Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In recent speeches and media scrums, President Donald Trump has lauded the federal budget surplus for the month of June, claiming the surplus had not happened in “many, many years” or “decades.” To be clear, the U.S. had not recorded a surplus in June since 2016 – but the country has had several surpluses in other months since that time.

Furthermore, while Trump has attributed the surplus in June to “good management and tariffs,” the latter of which have produced record revenue, the Congressional Budget Office said there would have been a budget deficit last month if the government had not made billions of dollars in payments in May that are usually paid in June.

Also, as of June, the U.S. still had an overall budget deficit of more than $1.3 trillion through the first nine months of fiscal year 2025, according to Treasury Department data. That’s about $64 billion more than the deficit during the same period in fiscal year 2024.

Photo by splitov27 / stock.adobe.com

Trump first mentioned the roughly $27 billion surplus in June during remarks at the White House Faith Office luncheon on July 14 – and he sounded surprised by the news.

“And on Friday, it was announced that the United States Treasury ran a budget surplus. Is that true, Scott?” Trump said, asking Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was in attendance. “In June, for the first time in many, many decades. Wow! I didn’t know that.”

Trump told Bessent that he would add that information to his “repertoire,” and the president has since mentioned the June surplus several times, including in July 15 remarks at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh.

“And did you notice that two days ago they just announced that they had a budget surplus of $25 billion in this country,” he told attendees, referring to the June surplus, which he lowered by about $2 billion. “They never saw anything like that. Everyone’s saying where did that — that’s been like decades.”

But it has happened before, and it wasn’t as long ago as he suggested.

In fact, prior to June, the most recent monthly surplus was in April, when government revenue exceeded its expenditures by about $258 billion, according to the Treasury. And most recently before that, there were six months with surpluses during the Biden administration (January 2022, April 2022, April 2023, August 2023, April 2024 and September 2024).

Trump may have been referring to the last time there was a surplus in June — that was June 2016, during the Obama administration, which still wasn’t “decades” ago.

Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told us that federal budget surpluses regularly occur in April, because of Tax Day, which is the deadline for most U.S. tax filers to submit their annual income tax returns and make tax payments. He said that surpluses also tend to occur in June, which the Wall Street Journal noted “is one of Treasury’s biggest revenue months of the year … because it’s a month when companies and individuals file their quarterly estimated tax payments.”

For example, the Treasury recorded four consecutive surpluses in June from 2013 to 2016. There have also been a number of surpluses in the month of September, which is the last month of the third quarter of the calendar year.

As we said, Trump has credited this year’s June surplus to tariffs and fiscal restraint.

New tariffs that Trump put in place this year did help. Last month, the government brought in about $26.6 billion in revenue from tariffs, or customs duties – a 321% increase from the $6.3 billion collected in the same month last year. June was the second straight month in which revenue from tariffs reached well over $20 billion, and the CBO recently estimated that a number of tariffs implemented earlier this year, between Jan. 6 and May 13, could reduce total federal deficits by $2.8 trillion over 10 years.

But tariffs aside, the CBO said there was another major reason that there was a June surplus instead of a deficit: the shifting of certain federal expenditures from June to May.

In its most recent “Monthly Budget Review,” the CBO said that federal spending was lower than it would have been in June because the government made billions of dollars in payments in May that were due on June 1, a Sunday. The Treasury said that some payments for active-duty military, veterans, Supplemental Security Income and Medicare were moved to May because June 1, the normal payment date, was a non-business day.

“If not for those [timing] shifts, the government would have recorded a deficit of $71 billion in June 2025,” the CBO said, emphasizing the word deficit.

So, Trump was off on the timing of previous budget surpluses, and he overlooked a key reason for the most recent surplus in June.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Trump’s Hollow Surplus Claim appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Contrary to President Donald Trump’s claim that no one will die as a result of the Republican budget bill, an analysis from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University estimated that the legislation’s changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act will result in at least 42,500 preventable deaths each year. At the same time, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has slightly overstated the estimate.

In the run-up to and in the wake of the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4, politicians of both parties have sparred over the budget reconciliation bill’s effects on mortality.

Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have said that “tens of thousands” of people will die as a result of losing health insurance.

“51,000 Americans will die each year so that the top 1% can get a $1 trillion tax break,” Sanders wrote in a July 3 post on X. “This bill is a death sentence.”

Sanders repeated the claim in a July 9 post, using a figure of “more than 50,000.”

Meanwhile, Trump has insisted that the Democratic talking point isn’t true.

“The Democrats have come up with a false narrative. … It’s death, death, everyone’s going to die,” he said in a July 8 Cabinet meeting. As he had before, Trump said that the bill was “just the opposite. Everyone’s going to live.”

“Somebody gave them a soundbite, ‘it’s going to cause death,’” Trump said in a July 12 interview on Fox News, referring to Democrats and the law. “It is not going to cause death. It’s going to keep people alive and it’s going to make our country successful.”

Sanders is using a higher estimate than he should, but researchers at Yale and Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics projected in June that the House-passed version of the bill would “result in more than 42,500 deaths annually.” 

The tally includes 11,300 deaths as a result of people losing Medicaid or Affordable Care Act marketplace insurance, as well as 18,200 deaths from low-income Medicare patients losing prescription drug benefits and 13,000 deaths from rescinding a Biden-era rule that required a higher minimum staffing level in nursing homes. 

The group, which performed its analysis in response to an inquiry from Sanders and Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, based its projections on a preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimate that 7.7 million people would lose insurance coverage as a result of the bill.

The CBO later projected that due to the House bill, 10.9 million people would be uninsured in 2034, a figure that includes 7.8 million becoming uninsured because of Medicaid changes in the bill and 3.1 million losing coverage due to changes to the Affordable Care Act. The CBO hasn’t yet provided an estimate for the final legislation, but said that a modified Senate version of that bill would increase the uninsured by 11.8 million people in 2034.

Dr. Rachel Werner, a co-author of the analysis and LDI’s executive director, told us in an email that it’s “incorrect to say that no one will die as a result” of the legislation. “There is strong evidence that Medicaid coverage saves lives,” she said.

Photo by Orathai / stock.adobe.com

“Getting someone insurance allows them to get screened for diseases like cancer. It’s a major source of providing people with treatment for the opioid epidemic,” Werner explained in a conversation with the Tradeoffs podcast. “It allows people to get medications to manage their chronic conditions. And so if you suddenly pull back all those resources that have been allowing people to get the care they need, the evidence is very clear now that we will lose lives.”

Another projection, published in mid-June in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the City University of New York, estimated that the House bill’s Medicaid spending cuts would lead to between 8,200 and 24,600 medically preventable deaths a year, with a mid-range estimate of 16,642. 

The study’s estimate, Werner explained, is “comparable” to the single 11,300 component of deaths from loss of insurance in her group’s total estimate. As she said on the Tradeoffs podcast, “we’re at the low end of that range, which is reassuring to us.”

Both the Harvard-CUNY and Penn-Yale authors have noted that the CBO estimates themselves may be low. When doing its calculations, the CBO assumed that states, which will lose some federal Medicaid funding under the bill, would use state money to make up for half of those losses.

“I think that that is a long shot,” Werner told Tradeoffs. “States budgets are very tight right now. Some states may be able to make up half of what they lose from the federal government, but I think it’s not a stretch to say most states can’t. And so if the funding that’s available for Medicaid goes down more than the CBO estimated, more people are going to lose access to coverage. So I think that I’m pretty confident that we are at the low end of the right ballpark.”

Both projections capture only a portion of the possible mortality effects. Dr. Eric Roberts, a co-author of the Penn-Yale analysis, said that his estimate does not include any deaths that might result from potential hospital closures, for example.

We asked the White House if they were aware of the Penn-Yale analysis and for support for Trump’s claim that the budget law would not lead to preventable deaths. “Reporters ignoring the commonsense reforms of The One, Big, Beautiful Bill that protect and preserve Medicaid while raising wages and growth to instead push debunked Democrat talking points with these sort of pointless ‘fact checks’ that rely on mindless hairsplitting is exactly why public trust in the media is at a record low,” White House spokesman Kush Desai replied in an email.

As for Sanders’ 51,000 figure, the number appears in the Penn-Yale estimate, and a Sanders spokesperson confirmed the analysis was the source of his claim. But it reflects an additional 8,811 preventable deaths that come from not extending expanded ACA premium tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year. That is not part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act itself, as we’ve written before.

Werner told us that the correct figure to use from her estimate when speaking of the provisions of the law is 42,500.

The overstatement is similar to what Democrats have done before, when they exaggerated the number of people who would lose health insurance under the bill using the same logic.

A Sanders spokesperson pointed us to Sanders’ full statement when the Penn-Yale estimate was first released, which repeatedly highlights the 51,000 number, but also explains the source of each of the four added figures. 

Sanders spokesperson Anna Bahr also argued that the lack of action to extend the premium tax credit could be viewed as part of the legislation. But whether those credits are extended remains to be seen.

“Whether it’s by making massive cuts to Medicaid that community health centers, nursing homes, hospitals, and health care providers rely on, whether it’s by using red tape to kick millions of people off of their ACA coverage, or whether it’s by failing to extend premium tax credits that made health coverage affordable for millions of working families throughout the country, the result is unacceptably the same: more people won’t go to the doctor on time because they don’t have insurance or they can’t afford it, more will get sicker, and this research shows just how many more people’s lives are at risk,” she said in a statement.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Big Beautiful Bill Projected to Lead to Preventable Deaths appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

An attack ad by a super PAC called MAGA Kentucky targets Republican Rep. Thomas Massie — a longtime conservative foil of President Donald Trump — with claims that distort the congressman’s votes on some of Trump’s policy goals.

The 30-second broadcast and digital ad, the first phase in a $1 million ad buy, according to Axios, began airing in late June in the northern Kentucky district where Massie is seeking reelection in 2026. The ad is titled “RADICAL DEMOCRATS,” and its narrator asks, “What happened to Thomas Massie? When did he decide to start voting with the radical Democrats? Massie voted against President Trump’s tax cuts. Massie voted against finishing Trump’s wall. Massie even voted against Trump’s ban on taxpayer-funded sex changes for minors.”

The ad is referring to Massie’s votes against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Massie was one of only two Republicans to vote against the initial House version of the bill on May 22, and the final Senate version of the bill on July 3. Although the bill contained elements of all three issues highlighted in the ad, Massie’s opposition was based on the bill’s impact on the national debt. The ad singles out aspects of the bill that Massie has generally supported.

During Trump’s first term, Massie voted for Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, and he has said repeatedly that he supports extending tax cuts in it that were scheduled to expire at the end of this year.

“Look, I’m for the tax cuts, extending those tax cuts. I voted for those in 2017,” Massie said in a May 20 interview on Newsmax2. “Here’s the problem: we’re cutting more taxes, and we’re increasing spending. And to the extent they say we’re cutting spending, that doesn’t happen in these first few years. They’re saying, ‘We’ll do that in the later years.’ The problem is the later years never come.”

“There are a lot of good things in this bill,” Massie said in a Newsmax interview on June 11. “We do need to deport the people who’ve come to this country illegally. I do support renewing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that I voted for.  But let me tell you what they’re not talking about … Number one issue, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, the tax break for seniors, that all expires in three years. And that’s because they’re using a budget gimmick where they’re trying to say this thing balances five years from now. But it doesn’t balance now.”

As for voting against “finishing Trump’s wall,” Massie has been a staunch supporter of building more border wall, though he has not always agreed with Trump’s method for funding it. In 2019, for example, Massie voted with Democrats to upend Trump’s attempt to fund the wall by declaring a national emergency. Massie argued that Congress, not the president, should decide on funding for construction of the border wall.

But he also supported and voted to provide more than $5 billion to fund Trump’s border wall in fiscal year 2019. And in 2023, Massie co-sponsored H.R. 164, the Close Biden’s Open Border Act, which sought to provide $15 billion for border wall construction.

As for the ad’s claim that Massie “even voted against Trump’s ban on taxpayer-funded sex changes for minors,” Massie has opposed gender-affirming surgery for children.

Massie said in post on X after his vote: “Although there were some conservative wins in the budget reconciliation bill (OBBBA), I voted No on final passage because it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates.”

As we’ve written, multiple independent analyses have found that the legislation, which Trump signed into law on July 4, will add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit over 10 years.

Massie had sought to amend the reconciliation bill to address federal jurisdiction in various cases of gender-affirming surgery. When the bill made its way through the Senate, according to Massie, the legislation allowed for funding of such medical procedures. Alluding to the MAGA Kentucky ad, Massie said on X, “What’s ironic is the senate stripped the ban on sex changes for minors from the BBB (referenced in the ad), so now everyone supporting the current BBB is for sex change for minors, using their logic?”

Long History of Animosity

The political friction between Trump and Massie goes back years. In March 2020, the Kentucky lawmaker tried to block Trump’s $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus package by forcing Congress to return to Washington for a vote on the bill, leading Trump to call Massie a “third rate Grandstander.”

In 2024, Massie was critical of Trump for not fighting to ensure funding to complete the southern border wall during the president’s first term.

Massie also endorsed one of Trump’s early challengers in 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the Republican presidential primary.

Massie and Trump clashed again in June, after the U.S. bombed the uranium enrichment facilities in Iran. Massie posted support for a War Powers Resolution vote in Congress to rein in Trump’s actions. “This is not our war,” Massie said on X. “But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution.”

After Massie registered opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump lambasted Massie on Truth Social as “a LOSER” and as “weak, ineffective,” and Trump has vowed in speeches to endorse a Republican primary opponent to Massie in the 2026 election. “I think he should be voted out of office,” Trump said.

Massie’s War Chest

Massie has held his office in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District since 2012, and he easily defeated primary challengers in the last three election cycles, winning 75% of the vote in 2024, 75% in 2022 and 81% in 2020.

Trump advisers are looking for a viable challenger in 2026, and Fox News posted a July 1 video of Trump saying Massie will have “a good opponent.”

Massie has been gearing up for the fight. He has $1.7 million in his war chest, the AP reported, including $584,000 raised between April and June.

He also has the support of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who said he plans to endorse Massie in 2026, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.

Another supporter of Massie is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is engaged in his own feud with Trump over the recently passed “big beautiful” law, saying he will support primary challengers to members of Congress who voted for the bill.

Musk shared a July 1 post by another user on X that said, “I donated again to @RepThomasMassie’s re-election campaign. Who’s next?” Musk responded, “Me.”

We reached out to Massie’s office for comment on the MAGA Kentucky ad, but did not get a response to our questions.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.

The post MAGA Ad Distorts How Massie Diverges from Trump appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

The Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, has been repeating the misleading claim that there are “over 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal records walking the streets of this nation.”

That number includes legal immigrants, not just those who entered the country illegally; about a third of them have only been charged, not convicted; and it’s unclear how many of them have been, or currently are, incarcerated. The figure also includes people who entered the country over the last several decades.

Homan made the claim on July 12, at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida, and twice on July 7, including in an appearance on Fox News, which reported that new funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will enable the current force of 5,000 agents to triple to 15,000. There, Homan said, “This is going to make this community safer. … We’ve got over 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal records walking the streets of this nation. With this plus up, we can take them into custody and remove them quicker.”

The White House told us that Homan’s claim was based on data from a 2024 letter from then Department of Homeland Security Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner to Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from Texas who had requested information on the number of noncitizens on the ICE docket who had been convicted or charged with a crime.

The data showed that, as of July 21, 2024, “nearly 650,000 criminal aliens were on the [Non-Detained Docket],” a White House spokeswoman told us, referring to the list of noncitizens who have been charged with a crime but are not in ICE custody.

But there are important caveats missing from Homan’s claim.

Of the total 647,572 noncitizens with criminal histories who were listed as being “non-detained” as of July 2024, 126,343 — or, about 20% — had “traffic offenses.” Another 92,075 had “immigration” offenses. So, at least a third of the total did not have violent criminal histories.

In comparison, 14,944 were listed as having “homicide” charges; 20,061 were listed as having “sexual assault” charges; 105,146 had “assault” charges; 30,631 had “larceny” charges; and 21,106 had “fraudulent activities” charges.

Not all of those listed in the 2024 data had been convicted, though. Of the 647,572 total, 222,141 — or 33% — had been only charged. It’s unclear how many of those pending cases ended in convictions.

It’s also important to note that the data doesn’t distinguish between immigrants who crossed the border illegally, immigrants who overstayed their visas, and immigrants who are in the country with documentation.

“The non-detained docket includes not just unauthorized immigrants but green-card holders and noncitizens on long-term non-immigrant visas who have made themselves removable by virtue of a criminal conviction,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us when we wrote about this data last year.

Lechleitner’s letter was sent in September, and President Donald Trump, who was campaigning at the time, distorted the data, falsely claiming that then Vice President Kamala Harris “let in 13,099 convicted murderers.” More recently, Trump has repeatedly used the figure “11,888 murderers,” though he appears to be citing the same data.

We asked the White House why the number is different, but we didn’t get a response to that question. Instead, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told us in an emailed statement, “Joe Biden let thousands upon thousands of violent criminal illegal aliens into American communities including murderers, rapists, gang members, and other violent criminals. President Trump will deport them all.”

When we wrote about Trump’s claims in September, DHS told us that the figures weren’t just for recent immigrants, but included people who entered the country over the last 40 years or more.

And DHS said in a statement at the time that the data “also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.” So, the 647,572 people on the list were not being detained by ICE, but some number of them were in the custody of state, local, or other federal authorities. We asked DHS last year, and again this week, how many were in the custody of other agencies, but we didn’t receive a response.

Also, given that the data cover several decades, “[i]t would be worth noting that people with criminal convictions who are not in custody have, for the most part presumably, served whatever sentence was imposed on them,” Mittelstadt told us in an email last week.

It’s also possible that some of them have been deported.

Since the Trump administration has put an emphasis on deporting immigrants with criminal backgrounds, we asked DHS for updated figures. The department didn’t respond to our request for that data, but a spokesperson provided a statement that said Secretary Kristi Noem was using ICE to “target the worst of the worst.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Border Czar Makes Misleading Claim About Immigrants With Criminal Records appeared first on FactCheck.org.