said that the lack of construction is pushing people out of Colorado. “There’s just not enough housing supply,” he said.

Shay Hata, a real estate agent in the Chicago and Denver areas, said she handles about 100 to 150 transactions a year. But she sees the potential for a lot more. “We have a lack of inventory to the point where most properties, particularly in the suburbs, are getting between five and 20 offers,” she said, describing what she sees in the Chicago area.

New construction could help more people afford homes because in some cases, buyers qualify for discounted mortgage rates from the builders’ preferred lenders, Hata said. She called the current situation “very discouraging for buyers because they’re getting priced out of the market.”

But pending construction has fallen under Trump. Permits to build single-family homes have plunged 9.4% over the past 12 months in October, the most recent month available, to an annual rate of 876,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Trump’s other ideas to help people buy houses

Trump has not always been against increasing housing supply.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s team said he would create tax breaks for homebuyers, trim regulations on construction, open up federal land for housing developments and make monthly payments more manageable by cutting mortgage rates. Advisers also claimed that housing stock would open up because of Trump’s push for mass deportations of people who were in the United States illegally.

As recently as October, Trump urged builders to ramp up construction. “They’re sitting on 2 Million empty lots, A RECORD. I’m asking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get Big Homebuilders going and, by so doing, help restore the American Dream!” Trump posted on social media, referring to the government-backed lenders.

But more recently, he has been unequivocal on not wanting to pursue policies that would boost supply and lower prices.

In office, Trump has so far focused his housing policy on lobbying the Federal Reserve to cut its benchmark interest rates. He believes that would make mortgages more affordable, although critics say it could spur higher inflation. Trump announced that the two mortgage companies, which are under government conservatorship, would buy at least $200 billion in home loan securities in a bid to reduce rates.

Trump also wants Congress to ban large financial institutions from buying homes. But he has rejected suggestions for expanding rules to let buyers use 401(k) retirement accounts for down payments, telling reporters that he did not want people to take their money out of the stock market because it was doing so well.

There are signs that lawmakers in both parties see the benefits of taking steps to add houses before this year’s elections. There are efforts in the Senate and House to jump-start construction through the use of incentives to change zoning restrictions, among other policies.

One of the underlying challenges on affordability is that home prices have been generally rising faster than incomes for several years.

This makes it harder to save for down payments or upgrade to a nicer home. It also means that the places where people live increasingly double as their key financial asset, one that leaves many families looking moneyed on paper even if they are struggling with monthly bills.

There is another risk for Trump. If the economy grows this year, as he has promised, that could push up demand for houses — as well as their prices — making the affordability problem more pronounced, said Edward Pinto, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.

Pinto said construction of single-family homes would have to rise by 50% to 100% during the next three years for average home price gains to be flat — a sign, he said, that Trump’s fears about falling home prices were probably unwarranted.

“It’s very hard to crater home prices,” Pinto said.

Colorado’s labor force shrank 0.6% year-over-year last month, a monthly decline matching the pace seen during the Great Recession. After flatlining in August, the labor force, those working or looking for work, has been retreating since September. For the year, 20,280 people vanished from its ranks, mostly in the fourth quarter.

That has never happened outside a severe recession or economic shock like the COVID-19 pandemic.

From April 2020 to March 2021, workers removed themselves from the labor force in record numbers. Giving up a paycheck to avoid landing on a respirator seemed like a fair trade-off to many older workers during the pandemic. The defections were unprecedented, triggering a 3.4% drop in the labor force in July 2020. But they were short-lived. People returned once restrictions eased and vaccines became available.

Another 12-month stretch of a draining labor pool occurred from September 2009 to August 2010 during the housing crash and Great Recession. People couldn’t easily replace the jobs they lost. Many gave up trying. That contributed to annual declines of 0.7% and 0.6% during the worst months.

The mother of all Colorado labor force deflations happened from July 1985 to June 1989. It started during a severe oil and gas downturn, which was followed by a lending crisis, which was followed by a collapse in commercial real estate and home values. It was such an ugly period economically that companies and people packed their bags and left the state in droves.

The year-over-year drops reached a high of 0.9% and 0.8% in 1989, but most months ran lower, with some positive months mixed in. But all those Colorado natives kept graduating from high school and college. The unemployment rose to as high as 8.4% in December 1985 and January 1986. The workers who stayed gutted it out. Better times returned in the 1990s.

There is no health crisis keeping people home, no recession triggering major layoffs and no collapse in a pillar of the state economy. So what might be driving the decline in the number of workers?

The easy out is to blame statistical noise. The household survey — used to determine the size of the labor force and the unemployment rate — is subject to revisions. The federal government shutdown in October might have mucked things up. Below-average snowfalls might have reduced demand for resort workers. The list goes on.

But the decline is large and accelerating, and it started before the shutdown. It likely reflects a real shift, said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“I think the current softening could be a mixture of both the market (demographics) and policy,” he said.

One demographic piece involves more workers retiring. The mirror doesn’t lie. Colorado’s population is getting older. The long-predicted silver tsunami may finally be sucking workers out of the labor pool. But aging is a slow-moving trend, not akin to an earthquake.

Migration is a more plausible force behind what is happening. Colorado lost 12,100 more people than it gained from other states in the year through June 30, according to a population update Tuesday from the U.S. Census Bureau.

That trend may have accelerated in the second half of the year based on what is happening to the labor force. Colorado’s net domestic migration is down sharply since the pandemic. Blame higher housing costs and fewer job opportunities. More longtime residents appear to be picking up and moving out. Last year, Colorado became one of five states with significantly more outbound than inbound moves, according to a survey by United Van Lines.

From the reopening of the economy following the pandemic through 2024, Colorado saw big increases in the number of people arriving from other countries. Migration to Colorado historically has been 80% domestic and 20% international. That ratio flipped this decade, according to the State Demography Office.

In the 12 months through June 30, the state’s net international migration of 15,356 was enough to offset the loss of 12,100 domestically last year. The combined number was weak, but it wasn’t negative. For the last several years, it appears international migration helped mask the weakness the state was facing on the domestic side.

And the mask has been removed. This is where policy shock comes into play.

Voters, upset with the immigration surge and inflation, elected Donald Trump to office. His administration has moved quickly to shut down flows across the border and remove illegal immigrants. The administration has also tightened down on legal channels of immigration, requiring more vetting and in-person interviews, delaying application processing and even reversing earlier green card approvals.

“The slowdown in U.S. population growth is largely due to a historic decline in net international migration, which dropped from 2.7 million to 1.3 million in the period from July 2024 through June 2025,” said Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for Estimates and Projections at the Census Bureau, in a news release Tuesday. “With births and deaths remaining relatively stable compared to the prior year, the sharp decline in net international migration is the main reason for the slower growth rate we see today.”

Lewandowski notes that the labor force shrank in a dozen states in December, and 19 states had growth rates below 1%. Wyoming led the country on the downside with a 2.5% decline. Vermont and Wisconsin also dropped more than 2%. Illinois, Virginia and Connecticut had declines above 1%.

“I certainly think the lack of international migration has to be playing a role as we don’t have replacements,” said Richard Wobbekind, a senior economist with the Business Research Division, of the shrinking labor force.

More older workers are retiring each year. Years of a subdued birth rate mean fewer young adults are entering the workforce. Colorado has become less attractive to young adults living in other states, and with each passing year, there are fewer of them to recruit. Now immigration has been throttled.

That may explain why the state’s unemployment rate has managed to drop significantly despite fairly weak job growth. It fell from 4.6% a year ago to 3.8%. Normally, a falling unemployment rate is associated with a strong job market. But job gains are a little over a third of their historical pace since 1990. The last two years have been the weakest outside of a recession.

Over the past year, nonfarm payrolls increased by 23,000, with 18,900 of those jobs coming in the private sector and governments adding 4,100 jobs, according to the December employment report from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

That is only a little better than the 22,100 jobs added in 2024. The pace of hiring, at 0.8%, is one of the slowest outside the last three recessions, but it was double the U.S. rate of 0.4%.

Job growth was enough to push the number of nonfarm workers in the state above 3 million for the first time, according to the report. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that as of June 30, the state’s population had crossed 6 million people. One out of every two residents in the state is collecting a paycheck from an employer who pays premiums for unemployment insurance.

A little over two-thirds of residents over age 16 in Colorado, 66.9% to be precise, described themselves as working or actively looking for work in December. That ratio, called the state’s labor force participation rate, has been falling for two years and is now at its lowest level since October 2020. It remains one of the highest rates in the country.

Wobbekind said he doesn’t think the drop in participation explains the shrinkage of the workforce. People aren’t dropping out like they tend to do during a downturn.

Instead, the big drop in migration, both domestic and international, might be influencing the share of the overall population that is in the prime working age range. And if working-age adults are leaving, that might explain why the labor force is shrinking.

That means helping their people, they say, and specifically tackling high rates of diabetes and obesity that affect their tribal nation and many other Indigenous communities.

It also means restoring their land and the river that has been intrinsically linked with their people for millennia.

“We are Native people tied to the resources and rhythms of the Eel River,” Parker said. “Our health is connected to the river.”

Now, the tribal nation is confronting the Trump administration over the river’s future and fighting some of its regional allies to reclaim water rights that have been overlooked for a century.

The struggle is taking place as the entity with a dominant stake in the river for generations, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., seeks to give up in Lake and Mendocino counties its network of Eel River dams and a linked hydropower plant. The move has triggered a federal review that has pitted the tribes, together with environmental groups in favor of dam removal, against farming interests, reservoir supporters and the Trump administration, which has taken a dim view of dam demolition.

The tribes never had much of a say when those dams went up starting 118 years ago, but they have been heavily involved in talks in recent years geared to planning for the future of the Eel River. Due to a century-old diversion that links the Eel River to the Russian River in the south — and to farms and about 100,000 residents who rely on the upper Russian for drinking and irrigation supplies — those talks have drawn in a host of sometimes competing interests, including counties and farm and fishery groups with a wider scope of interest across the North Coast.

Our “water rights were completely ignored,” Parker said of his ancestors. “The Round Valley Indian Tribes were very much in survival mode when the dams were built and the diversions began.

“It started in 1905 when W.W. Van Arsdale posted a note along a tree saying he had a right to appropriate more than 100,000 acre-feet of Eel River water to put into the Russian River basin,” Parker said. “That’s how it all started.”

PG&E has informed federal officials it wants to decommission Scott and Cape Horn dams and give up the aging, associated hydropower plant, offline since 2021, that has helped get Eel River water through Mendocino County’s Potter Valley into the Russian River basin.

In 2022, the power company applied to surrender its operating license to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, which oversees the nation’s hydropower projects. The utility giant followed through with formal plans to FERC in June 2025.

Historically, FERC has had the final say and has not stood in the way of dam removal, though Congress and the White House have.

Years from now, the tribes and their allies hope their efforts will lead to the nation’s next big dam removal project, freeing the headwaters of California’s third longest river to revive its beleaguered salmon and steelhead trout runs — and the culture and economy of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, said John Bezdek, an attorney for the seven-tribe nation.

“The fishery declined with the significant diversions of water into the watershed,” Bezdek said. “It was a source of subsistence and culture. This is a fishing tribe. That was taken away from them.”

Farming interests and others in the region, however, are against dam removal, pointing to downstream ripples for irrigators and drinking water customers, the loss of reservoir water for aerial fire suppression and the blow to the hundreds of Lake County residents and visitors around the largest of those reservoirs, Lake Pillsbury, a destination for boaters and hunters.

They secured a powerful ally late last year in the Trump administration, which raised its objections to dam regulators in a Dec. 19 letter from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. She warned that “if this plan goes through as proposed, it will devastate hundreds of family farms and wipe out more than a century of agricultural tradition in Potter Valley. Without it, crops fail, businesses close and rural communities crumble.”

Rollins also said that her department would work with the Department of the Interior to bring “real solutions” for water security to the North Coast.

The Round Valley tribes responded Jan. 14 in a letter to those two agencies, spotlighting a familiar slight: Rollins’ failure to acknowledge or even mention the tribes’ “senior water and fishing rights, much less our culture, our economy and our way of life.”

“We are reminding the departments … that the discussions going back to DC have been one sided and that we have been left out of the conversation,” Parker said in an interview with The Press Democrat.

Tribes to DC: Respect local solution

Just as dam removal opponents, including Lake County itself, are lobbying the administration to intervene and block federal sign-off on PG&E’s plans, the tribes and their allies are asking Washington, D.C., to allow a locally brokered water pact to proceed.

Known as the two-basin solution, it solidified a 30-year framework under which diversions from the Eel River to the Russian River would continue after dam removal, at least in periods of high flows, and only if there’s enough water in the Eel to support its salmon and steelhead runs. The pact supporters, including many local governments and water providers, agreed to construct a new diversion facility to support those operations, and to return water rights to Round Valley Indian Tribes who, as the first people in the area, have seniority rights to Eel River flows.

Hailed by supporters as historic when it was finalized in early 2025, the deal sought to rectify wrongs that disadvantaged tribes and harmed Eel River fisheries, signatories said.

“Our tribal members work and live in the broader regional community and despite the historic injustice to our tribal community, an ‘all or nothing approach’ is simply not realistic,” Parker wrote to the secretaries.

Parker and Russ said it was better to come together with partners and collaborate on a solution.

“We decided at the time we could spend the next 20 years arguing about what’s right and what’s wrong,” Russ said. “We decided collectively to focus on our commonalities so that maybe our kids and grandkids wouldn’t be fighting this war. We started to figure out what would be beneficial for everyone.”

But the deal has many staunch opponents, and few more visible these days than Cloverdale Vice Mayor Todd Lands, who has made his opposition to the pact and to dam removal a central part of his campaign for a seat on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. In January, he accompanied Secretary Rollins at an American Farm Bureau Federation conference in Anaheim, speaking out against the two-basin solution and appealing to the Trump administration to intervene.

“The two-basin solution does not guarantee water,” Lands told The Press Democrat. He fears the change from year-round to seasonal diversions will not be enough to fill Lake Mendocino, which helps sustain dry-season flows in the upper Russian River, the main source of drinking water for communities stretching from Ukiah to Healdsburg.

“This will cause drought conditions, not allow cities to replenish their water systems for fire and public use, and cause disease in the (Russian) river basin,” Lands said. “People will have to decide between showers and laundry and will not be able to have their own gardens as a food source.”

He also echoed shared concerns among dam removal opponents that the Round Valley Indian Tribes would cease all diversions “if the goals of the water supply and fish in the Eel River are not met.”

Those fears were inflamed in December when a California-based attorney for the Round Valley Indian Tribes told a group of Potter Valley farmers that diversions would one day end — comments that were caught on video and circulated widely.

In an interview with The Press Democrat, Bezdek, the tribal attorney based in Washington, D.C., sought to clarify that statement.

“Obviously if the fishery doesn’t recover, that will be a problem for us,” he said. “But we believe the best science is available and it says that we can do this.”

Parker and Russ elaborated.

“We believe everything is integrated,” Russ said. “The other side is saying we are putting fish before people. But we need healthy fish for a healthy balance for people. We are trying to create a healthy ecosystem for healthy people.”

Critical resource over millennia

The Round Valley coalition, made up of the Yuki, Pit River, Little Lake, Pomo, Nomlacki, Concow and Wailacki tribes, trace their ancestry in the area to “the beginning of time,” Bezdek said.

The Eel River and its tributaries served as the center of Indigenous culture, religion and trade.

“Our elders used to tell us stories about seeing so many fish that you could walk on their backs,” Bezek said. “Now, when we fish, we barely see a fish. Our ecosystem has just been decimated.”

As they told Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in their Jan. 14 letter, the tribal nation seeks to bring back the health of the river and their community.

“If the river is not healthy, the community is not healthy,” Russ said.

Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt, who has close ties to the region’s farming industry, has heard the concerns of those opposed to dam removal, including their fears the tribe will end all diversions.

He isn’t buying that claim.

“There’s no automatic termination and no single entity can end diversions,” Rabbitt said. “The whole thing is a collaborative effort.”

Rabbitt, who read the Round Valley Indian Tribes’ letter, said he supported their effort “to set the record straight” and “establish a position within all the noise that’s going on. That’s vitally important.”

At the same time, he understood people’s fears and reservations.

“I will admit, I’m not a huge fan of taking down dams, but ultimately it isn’t my decision,” he said. “But then it’s ‘OK, what happens if you’re on your soapbox in the corner, it comes down and there’s no agreement for diversion? Then what?’

“We have to move forward.”

Rabbit is board president of the entity created by the pact outlining a post-dam future, the Eel-Russian Project Authority. Its aim for fish, he said, is “making sure both runs” — the Eel’s and the Russian’s — “are healthy. Our goal is to keep the diversion active and to do it in a responsible, collaborative way.”

Parker said collaboration is key and he shared his hope the Trump administration will work with the tribes and Eel-Russian Project Authority.

A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture said it had received the tribes’ letter and “looks forward to formally responding to President Parker on this important topic.” The Department of the Interior declined to comment.

Bezdek said both secretaries have reached back out to him and are trying to coordinate dates to discuss a way forward.

“We were here before Sonoma County and Mendocino County and we will be here after they are gone,” Parker said. “PG&E’s decision to decommission the project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring fairness. We know we won’t be adequately compensated, but the two-basin solution is the first step to heal those wounds and remedy this historical wrong.”

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In 2019, after a routine vaccination, 11-year-old Keithron Thomas felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and down his arm. His mother, Melanie Bostic, thought it would go away after a few days. But days turned to weeks, then months, and years.

Bostic learned of a federal program designed to help people who suffer rare vaccine reactions.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was created in 1986 after a flood of vaccine injury lawsuits drove drugmakers from the market. Congress aimed to offer a faster and more generous path to compensation for people injured by vaccines, while shielding manufacturers from liability. The VICP, commonly known as vaccine court, is taxpayer-funded. The government pays any award to claimants as well as attorneys fees.

Bostic filed a claim in 2022 for compensation to cover her son’s spiraling medical bills. She then contacted the Carlson Law Firm, which referred her to Arizona-based attorney Andrew Downing — who now serves as a senior adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Downing declined to comment and HHS did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Downing, who has represented hundreds of plaintiffs in vaccine court in Washington, D.C., signed on to take their case, according to a contract reviewed by KFF Health News. They agreed Downing would pursue the claim before the VICP.

Bostic shared documents and medical records as he requested them. Months passed as she waited for news on her son’s case.

After several months of making court filings, Downing told her it was time to opt out of the vaccine program and sue the drugmaker. When she refused to opt out, he withdrew from the case.

The government paid Downing $445 an hour for representing Bostic, which is typical for program attorneys with his experience, according to court records.

Three years later, Bostic said, she hasn’t received a dime for her son’s injury. Thomas, now 18, endures debilitating pain that doctors say may never go away.

Rather than help them work through the program, Bostic feels that Downing steered them away from it and toward a lawsuit against the manufacturer. The VICP ultimately dismissed her case.

Bostic was furious that the court paid Downing anything.

“Y’all could’ve gave that to me for my son,” she said. “How dare y’all.”

In Business With Washington

In June, Kennedy’s HHS also awarded Downing’s law firm, Brueckner Spitler Shelts, a sole-source federal contract to consult on an overhaul of the VICP. The contract has grown to $410,000. Downing is the only attorney listed on the firm’s website who has practiced in vaccine court.

Kennedy has routinely questioned vaccine safety and called the VICP “broken,” saying it shields drug companies from some liability “no matter how negligent they are.” As a personal injury lawyer, Kennedy previously spearheaded civil litigation against vaccine maker Merck.

Downing and about a dozen other lawyers have transferred hundreds of clients from the vaccine program to civil suits, where the financial rewards — for patients and their lawyers — could run far higher, according to a KFF Health News analysis of court records and program data. They’ve collected millions of taxpayer dollars in attorneys fees from vaccine court while launching precisely what it was designed to avoid: lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.

This shift in legal strategy has fueled Kennedy’s crusade against Merck, and it could end up hurting some vaccine-injured clients, several experts said.

University of California Law-San Francisco professor Dorit Reiss has studied vaccine court for over a decade and has tracked the rise of anti-vaccine forces in American politics. She said VICP attorneys who are also suing vaccine makers have “incentives to direct more people” to lawsuits, “when it might not be in their best interest.”

A Delicate Balance

Kennedy has criticized the VICP as a barrier to accountability. But for Bostic, vaccine court offered an opportunity to hold the government to its promise of caring for casualties of widespread immunization.

Like any medication, vaccines can have side effects. Serious reactions to routine shots are rare, but for the unlucky few who bear this burden, the government promises recourse through its administrative program.

Vaccine court aims to strike a balance between protecting public health and helping individuals who may pay its price. The no-fault program allows claimants with vaccine-related injuries to get help without showing that the vaccine maker did anything wrong, even when the evidence doesn’t meet courtroom standards.

The program has made more than 12,500 awards, totaling roughly $5 billion in compensation. Historically, nearly half of claims have been resolved with some kind of award.

If patients aren’t satisfied with the outcome or don’t get a ruling within 240 days, they may leave the administrative program and sue the vaccine maker in civil court. Plaintiffs could potentially win larger awards. Lawyers could obtain higher fees, which they can’t in vaccine court.

But winning a civil suit is far more difficult, in part because plaintiffs have a greater burden of showing the vaccine caused their injury and that the maker was at fault. Since the VICP was created, no vaccine injury lawsuit has won a judgment in regular court, records show.

That hasn’t stopped some lawyers from trying. After the requisite 240 days, they have transferred hundreds of VICP claims into civil litigation against HPV vaccine manufacturer Merck, the KFF Health News analysis found.

The lawyers who represented those claims include Downing and other VICP attorneys with ties to Kennedy, court records show. Those include Kennedy advisers and people who work in the law office of his longtime personal lawyer Aaron Siri or with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine outfit Kennedy founded, as well as a former Kennedy co-counsel in suits against Merck over its HPV vaccine, Gardasil.

Downing, whose law firm biography describes him as “one of the preeminent litigation attorneys in the Court of Federal Claims,” has not won an HPV vaccine injury claim in the past five years, records show. Vaccine court did compensate dozens of HPV vaccine claims in that time, but most — including nearly all of Downing’s — were withdrawn upon reaching the opt-out period.

VICP data and court records show that over the past five years, Downing and other lawyers withdrew roughly 400 Gardasil claims from vaccine court before a ruling was issued. The plaintiffs received nothing from the program. Hundreds of these cases joined the litigation against Merck, according to court records.

Once the opt-out period arrived in Bostic’s case, Downing informed her that he was preparing to withdraw her son’s claim and move the case back to the original law firm for a lawsuit against Merck.

“That,” he wrote in an email, “was the plan all along.”

Fighting for Compensation

Thomas, who hopes to enroll in community college and become a computer programmer, has intermittent numbness in his fingers and stabbing sensations in his arm nearly every day. The pain often radiates across his back or up his neck, and he’s developed migraines. Once an active kid who dreamed of playing basketball professionally, he now spends his time playing video games and trying to sleep during lulls in his pain.

Bostic’s claim on behalf of her son made him one of about 1,000 people who have filed with vaccine court for HPV vaccine injuries. More than 200 have received compensation — just over one for every million shots given. Court records show program awards were typically $50,000 to $100,000, with some also covering past medical bills or future health care expenses.

Richard Hughes IV, a health care attorney and former pharmaceutical executive who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University Law School, reviewed Thomas’ records and said cases like his were exactly what the vaccine program was designed to address.

“That just seems straightforward,” Hughes said of Thomas’ claim. “That should have gotten compensated.”

Bostic wanted the federal agencies that had approved and recommended Gardasil to answer for her son’s injuries. The single mother hoped compensation from the program would allow Thomas to see specialists including neurologists, afford natural treatments, and enroll in physical therapy.

“He would have had the best of the best health care,” she said.

When Downing took their case, Bostic said, he told her during a phone call that vaccine court’s $250,000 limit on pain and suffering was too low for her son’s injury. Bostic said Downing advised she could get more money by suing Merck, though that could take longer.

“I said, ‘No, that will take years. My son needs help now,’” Bostic recalled.

Bostic said she told Downing she wanted a fund set up for Thomas’ health care as soon as possible.

In the following weeks, Bostic sent paperwork to Downing’s office but had difficulty getting in touch with him, email and text messages show. Downing’s billing records show a gap in his work on the case from late September until mid-November.

In November 2022, Downing emailed Bostic, “The opt out date for K.T.’s case is set for April 23, 2023. At that point, we will be in a position to opt K.T.’s case out of the Vaccine Program and move the case back over to the Carlson Law Firm for handling in the Merck litigation.”

Bostic said she was confused at the time by that language. But she remembers being emphatic in a follow-up phone call with Downing, repeatedly telling him she would not opt out.

After that, Bostic said, she didn’t hear from Downing for months despite calling his office and leaving messages with secretaries.

Downing’s billing records show that he and his paralegals spent fewer than nine hours on Bostic’s case in that stretch. This included time spent requesting, reviewing, and filing medical records, as well as drafting and filing extension requests. The billing records did not include any communication with Bostic during that time.

The court granted each of Downing’s extension requests, pushing back the deadline a month at a time.

In April 2023, Downing sent Bostic an email noting that 240 days had passed, so he could drop their government claim and they could sue Merck.

“Gardasil cases do not receive very fair treatment in the Vaccine Program,” Downing wrote, adding that he would withdraw as her attorney if Bostic stayed in the program.

Bostic chose to stick with vaccine court, later telling the vaccine court judge by email that she’d advised her attorney “I was not trying to become a millionaire.”

That exchange of emails in April is when Bostic said she learned Downing was already representing plaintiffs in lawsuits over Gardasil. The litigation encompassed hundreds of other patients who — most of them under Downing’s counsel — had filed VICP claims in recent years.

Running out the 240-day clock, critics say, is allowed but subverts the program’s intent.

Some legal experts criticize the way Downing handled Bostic’s case.

“They trusted him to file the VICP case,” Reiss said. “It’s his job to zealously advocate for his clients. In this case, his clients want to go through VICP. It’s his job to fight for them in VICP, not to wait for 240 days.”

When Downing joined HHS as a senior adviser to Kennedy, court records show, he handed off his remaining vaccine court cases to other attorneys in firms involved in the litigation against Merck.

A New Approach

The vaccine program has long faced criticism for giving claimants too little, too late. Even VICP advocates see the need for reform, with eight officials deciding a growing backlog of claims, driving up wait times. The cap on pain and suffering payments has not changed since 1986. But the court can award further compensation like a fund for lifetime medical care that can reach millions.

Most vaccine-injured individuals are better off in the administrative program than in civil litigation, legal experts said.

Renée Gentry, director of GWU’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic and a founding member of the Vaccine Injured Petitioners Bar Association, has represented hundreds of families alleging vaccine injuries. Most of them, she said, aren’t focused on big payouts; rather, they “want their kid taken care of or they want to be taken care of.”

For claims that often fail in vaccine court, however, Gentry said a lawsuit may be the best option. According to Gentry, HPV vaccine claims like Thomas’ are particularly challenging to win in the VICP.

“If you’re not going to win, then you want those clients to have at least an opportunity at something,” she said.

For Mark Sadaka, a prominent vaccine court lawyer representing some claims in Merck litigation, sending clients to regular court is a last resort.

Sadaka said certain Gardasil injury claimants, such as those alleging mental rather than physical harm, might be better off in litigation. But by sticking it out in the VICP, Sadaka has won HPV vaccine injury claims that were the first of their kind, including for narcolepsy, alopecia, and even a deadly arrhythmia.

“He’s going to get taken care of for the rest of his life,” Sadaka said of his client who won compensation for narcolepsy in 2023. “And he doesn’t have to pay me anything.”

Sadaka, like all program lawyers, gets an hourly rate from the VICP. He said that he could make much more money representing the same claims in traditional litigation, since he could get a cut of any awards.

“It’s a better thing for me to file in regular court and get a higher fee, but for the client, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t,” Sadaka said. “My role is to explain both sides in gross detail for them and give them as much information as possible so they can make an informed decision.”

According to Sadaka, some lawyers in the VICP automatically advise their clients to leave vaccine court and file a lawsuit.

“If they can extract settlements, they’re going to be very happy to put that money in their pockets,” Hughes noted.

Winning a lawsuit or reaching a major settlement could also spell trouble for nationwide vaccine access, replaying the events that gave rise to vaccine court in the 1980s.

Some vaccine lawyers and policymakers believe Kennedy and his colleagues might welcome a return to those days.

“If they can bring down the system, that’s a feather in their cap,” Hughes said.

Lawyers cannot win contingency fees in vaccine court. They get paid for time spent on reasonable claims whether they win or lose. Downing made more than $1 million representing clients before the VICP in recent years, according to court records.

A January VICP report shows that since fiscal year 2020, the program has paid scores of attorneys about $280 million — including over $43 million for cases they did not win.

In each of the last two fiscal years, lawyers got roughly $9 million for VICP claims in which their clients got nothing. That was more than the program had ever previously paid to attorneys for unsuccessful claims, according to vaccine court data.

‘Learning How To Cope’

After discovering her attorney would not pursue VICP compensation for her son, Bostic decided to advocate for Thomas herself.

“Please help me,” she wrote in a letter to the court.

VICP staff gave Bostic extra time to find a new lawyer and gather records.

The following months proved difficult for the family. Bostic was hospitalized with a life-threatening condition. Her mother’s health declined. She was laid off and lost her family’s health insurance.

By the time Bostic could take Thomas to a pediatric neurologist to get medical records for his VICP case, she said, the doctor had moved hours away to Orlando.

Bostic repeatedly missed deadlines and failed to communicate with program staff as required, court records show. Emails, docket entries, and letters suggest she may have misunderstood some court orders and not received others.

When Thomas’ medical records remained incomplete for another year, the presiding official dismissed Bostic’s claim, writing that while he had sympathy for what she and her son had endured, “the case cannot be allowed to remain pending indefinitely.”

Thomas said he can no longer play basketball with friends. He can’t even help his mother carry groceries into the house.

“I got to live with this, and there’s pain,” he said.

Bostic now works from home as a bank fraud analyst. With an income just above the cutoff for government assistance, she puts in overtime in hopes of affording health insurance for Thomas and her six other children.

“People are asking, ‘How’s your son doing?’” Bostic said. “I normally say, ‘Still the same. We just learning how to cope with it.’”

Methodology

The KFF Health News analysis began with court records for cases in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which includes vaccine court. We first identified all cases since 2006 (when the HPV vaccine was introduced) in which the “nature of suit” field explicitly mentioned human papillomavirus, or in which “nature of suit” was categorized as “other” vaccine injury/death and the case text included the word “papillomavirus.” The latter made up about 10% of identified cases, mostly claims filed before the HPV vaccine was added to the program or claims involving multiple vaccines. We cross-referenced the number of cases with data from VICP reports to verify completeness.

After identifying the relevant vaccine court cases, we pulled these claims’ filing and closing dates and took the difference to find the number of days that each case spent in vaccine court. To estimate total attorneys fees awarded for these claims, we added the fee amounts recorded in dozens of the VICP rulings and derived a minimum estimate based on the number of such cases.

We then searched federal court records for litigation over Merck’s HPV vaccine, Gardasil, and pulled the names of the plaintiffs and attorneys involved. To gauge the scale of claims diverted from the VICP to litigation, we searched for each attorney in the Gardasil-related vaccine court cases and searched for the last name of each plaintiff in the titles of those cases.

©2026 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.