The Brief

Cynthia Williams is furious with U.S. House Republicans willing to slash Medicaid, the government-run insurance program for people with low incomes or disabilities.

The 61-year-old Anaheim resident cares for her adult daughter, who is blind, and for her sister, a military veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions. Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid, pays Williams to care for them, and she relies on that income, just as her sister and daughter depend on her.

“Let’s be real. We shouldn’t have to be here tonight,” Williams told a raucous standing-room crowd of over 200 people at a recent town hall. “We should be home, spending time with our loved ones and our families, but we’re here. And we’re here to fight, because when politicians try to take away our healthcare, we don’t have the option to sit back and let it happen.”

The House last month approved a Republican budget plan that could shrink Medicaid spending by $880 billion over 10 years, only partially paying for an extension of expiring tax cuts from President Donald Trump’s first term, plus some new ones he has promised, totaling as much as $4.5 trillion.

A spending cut of that magnitude would have a huge impact in California, with nearly 15 million people — more than a third of the population — on Medi-Cal. Over 60% of Medi-Cal’s $161 billion budget comes from Washington.

Attendees applaud speakers during a Tustin town hall last month organized to protest potential cuts to Medicaid.

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Williams was among about a dozen providers, patient advocates, disabled people and family members who stood up one after the other to tell their stories. Rep. Young Kim, a Republican whose district includes this relatively affluent Orange County city, declined an invitation for her or a staff member to attend. But her constituents delivered their message loud and clear to her and the other Republicans in Congress: Hands off Medicaid.

Josephine Rios, a certified nursing assistant at a Kaiser Permanente surgical center in Irvine, said her 7-year-old grandson, Elijah, has received indispensable treatments through Medi-Cal, including a $5,000-a-month medication that controls his seizures, which can be life-threatening. Elijah, who has cerebral palsy, is among the more than 50% of California children covered by Medi-Cal.

“To cut Medicaid, Medi-Cal, that’s like saying he can’t live. He can’t thrive. He’s going to lie in bed and do nothing,” Rios said. “Who are they to judge who lives and who doesn’t?”

Josephine Rios, speaking at the Feb. 20 town hall in Tustin, worries about her grandson who has cerebral palsy and relies on Medi-Cal.

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Two-thirds of Californians across party lines oppose cuts to Medi-Cal, according to a new survey by the California Health Care Foundation and NORC at the University of Chicago.

The town hall here was one of three organized by Fight for Our Health, a coalition of health advocacy groups and unions, to target Republican House members whose California districts are considered politically competitive. The other two were in Bakersfield, part of which is represented by Rep. David Valadao, and Corona, home to Rep. Ken Calvert. Multiple other town halls and protests have sprung up across the country in recent weeks.

The coalition has reprised a campaign — part of a broader national movement — that fought against the GOP’s unsuccessful 2017 effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The Republicans’ loss of House control in the 2018 midterm elections has been widely attributed to their stance on healthcare. Valadao was among the GOP members who lost their seats in 2018, though he took his back two years later.

Still, he voted for the House budget proposal last week, despite the fact that about two-thirds of the population in his district is on Medi-Cal — the highest in the state — and even though he is one of eight GOP House members who sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson warning about the “serious consequences” of deep cuts to Medicaid. Valadao’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Calvert, who’s been in the House for 32 years and eked out reelection last November, also voted for the budget, as did Kim. All nine GOP members of California’s congressional delegation supported it, as did all House Republicans except one.

A woman protests Medicaid cuts outside the Tustin town hall.

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Critics of the budget plan say it helps the rich at the expense of society’s most vulnerable — an argument that was vigorously repeated at the Tustin town hall. But supporters of the plan say that extending the tax cuts, key provisions of which are set to expire at the end of this year, would avoid a large tax hike for average Americans and benefit low-income families the most.

“American families are facing a massive tax increase unless Congress acts by the end of the year,” Calvert said in a statement to KFF Health News before the vote. He vowed the GOP would not touch Social Security or Medicare. He did not offer similar assurances on Medicaid, but said, “We are not interested in cutting the social and healthcare safety net for children, disabled and low-income Americans. We are focused on eliminating waste, fraud and abuse.”

The House budget proposal does not specify spending cut details, though it instructs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Medicare spending, to cut $880 billion — a large chunk of the up to $2 trillion in total cuts. The GOP’s razor-thin majority means Johnson will have a narrow path to get a more detailed budget passed. Republican support, whether from fiscal hawks who want deeper spending cuts or House members worried about slashing Medicaid, could ebb and flow as the details are hashed out.

Moreover, the House must reach a compromise with the Senate, which has passed a much narrower budget resolution that leaves the big tax cuts out for now.

Like Kim, Valadao and Calvert declined invitations to attend or send staffers to the town hall meetings in their regions. At the Tustin meeting, multiple speakers chided Kim for her absence. At one point, the large screen behind the podium flashed a picture of an empty chair with the words, in large block letters, “Congresswoman Kim, we saved you a seat.”

Kim spokesperson Callie Strock said in an email that Kim and her local staff had preexisting commitments that night. She added that Kim is “committed to protecting and strengthening our healthcare system.”

But those in attendance were clearly worried.

“It’s a moral obligation for all of us to look at the most disadvantaged people in our country and take good care of them,” said Beth Martinko, whose 33-year-old son, Josh, has autism and relies on Medi-Cal for his care. “This has no place in politics.”

Fifteen years ago, when modern electric vehicles were just hitting the road, no one knew exactly what to expect from their giant, expensive lithium-ion batteries.

As batteries age, they hold less and less energy. Anyone who's ever had a dying smartphone, or had to replace a vehicle's 12-volt starter battery, knows this painfully well.

EV batteries were intended to last longer than those smaller, cheaper batteries. But how much longer?

The predictions were not soothing. In 2010, the New York Times wrote that "estimates of [EV] battery packs' lifespan — no one knows for sure — range upward from seven years." The average car on the road is more than 12 years old. And that discrepancy made some would-be EV buyers nervous.

Batteries come with warranties, but they don't last as long as the car. If a high-voltage battery chokes out midway through a car's life, it needs replacing — at a price tag that can run in the ballpark of $5,000 to $20,000.

But there's good news.

As the fleet of EVs on the road ages, new data pooled from tens of thousands of vehicles is showing those batteries are lasting longer than expected.

How a battery ages 

Lithium-ion batteries undergo two kinds of aging. First, there's calendar aging: They degrade as time goes on, holding less juice, even if they just sit in storage.

Then there's cyclical aging, which is how much a battery degrades based on its use — being charged and discharged, over and over again.

That means there's no way to dodge degradation. Whether you use a vehicle a lot or a little, eventually, the battery will hold less energy.

But the trajectory of aging isn't a straight line. Recurrent, a research firm that pulls in data from over 30,000 EV drivers, describes it as an "S curve." There's a rapid decline at the beginning, a long leveling off, and then a more rapid decline at the end.

"It's very much like breaking in a pair of shoes," says Liz Najman, the director of market insights at Recurrent. The shoes start out stiff, but quickly get a little more give. "And then your shoes just last you," she says, until at some point, "It's all over, it's a rapid decline."

And when it comes to EV batteries, two things are becoming clear. The initial drop-off is not as severe as some people had worried. And the sharp end-of-life decline is taking a long, long time to materialize.

At auto auctions, a lot of healthy batteries

Adam George is a vehicle services director at Cox Automotive, which runs used car auctions around the country. In recent years, the number of used EVs for sale has increased enormously — reflecting the sharp rise in production a few years ago.

That's given Cox Automotive a growing pool of used EVs to evaluate before they're re-sold.

"We were expecting battery health to be experiencing mass degradation over the first one to three years of owning a vehicle," George says. "What we have seen, though, is that these 2, 3, 4-year-old off-lease cars that are coming back have battery health scores well upwards of 95%."

Recurrent's data also shows that cars from most major brands retain 95% or more of their expected range after 3 years, thanks in part to software and battery management systems that are designed to correct for the battery's early degradation, and give drivers consistent range.

So the initial drop-off in that S curve is in the range of 5% or so, give or take. After that? Well, Cox Automotive has tested nearly 80,000 EVs, and found an average battery health of 92%.

Decade-old EVs are overwhelmingly on their original batteries 

That data set is naturally skewed toward younger vehicles, because the vast majority of EVs on the road today are fairly new. There were only a million EVs sold between 2010 and 2018, and now there are more than a million sold each year.

So what about the oldest EVs, specifically?

Recurrent's data can help answer this question. Najman, a data scientist, notes a few caveats: It's a fairly small dataset, just because there weren't many EVs built more than a decade ago. And some of the oldest EVs use technology that can't connect to Recurrent's opt-in network.

But based on their community, among EVs that are 10 years old or older, only 8.5% have ever had a battery replacement. More than 90% of them are still on their original battery.

"EV batteries are holding up phenomenally well," Najman says.  

Recurrent has also looked at EVs of any age that have more than 150,000 miles on them, which provides a closer look at the effects of that cyclical aging. There, too, the batteries outperformed expectations.

"Cars with 150,000 miles or more, and that have not had battery replacements, are getting at least 83% of their original range," Najman says.

Now, there is one common reason why EV batteries will be replaced very early on: a defect. There have been multiple large-scale battery recalls, and any individual battery might have a flaw that requires replacement. But because all new EVs come with warranties, that kind of replacement isn't a financial blow to owners.

"That would be something that would be synonymous with, like, your engine or a transmission going bad," says Adam George, of Cox Automotive. "That's what warranties are for."

EV battery warranties typically cover at least 8 years and 100,000 miles, and automakers will replace the battery in the case of catastrophic failure, or a reduction in capacity (usually to 70% of the original or less).

A robotic arm displays the dual engine chassis of a Model S electric sedan at the Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles on October 9, 2014.

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The tale of one Model S 

What do all these stats look like in real life? Consider Norman Hajjar's Model S.

Hajjar was an early adopter of electric vehicles. He kind of had to be: In 2013 he became an executive at the electric vehicle drivers' app Plugshare.

His 2012 Model S is one of the first that Tesla ever built. When he got it, he was well aware of the question mark about battery lifespan. "There was really no way of knowing what the future held for it because there was zero track record," Hajjar says.

In his case, the future held a battery defect: a loud noise followed by his car coming to an abrupt stop. He recalls Tesla replacing the battery — free of charge and under warranty — in 2014.

Since then, he's spent 12 years on that second battery. He's put around 200,000 miles on the car overall. And it's driving great, thank you very much.

"This vehicle still is a monster," Hajjar says, affectionately. "It is extremely fast, quick off the line."

The vehicle was originally rated to have 265 miles of range. Now it has about 220. Do the math, and it's at 83% of its original capacity. "The amount of degradation is pretty minor," Hajjar says.

Hajjar has moved on to a newer vehicle for his daily driver, mostly to enjoy higher-tech features. (His newer Model Y has Tesla's advanced driver-assistance software.) His son uses the Model S these days for his commute to college. "It's just sort of a backup vehicle now," Hajjar says. But he plans to hang on to it. He's sentimental about it, he says.

Why are batteries outlasting expectations? 

The engineers who developed modern EVs knew that prolonging battery life would be crucial. They designed systems to actively manage temperatures to improve battery lifespan, and software to constantly check battery health. Years have shown those efforts paid off.

But there's another reason EV batteries have out-performed expectations. It turns out that testing batteries is harder on them than the real world. Their lifespan was underestimated.

Simona Onori's lab at Stanford University has done research into the longevity of lithium-ion batteries, including a 2024 paper in Nature Energy showing that traditional methods for testing battery life are very stressful, and don't match the way batteries are actually used.

In most lab tests, researchers repeatedly cycle them from a very high state of charge to a very low one.

Real-world driving is gentler, with stops and starts — each start draws a bit of the battery's energy down, while each stop gives it a little time to recharge. A driver would never slam the accelerator to the floor and keep it there until the battery is dead.

"We accelerate, we decelerate," Onori says. "The battery will be charged, and discharged, some rest if you're at a traffic light."

Her lab's findings suggest that the traditional tests for battery life were unrealistically challenging, and Onori says ongoing work with real-world data is now confirming that. When they're actually driven, she says, EV batteries "age gracefully. Very gracefully."

Just like humans, she notes: "When we live a life with less stress, we live longer."

A decade plus … and counting 

So how long do EV batteries last? It's still too soon to put a precise number on it, because — as a group — the cars already on the road haven't yet reached the end of the S-curve, the point when they will start to show massive performance declines. In other words, they're not dead yet.

Meanwhile, battery technology keeps improving. The oldest EVs, like Hajjar's Model S, may not be the best indicator of how long newer EVs will last. Software systems to manage batteries have gotten more sophisticated. A lot of new EVs use a different battery chemistry — lithium iron phosphate or LFP — which lasts even longer than other lithium-ion batteries.

As Stephanie Valdez-Streaty, who follows EV trends for Cox Automotive, puts it: "These batteries are built to outlast the cars."

And there's one more wrinkle when it comes to figuring out the end of life for a normally-aging EV battery. They don't die abruptly, like an old engine cutting out. It's more that their range shrinks; they can only hold enough energy for shorter and shorter trips. Instead of shelling out for an expensive battery replacement, some EV owners might just put up with that limitation.

Thomas McVeigh, of Ontario, Canada, drives a 2014 BMW i3. That vehicle didn't have an impressive range even when it was new, and now it can only manage about 55 miles on a single charge in the winter. But it still looks great. It's pleasant to drive. It saves him on gas. Maintenance is wildly cheap for a 12-year-old vehicle, and especially for a BMW; his only real cost is new tires.

He's fine with its diminished range. And he's not inclined to put what he estimates would be a $6,000 battery into an aging car. Instead, maybe he'll pass it on to his kid. "Teenagers generally aren't going for long drives," he says.

Or maybe he'll keep it for himself, after all. "I mean," he says, "I love that car."

Copyright 2026 NPR

This week the Getty Villa Museum will begin offering a rare look at scrolls from its ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead” collection.

The collection of 19 manuscripts written on scrolls of papyrus and linen fragments are fragile, with one of them dating back nearly 3,500 years. Because of that, the materials are not usually on display to the public and the gallery will be carefully lit, temperature and humidity-controlled.

Sara Cole, associate curator of antiquities, told LAist that a lot of the language in the spells is written in first person speech for the deceased spirit to say while navigating the afterlife.

“One of my favorite phrases that I have on a wall of the gallery is ‘May I join with the stars that call out to me in the night boat,’” Cole said.

Cole explained that the manuscripts have been in the Getty’s collection since 1983, when they were donated by a bookseller in New York, who got them from the private collection of a British rare manuscript collector.

Egyptian mummy wrapping of Petosiris, Son of Tetosiris, from around 332–100 BCE.

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A years-long project is underway to translate the spells and rituals immortalized in the Getty's “Book of the Dead” scrolls and fragments, with a “large publication” in the works, Cole said.

The exhibition will feature four papyri belonging to women named Webennesre, Ankhesenaset, and Aset. Cole said “Book of the Dead” materials belonging to women are rare, because most were reserved for men.

Twelve of the manuscripts in the exhibition are written on fragments of linen that were used to wrap the mummified remains of the people they belonged to. Cole said she hopes visitors will understand that the material was very intimately associated with peoples’ burials.

Cole said her goal is to foreground the identities of the people who owned the scrolls, including two women who were ritual singers for the god Amun in the ancient city of Thebes.

“We see in these manuscripts the ancient Egyptians really grappling with this question and thinking about what might happen when we die... And I think that’s something we can all connect with and understand,” she said.

Cole recommends visiting the Getty’s website for a calendar of curator tours and special events related to the exhibition, including an upcoming talk by an Egyptologist.

The “The Egyptian Book of the Dead” at the Getty Villa runs from March 4 to Nov. 30.

The Supreme Court hears arguments Monday in an important gun case that has united an array of strange bedfellows, from conservative gun rights groups to liberal civil liberties groups. At issue is a federal law making it a crime for drug users to possess a firearm. It's the same law that was used to prosecute then-President Joe Biden's son for illegal gun possession — only this case involves marijuana use and gun ownership.

The briefs in the case present diametrically different versions of the facts. On one side, the Trump administration portrays Ali Danial Hemani as a drug dealer and someone with terrorist ties and a marijuana habit. Importantly, he is not being prosecuted for any of those offenses, however. Rather, the government has charged Hemani with violating a federal gun law that bars people with drug addiction from possession of firearms, a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the indictment, declaring that the federal law violates Hemani's Second Amendment right to own a gun.

The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that because Hemani admitted to FBI agents that he used marijuana several times a week, he is a "persistent" drug user, thus rendering illegal the possession of the gun he bought legally and keeps securely in his home.

Hemani's lawyer, law professor Naz Ahmad of the City University of New York, paints a very different picture of her client. Hemani, she notes, was born and raised in Texas, "attended high school there, played on the high school football team, attended the University of Texas at Arlington, was an honor student there" and is "a really valued member of his local religious community."

"The Second Amendment doesn't support disarming and prosecuting somebody for mere possession of a firearm if they happen to have used marijuana occasionally," she says.

"That's a mismatch," she adds, especially at a time when 40 states, to one degree or another, have legalized marijuana use.
 
If the court rules against Hemani, she says, "the statute could apply to anybody. It could apply to somebody who uses like a marijuana sleep gummy."

The Trump administration's advocate, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, acknowledges that under the Supreme Court's landmark gun decision four years ago, the government has a heavy burden to show that modern-day gun laws are analogous to laws in place at the nation's founding. But he contends that the statute used to prosecute Hemani is both justified and analogous to founding-era laws and practices.

Specifically, in his Supreme Court brief, Sauer points to the harsh punishments imposed during the founding era on "habitual drunkards." And he contends that both Congress and the states have restricted firearm possession by illegal drug users "for as long as that social evil has plagued America."

That said, for the most part, the case seems to have united groups from left to right, from civil liberties groups to gun rights advocates.

"It's outrageous that they tried to get him on a marijuana gun charge," says Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America. He contends that the government is seeking to criminalize conduct that was widely tolerated at the founding.

"It was the universal custom of founding-era militias to imbibe," he notes, adding that Thomas Jefferson and other famous Americans "possessed firearms while being users of drugs ranging from opium to cocaine."

At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum are a variety of gun-safety groups that fear that if Hemani wins his case, it could gouge a hole in the existing system of national background checks.

Under the current system, dealers are required to first clear the sale by submitting the buyer's name to the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The hitch is that there is a very small window in which to complete the check — just three days. And gun-safety groups say that anything that makes the rules more complicated and unclear could really screw up the system.

"We're saying" to the court, "whatever you do, it's essential that you keep the rules clear so that in that short window, federal agencies can give a quick answer to the dealers," says Douglas Letter of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 

An adverse ruling, he says, would mess up the criminal background check process. That, in turn, would result in "so many, particularly women and children, who will die if that kind of a system is not in place."

A decision in the case is expected by summer.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Longtime administrator Andres Chait addressed the public as acting superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District for the first time Monday.

“ We remain committed to academic excellence and student wellbeing,” he said ahead of a closed board meeting to discuss his employment and ongoing labor negotiations with district unions. “Our core values remain unchanged. I know transitions can create uncertainty, but our district is strong.”

After meeting for about four hours, the Board recessed the closed-door convening until March 10 at 9 a.m., the same day as the next regularly scheduled meeting.

Chait has worked for the district for nearly three decades, most recently as chief of school operations. His responsibilities included overseeing school safety, athletics and the district’s office of emergency management.

The LAUSD board voted unanimously Friday to place Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on paid administrative leave “pending investigation,” and appointed Chait in his stead. FBI agents searched Carvalho’s home in San Pedro and district office Wednesday.

A justice department spokesperson said the agency had a court-authorized warrant but declined to provide additional details. The reason for the searches is unknown.

Listen to Chait's full comments