The Brief

Days after starting his second term, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that targeted DEI programs and policies for elimination, decrying them as illegal and immoral. Museums across the country scrambled to react — and in many cases, comply. Within days, Washington’s National Gallery of Art announced it would close its office of belonging and inclusion and remove the words “diversity, equity, access and inclusion” from its list of values on its website. Five days later, the Smithsonian followed suit.

But the Japanese American National Museum, a relatively small institution in downtown Los Angeles, chose a different path. Founded in 1992 at the site of a historic Buddhist temple in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, the museum took a stand against Trump and his anti-DEI edicts while other museums acquiesced. Two weeks after the Smithsonian shuttered its DEI office and stripped its websites of DEI-related language, JANM’s leaders announced that they would not waver from their commitment to DEI or their mission of telling the full truth about the Japanese American experience, World War II incarceration camps and all. We will scrub nothing, JANM announced, in what would become a slogan for the museum’s defiance. That stance came with significant risks: At stake were millions in federal grants from institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

“You can’t put a price tag on your community’s integrity and your institution’s integrity,” said William T. Fujioka, chair of JANM’s board of trustees and the former chief executive officer of L.A. County.

To date, JANM, which has an operating budget of around $13 million, has lost $660,000 in federal funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, said Sherrill Ingalls, JANM’s director of marketing and communications. In October, the museum was also turned down for a Japanese American Confinement Sites grant from the National Park Service that funds projects about the Japanese American incarceration camps — a story central to the museum’s existence since it was founded.

“We always got money for this grant,” Fujioka said. This year: nothing.

“I don’t think we can draw conclusions,” said Ann Burroughs, JANM’s President and CEO. “I think it’s important that you quote that: We can’t draw conclusions.”

“But one hears things anecdotally,” she added.

“We don’t know for a fact why we didn’t get it,” Fujioka said. “But it’s probably grounded on the very vocal and strong position we’ve taken.”

Sticking to your principles in defiance of a vindictive president and your own financial interests is never easy. But as many prominent museums — institutions whose primary mission is to inform the public about our collective histories — bend to Trump’s will, it’s become a stand few museums other than JANM have been willing to take.

“If you find some, let me know, because I haven’t seen it,” said Lori Fogarty, the director of the Oakland Museum of California. “And I’ve been actively looking to see what other museums might take the stance of bravery that JANM has taken.”

JANM’s decision to take a stand came at a board of trustees meeting last February. “We started to hear that other nonprofits, particularly other museums, were starting to scrub their websites of any references to DEI because they were afraid they were going to lose funding,” Fujioka said.

“The executive orders were coming fast and furious, and there was this pervasive fear of, ‘What the hell does this mean?’” Burroughs said. The trustees considered what might be lost by opposing the executive orders — both in terms of funding, but also by placing a very visible target on their backs. “We talked about the importance of standing up and being vocal,” Fujioka said.

In the end, the board voted unanimously to push back against Trump’s attacks on DEI, approving a strongly worded statement that called out the administration’s “attempt at erasure” and affirmed the museum’s commitment “to stand up for the truth about history” to fight discrimination and hate “and to ensure that no community is ever again subjected to the injustices that Japanese Americans faced.” “There were no dissenting voices,” Burroughs said.

“Nobody stood up for Japanese Americans in 1942, other than the Quakers and perhaps one chapter of the ACLU,” said Burroughs, who was jailed as a young activist in her native South Africa for her opposition to apartheid, and is also the chair of the board of directors of Amnesty International USA. “I think our trustees, the children of camp survivors, felt that weight of history enormously. Now was the time to stand up for other people and other communities that were under attack.”

JANM’s statement was as thorough as it was bold, as the board decried the “erosion of civil rights” and the resurfacing of “racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism” under the second Trump administration. It denounced Trump’s directive to build a migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay; his invoking of the Alien Enemies Act to carry out mass deportations without due process (as was done to Japanese Americans during World War II); the administration’s attacks on birthright citizenship, among other actions.

“I was impressed,” Fogarty said of the statement, which was released Feb. 11. “But it totally made sense to me, knowing JANM’s history.”

It’s the kind of stance that JANM has been taking for years. After 9/11, the museum’s leaders declared their solidarity with Muslim Americans, noting the similarities between the hysteria and hateful political climates of 2001 and 1942. “The Japanese American community came to Michigan to hold one of their conventions and to support the Arab American community here,” said Devon Akmon, former director of the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. “JANM was very instrumental throughout our early years.”

In 2017, JANM was among the first museums in the country to see its leaders speak out against Trump’s anti-Muslim travel bans, as the museum drew hundreds of people to a series of marches, vigils and rallies in support of the Muslim community. Over the years, the museum has held programs about everything from implicit bias to antisemitism at its National Center for the Preservation of Democracy.

The issue came to a head in April, when JANM learned that the Department of Government Efficiency had terminated a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that was to fund an annual program that brings teachers from across the U.S. to Little Tokyo to learn about the history of the incarceration camps. The central goal of the program was to prevent history from repeating itself by educating teachers about the camps who would then pass along that knowledge to their students.

The museum responded with a rebuke of the executive order Trump issued in March, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” “The order,” the museum said in an April 3 statement, “aims to replace nonpartisan, research-based, and comprehensive history of the US with a grandiose and simplistic narrative that omits the nation’s injustices, mistakes, and dark chapters.”

“The attack on DEI was anathema to us, because our mission is absolutely centered in a celebration of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the U.S.,” Burroughs said.

Word of JANM’s stand spread through museum publications, on social media and via arts blogs, local news outlets and the Japanese American ethnic press. And when Gov. Gavin Newsom was looking for an appropriate place to hold a press conference about Proposition 50 and congressional redistricting in August, he chose the museum’s National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. The spot is steps from the site where, in 1942, Japanese Americans assembled to board buses bound for American detention centers and incarceration camps. As Newsom made his remarks, dozens of masked and armed Border Patrol agents roamed around the center’s plaza, ostensibly to conduct an immigration raid. At the press conference, Newsom called those actions “sick and pathetic.”

Since then, some other museums have also opposed Trump’s executive orders, though in quieter ways. A few, like JANM, are also choosing to “scrub nothing,” a message that JANM placed on t-shirts to raise money to replace lost federal funds. For JANM, scrubbing was never really a choice. What would a JANM exhibit or website look like without DEI? “It would be blank,” Burroughs said.

“Right now, a lot of museums are still trying to figure out how to navigate this very carefully and deliberately,” Akmon said. “I’ve had conversations with people who are very, very nervous about making public statements because of concerns like, ‘How do I shield my staff? How do we not get obliterated?’”

“I think it’s really important to acknowledge that not all museums have the same latitude to be as bold as JANM,” Akmon added. “There are factors like governance structures, funding, political environments, community pressures. But I do think that courage looks different in different contexts. For some it might be public statements and very forward-facing initiatives. For others, it could be quietly sustaining inclusive practices despite external pressure.”

Although San Diego’s Museum of Us isn’t taking a formal stance on DEI like JANM did, its current exhibit, which opened this November, is about as aggressively DEI in nature and name as one gets. Titled “Race: Power, Resistance & Change,” the exhibit “tells the truth about racial oppression and white supremacy in the Californias, and how indigenous and other communities of color have resisted that oppression,” said Micah Parzen, the museum’s CEO.

The exhibit was in the works years before Trump’s election to a second term, so it is “not a reaction [to the executive orders] by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “We’re just continuing to do what we believe museums should be doing.”

At JANM, the museum is expanding the reach of its message beyond its Los Angeles walls with JANM on the Go, an ambitious outreach project undertaken this year while the museum’s main exhibit space is undergoing major renovations. The program is partnering with other museums and art institutions to present shows about Japanese American female artists in Philadelphia and Monterey, Calif.; exhibits about the incarceration camps in Chicago and Seattle; a showcase of Japanese American car culture in Pasadena; and film screenings of JANM-produced documentaries in theaters from Santa Monica to Nagoya, Japan. Burroughs can’t say how much of this collaboration with other museums has been driven by their stance on DEI. “But certainly there is more interest in our work,” she said.

Still others are simply choosing not to accept or apply for federal grants. Last October, the executive committee of the Oakland Museum of California, which focuses on the arts, history and culture, turned down a major grant administered by the Department of Interior after the department told the Oakland Museum executive committee that accepting the award would essentially affirm that the museum would abide by Trump’s executive orders against DEI. The museum also decided to stop pursuing federal grants in the future. “We wouldn’t be able to accept federal funding in good conscience with those strings attached,” Fogarty said.

Parzen isn’t applying for any new federal grants either. “We know, just from a practical perspective, we’re not going to get them,” he said. “Because the mandate is to not fund the so-called ‘woke’ museums.”

Parzen said the administration’s anti-DEI stance has completely upended what the grants were originally intended to do — and nearly guaranteed that places like JANM won’t get the sorts of grants they did in the past, like the National Park Service one they lost. “One of the key criteria they used to use to evaluate these grants was: Does it support a community of color that typically hasn’t been represented in museums?” Parzen said. “Whereas now, all of a sudden, it’s: Does the grant support the administration and celebrate patriotism and all the wonderful things about what it means to be American?”

Since the beginning of the year, the National Endowment for the Humanities has canceled at least 1,200 grants — an estimated 85% of its existing grants. It’s hard to quantify how much has been lost to federal cuts, both in terms of research and public-facing programs, but it’s a lot, say museum directors like Fogarty. “Those grants are really important because they are peer reviewed and so competitive that in order to receive one, it really has to be a model project,” she said. “So these grants would really jump-start very important projects.”

This March, Burroughs will be attending the California Association of Museums annual conference being held in Los Angeles in 2026. With museum leaders and administrators in attendance from across the state, Burroughs will likely field questions about JANM’s ongoing stance against the Trump administration — how it came to make it, and what it has cost them.

Why was JANM able to take such a strong stance against DEI, for instance, when so many others could not, or would not? A major factor was its board, which was the driving force behind JANM’s position, Fujioka said.

“There was no politics in that discussion,” Fujioka said. “What we talked about was our heritage, and our responsibility to the Issei and Nisei [first and second Japanese American] generations, who lost so much.”

For many museums, this is not typical. “Boards in particular are getting skittish and nervous and saying, ‘Maybe we need to change this a little bit,’” Parzen said. “‘We wouldn’t want to be on the radar and subject to an investigation or an audit.’”

JANM also has the advantage of being a culturally specific museum whose very existence is rooted in community activism. The museum was established because other museums across the country were not telling the history of Japanese Americans, and was funded, in large part, by individual Japanese American community members and groups. “I think a museum like the Japanese American National Museum, or even the Arab American National Museum, a lot of these culturally specific museums have a lot of clarity on why they exist,” Akmon said. “I mean, a deep, deep purpose. Being a museum is almost secondary. It’s like, we’re a museum because of this. That is a powerful proposition.”

“And sometimes, in some of the darkest hours,” he continued, “being bold, for these types of institutions, actually galvanizes their community.”

Ironically, JANM is, in many ways, in the same position as other museums that scrubbed their websites or canceled exhibits or chose not to take a stand. Even after the Smithsonian scrubbed its site, Trump announced an extensive review of the museum to ensure that it “reflect(s) the unity, progress and enduring values that define the American story”; similarly, in May, Trump called for the removal of Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, because of her support of DEI, even after the gallery removed the DEI messaging from its website (she resigned the following month).

“A lot of museums chose not to speak out because they were afraid of funding getting cut,” Burroughs said. “Well, it’s been cut. It’s gone.”

For Burroughs, museums are at a critical crossroads where they must make tough decisions about how to stand up for their principles. “I just don’t believe for a second that museums can be neutral,” she said. “Museums can’t be neutral, whether you’re a science museum or an art museum or a cultural history museum. Especially at a time like this, when truth is under attack, when truth and history and science and art and culture is under attack, I think that we have a responsibility to stay firm.”

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main

The U.S. has lost its status as a country where measles is eliminated, a public health triumph secured a quarter century ago.

Researchers with direct knowledge of the deliberations on the country's status told KFF Health News that the Pan American Health Organization reached the conclusion this week: Measles has reestablished regular transmission in the country.

PAHO had planned a public announcement on Nov. 17.

In public health parlance, measles elimination depends on a country's sporadic outbreaks ending within a year. That's no longer happening in the United States.

"It's a very sad moment," said Anne Schuchat, an epidemiologist and a former deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was not involved in PAHO's decision.

"Measles causes so much unnecessary suffering, everything from a high fever and missed work and school to long-term complications like progressive degenerative nerve disease and death," Schuchat said.

Measles outbreaks are entirely preventable: Two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine prevent about 97% of infections, so when almost everyone in a community is fully vaccinated, the virus can't spread.

In the past two years, over 830 people have been hospitalized with measles in the U.S. More than 8,000 people have been sickened in outbreaks that have cost roughly $125 million in medical care, public health response and productivity losses, Johns Hopkins University researchers estimate.

States have reported 13 measles-associated deaths, including a 7-month-old in New York and infants in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in recent months. Babies typically aren't vaccinated before they're a year old.

PAHO, an international group that oversees health in the Americas and works with the World Health Organization, based its assessment on two analyses: one by the CDC and another by an independent group of measles experts.

Researchers anticipated this conclusion after an outbreak in Utah surpassed the one-year mark in June.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, Emily Hilliard, attributed the resurgence of measles to vaccination gaps that opened years before this administration. Indeed, rates of childhood vaccination have steadily declined since the COVID pandemic started.

But many scientists also blame the Trump administration for spreading vaccine misinformation and stifling a swift, strong response to outbreaks.

For example, the administration cut millions of dollars from children's immunization programs run by state health departments and terminated funds for research on vaccine hesitancy.

After Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sacked CDC director Susan Monarez in August 2025, she told Congress she was fired because she would not preapprove changes to vaccine recommendations "without reviewing the evidence."

Monarez added that "we already have seen the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years" and that, "if vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return."

Spokespeople for HHS and the White House defended the administration, and Kennedy, who led a prominent anti-vaccine organization before he took the helm at HHS. "The President and the Secretary have repeatedly encouraged measles vaccination, coordinated with states, and facilitated the deployment of vaccine doses across the country," White House spokesperson Allison Schuster wrote in an email.

Past administrations sounded alarms

For more than three decades, the federal government treated measles as a preventable tragedy, with sizable outbreaks triggering national efforts to boost vaccination and stop the virus from spreading.

That's no longer the case, said Patsy Stinchfield, executive director of the Measles Collaborative, a new initiative that educates the public about vaccines and assists health workers responding to outbreaks.

Stinchfield was a pediatric nurse at a children's hospital in Minnesota during the nation's last surge of measles before elimination, from 1989 to 1991. She recalled an entire ward devoted to children with measles and the enormous effort required to prevent the virus from spreading to kids with cancer and weakened immune systems.

Two children at the hospital died of measles. "That changed my career forever," she said.

Back then, she said, the federal government "saw the urgency." Officials held press conferences, spoke on the news about vaccines, issued clinical guidelines, and published reports in the CDC's flagship journal — the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, or MMWR — that drove policies.

When data suggested that some children weren't mounting a strong response to a single dose of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, a CDC advisory committee recommended two doses of the shot.

When CDC analyses found that many children with measles hadn't been vaccinated due to cost, the government launched the Vaccines for Children program to make immunizations available free of charge to underinsured families.

Cases plummeted. By 2000, the CDC and PAHO determined that measles was no longer a national threat — measles transmission had been eliminated.

"Elimination" allows for occasional outbreaks, because measles is not eradicated worldwide and a small fraction of people, such as young infants, can't be protected by vaccines.

People infected abroad sparked occasional outbreaks after U.S. elimination, but — until now — those fizzled out because of herd immunity, when 95% of people within a community are immunized. In those situations, outbreaks peter out and vulnerable people are protected.

It would be 14 years before another significant outbreak in the U.S. Then in 2015, the virus took off among unvaccinated children at Disney parks in California, giving rise to outbreaks elsewhere. Congress saw some 125 cases as an emergency and summoned the CDC's Schuchat to testify on the situation.

"Vaccination wasn't a partisan issue," she recalled. "This was about problem-solving: What can we do about this?"

National television aired a video of then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy talking with Sesame Street's Elmo about vaccination. HHS officials worked with vaccine experts on strategies to boost public confidence in vaccines. California and Vermont tightened vaccine requirements.

In 2019, House and Senate committees met again about measles, as a large outbreak took hold in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and New Jersey took hold. Congress asked HHS leaders how the administration planned to curb the rise of vaccine misinformation online.

"Internet fraudsters who claim that vaccines are not safe are preying on the unfounded fears and daily struggles of parents, and they are creating a public health hazard that is entirely preventable," Lamar Alexander, then a Republican senator from Tennessee, said at the time.

Alex Azar, health secretary during the first Trump administration, and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield held a press conference stressing the "importance of on-time vaccination."

And during the 2014, 2015, and 2019 outbreaks, the CDC's MMWR published detailed articles within weeks of data collection. Timing matters since the reports guide emergency response. "The MMWR is the voice of the CDC," Schuchat said, "alerting the nation, the media, clinicians, and public health experts to events that require action."

'The dog didn't bark'

Just after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, a measles outbreak exploded in West Texas. Within seven months, it surpassed the size of any in the U.S. since 1992, spread to Mexico and at least three other states, sickened more than 4,500 people in the two countries, and killed at least 16.

Instead of broadcasting clear, repeated messages on the importance of measles vaccines, Kennedy falsely claimed on Fox News that they lead to "deaths every year."

Congress didn't call a hearing, and HHS didn't send funds until after the emergency in West Texas had subsided. Besides an annual measles update, the MMWR didn't publish a single report on the outbreaks that year.

"A lot of this is the dog didn't bark," said Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy researcher at the University of California Law San Francisco. "Something that normally happens isn't happening."

Political appointees have delayed or blocked several MMWR articles, according to multiple CDC officials whom KFF Health News agreed not to identify because they feared retaliation for speaking with the press. "There's a deliberate effort to downplay vaccine-preventable diseases by the administration," one official said.

"Measles reports from West Texas and New Mexico were intentionally shelved," another scientist at the agency said. In April, The Washington Post reported that Jay Bhattacharya, who temporarily led the CDC this year and remains head of the National Institutes of Health, had blocked the publication of a study in the MMWR finding that COVID vaccines halved the likelihood of emergency department visits.

"The suggestion that HHS is deliberately suppressing information about measles or other vaccine-preventable diseases is false," Hilliard, the HHS spokesperson, said in an email to KFF Health News.

Hilliard said Kennedy and the CDC have provided approximately $100 million in additional funding to respond to outbreaks. The timing of MMWR reports, she added, varies due to factors such as data analysis and scientific review.

More than a year after data was collected from Texas, a few reports came out in the CDC's journal. One study on 60 people hospitalized for measles in West Texas revealed that two required intubation and mechanical ventilation and that a baby born to a mother with measles experienced dangerous brain swelling due to the virus.

The MMWR still hasn't published detailed reports on massive outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah and Pennsylvania. The CDC's national measles update hasn't appeared in the MMWR this year either. Instead, the journal has featured less urgent articles on scientific techniques that may help characterize future outbreaks.

CDC scientists told KFF Health News that they continue to analyze data but no longer expect to publish their findings in the MMWR because the process has become slow, opaque, and unpredictable. An urgent CDC report on the risks of measles to pregnant women was withheld, The Washington Post reported recently.

"We have two CDCs now," an official at the agency said. "One is staffed by CDC scientists and civil servants who are committed to public health, and the other is political appointees who go in and change the website."

The CDC's measles dashboard counts four fewer measles deaths than state health departments have reported this year. Kennedy has disputed some deaths and made unsubstantiated claims that Pennsylvania health officials misrepresented data.

Kennedy personally instructed the CDC to alter language on a webpage that said vaccines do not cause autism, he told The New York Times last year.

The page now suggests a potential link between the two and no longer lists a slew of peer-reviewed studies that rigorously searched for an association and found none. These have been replaced with speculation about a correlation and unsubstantiated accusations that the scientific establishment has buried a potential link in order "to prevent vaccine hesitancy."

The Trump administration has muddied the message on vaccines in other ways, Reiss said. Trump incorrectly said in August that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could be "quite lethal," and he repeated the debunked idea that vaccines may cause autism.

Stephen Miller, now Trump's White House chief of staff, has falsely said doctors "pump your kids full of shots days after birth with no understanding of the long-term consequences." Recommended vaccines and the vaccine schedule have been thoroughly studied.

Kennedy has made such claims for two decades, including as health secretary. "Having top leadership disseminating rumors, disinformation and flat-out falsehoods has been unforgivable," Schuchat said.

When pressed by journalists and Congress, Kennedy and Trump have recommended measles vaccines. But they haven't repeated the message clearly and unprompted on social media or on the podcasts and videos that Kennedy regularly appears in.

Kennedy also replaced vaccine experts on a panel advising the CDC with fringe researchers holding anti-vaccine views. And under his leadership, the CDC has laid off or forced out many vaccine specialists, including all of those in a group that partners with community organizations and pharmacies, the Immunization Services Division partnership branch.

At the same time, Kennedy has devoted resources to searching for potential harms from vaccines, including through an attempted clinical trial considered unnecessary and unethical by medical societies and the WHO.

To regain measles elimination status, the current U.S. outbreaks must end — then, future outbreaks must stop spreading within a year, said Paul Rota, a microbiologist and former CDC official. With outbreaks expanding in several states, he said, that moment isn't on the horizon.

"Bigger fires create more embers, and any one of those embers can seed another fire," he said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Copyright 2026 KFF Health News

Route 66 is celebrating 100 years of being the country's most famous highway, an icon of American culture.

As it passes through eight states — from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif. — its charm is all about driving on the open road, through the plains and prairies, canyons and deserts. Past big cities, cow towns and ghost towns, stopping at roadside motels, retro diners and kitschy tourist traps.

Like every good road trip, Route 66 has a soundtrack — starting with the famous anthem sung by Nat King Cole (and later, his daughter Natalie).

If you ever plan to motor West/ 
travel my way, take the highway that's the best/ 
Get your kicks on Route 66 …

Bobby Troup, then an aspiring songwriter and jazz pianist, wrote that 1946 song during a road trip he took to California. Over the years, many others have recorded their own versions, including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters.

It winds from Chicago to L.A/
More than 2,000 miles all the way/
Get your kicks on Route 66 …

The famous thoroughfare was created in 1926, and three years later, the Depression hit, followed by the Dust Bowl — when drought and dust storms devastated farmland.

A family in Pittsburg County, Okla., is forced to leave their home in June 1938 due to a serious drought in the region.

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"The Dust Bowl drove thousands of families away from their farms in the Midwest and Southwest states," said Jim Ross, who has written nine books about Route 66. He lives on an original section of the highway. "Most of them headed for California, because that's where the jobs were, or so they thought."

For the Farm Security Administration Project, Dorothea Lange photographed displaced families as they traveled West. The migrants drove in covered jalopies, hitchhiked and walked barefoot with their belongings along the highways.

Route 66 expert Michael Wallis says their trek was heartbreaking — "Following the scent of citrus out to California to rebuild their lives, they were hooked into that old dream, the land of milk and honey, which let them down.

Writer John Steinbeck chronicled the migration along Route 66 — which he named "The Mother Road" — in The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck's 1939 novel won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a now-classic film. It starred Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, an ex-con traveling from Oklahoma with his sharecropper family.

"Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can't eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad," he said in a monologue that would later inspire songwriters Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen.

And legends of Route 66 shifted gears with the times.

After World War II, cars and Route 66 tourism were heavily marketed. Families began taking road trips around the country. And by the early 1960s, their spirit of adventure was captured by rock and rollers Chuck Berry and The Rolling Stones.

It goes from St. Louis, Joplin, Missouri/
and Oklahoma City looks so pretty./
You'll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico/
Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona/ 
Kingsman, Barstow, San Bernardino… 

Route 66 was also celebrated by a TV series with the same name, with a theme song by composer and arranger Nelson Riddle. It features two young adventurers who hit the trans-American highways in a Corvette convertible.

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in a scene from the 1969 film <em>Easy Rider</em>.

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Route 66 was also the scenic road in the 1969 film Easy Rider. It starred Henry Fonda's son Peter, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson as counterculture wanderers who traveled by motorcycle.

"All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut," Hopper's character says in one scene, referring to some haters.

"Oh no," Nicholson's character responds. "What you represent is Freedom.

Into the 21st century

In 1985, Route 66 was officially decommissioned as a federal highway. But its lure endured. Two years later, the English electronic band Depeche Mode made a music video about it.

Won't you get hip to this timely tip?/ 
And you'll you make that California trip/
Get your kicks on Route 66

The documentary Depeche Mode:101 followed a group of fans traveling across the country on a tour bus. It was an inspiration for reality TV shows in the 1990s: The Real World and Road Rules.

Route 66 was also celebrated in Pixar's 2006 animated movie Cars. With John Mayer's version of the old classic as its theme song, Cars was set in a fictional town along Route 66: Radiator Springs. The popularity of the movie and a sequel led to a theme park attraction at Disneyland's California Adventure.

A 2012 handout photo provided by Disney Parks shows the Radiator Springs Racers attraction.

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Author Michael Wallis consulted for the Disney Imagineers and the Pixar filmmakers. And he was the voice of the animated sheriff in the movie — a 1949 Mercury Club Coupe police car.

A vintage postcard-style map traces Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles with landmark illustrations along the border, marking the road's 100th anniversary.

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Wallis co-founded the Route 66 Alliance, and is on the highway's Congressional Centennial Commission. The 81-year-old says the road has stirred his imagination ever since he was a child.

"There's a sense of adventure," he said. "If you've not been in a pie palace or greasy spoon on the Mother Road, you don't know what to expect."

Wallis' bestselling 1990 book The Mother Road is credited with sparking a revival of interest in Route 66.

"It's the path connecting two big cities across two-thirds of the continent," he said. "People renting you a room, selling you a cheeseburger, a peek at the snake pit. A dream. An illusion. That's what it's all about."
Copyright 2026 NPR

A cat walks past a Route 66 signs at the El Rancho Motel, once a major Route 66 landmark, on June 15, 2007 in Barstow, Calif.

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California voters faced big questions about money in this election, and the results sent mixed signals about how the electorate feels about taxation.

They want to tax the rich — but only sometimes. They want the money counters at the Franchise Tax Board to stay far away from personal assets, but are leaving the door open for future taxes or taxes on other people.

On Election Day, voters:

• Rejected Proposition 40, an effort to levy a first-of-its-kind wealth tax on billionaires
• Rejected Proposition 41, a taxation transparency measure 
• Approved Proposition 42, a ban on wealth taxes and retroactive taxes 
• Rejected Proposition 43, an attempt to make it more difficult for local governments to raise taxes
• Approved Proposition 3, a proposal to make permanent a tax on high-income earners

Voters also approved several high-profile local taxes, including two measures to fund the Bay Area’s regional transit systems, including Muni and BART, and a half-cent sales tax to fund firefighting in the city of Los Angeles.

The mixed outcome, experts say, shows that California voters are embracing tax hikes — but only when they can ensure the money is funding tangible services they support.

“Voters are willing to open up their wallet if they believe it’s for a good cause … and that it’s actually going to that place,” said Brandon Castillo, a prominent ballot measure strategist in California.

It also demonstrates voters’ willingness to support taxes that likely won’t affect their own pocketbook, said Mark Baldassare, survey director of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

“We are a very progressive state where voters, particularly today when affordability weighs on them, have a tendency to say somebody else will be paying taxes, not me.”

Still, that “not me” attitude didn’t stretch as far as the state’s contentious billionaire tax, which faced opposition from business interests, Democrats and deep-pocketed Silicon Valley executives alike.

Why did the billionaire tax fail?

The failure of the billionaire tax represents the most stunning defeat of Election Day for progressive Democrats who tried unsuccessfully to capitalize on souring sentiment toward the ultra-wealthy amid high gas prices and worsening inflation for average Californians. How could the most progressive measure in the most progressive state fail during a “blue wave” election?

“California voters are sometimes more conservative on ballot propositions than they are on voting for candidates,” said Christian Grose, a political science and public policy professor at USC.

In recent years, voters through ballot measures got tougher on crime, shot down a minimum wage increase and rejected efforts to make it easier to pass local bonds. In fact, voters upheld the death penalty the last time it appeared on the ballot even though the state has not executed anyone since 2006. In a historic decision, Gov. Gavin Newsom also earlier this month commuted all death row sentences to life without parole.

Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant, said this trend likely holds true because ballot initiatives — including taxation questions — generally ask voters to consider one issue at a time and are presented in a nonpartisan manner. In contrast, voting for a liberal or conservative candidate requires voters to weigh multiple aspects of a person’s record, character or values.

“They just have the policy question, and voters sort it out for themselves,” Stutzman said.

Those centrist tendencies helped push Prop. 42, one of two measures put on the ballot by billionaires trying to protect their wealth, across the finish line. That measure bans taxes on personal property, business interests and financial investments. The Associated Press confirmed its passage by 51.3% Friday.

Anti-tax and union supporters touted it as a way to protect retirement savings and pensions potentially targeted by the billionaire tax, though billionaire tax proponents countered that their measure never targeted ordinary retirement accounts in the first place.

Experts say voter confusion and a $378 million opposition warchest donated primarily by Silicon Valley tech billionaires doomed the billionaire tax.

Props. 41 and 42 were designed specifically to kill Prop. 40 if it had passed, creating a chaotic array of choices. The billionaire tax also amassed a coalition of diverse and vocal opponents, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, Planned Parenthood, medical clinics and the state’s largest teachers union, despite the California Democratic Party and California Labor Federation supporting it.

Polling showed support for the measure dropped 6 points in the last two months before the election, taking it from a narrow lead to a crushing defeat.

“The campaign against the billionaire tax was a success,” Grose said.

Other taxes succeeded

But few view the results on Prop. 40 as a referendum on the state’s progressive tax system. Instead, many analysts said it was simply bad policy that splintered California’s Democratic base.

Prop. 40 aimed to focus almost all the revenue in healthcare while cutting out other areas of state spending, which would lose funding if billionaires left the state and stopped paying income taxes, said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego. That, he said, was “an unforced error.”

“It made it a David and Goliath fight, but it didn’t need to be,” he said. “You don’t pass a landmark progressive tax increase that is sort of a change to how America has historically done anything by dividing up the progressive coalition.”

At the same time, Prop. 42’s anti-taxation sentiment was also somewhat tempered by the defeat of Prop. 43, which would have made increasing taxes for local public services more difficult, and the success of Prop. 3, which sticks a higher tax bracket on high-income earners to help fund schools.

Prop. 43 would have required a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax dedicated to specific services. Kousser said voters are concerned the measure would allow for “minority rule,” where just a third of voters would be able to block essential funding for local services.

“Voters don’t like to put in place these rules that seem to be tilted in one direction,” he said.

David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, said Prop. 3’s passage sent a “resounding message of support for taxing the wealthy.” That measure passed with nearly 59% of the vote and sets a higher tax bracket on individually earned income above $360,000.

People in that income bracket have been paying that extra tax since 2012 as a temporary state budget fix; Prop. 3 made it permanent.

Why could voters distinguish between the income tax Prop. 3 and the wealth tax in Prop. 40? Partly because Prop. 3 had no opposition among Democrats, Kousser noted. It also extended an existing tax, whereas Prop. 40 opponents ran ads claiming that state lawmakers could come after average Californians’ personal savings.

Ballot box tempting for revenue seekers

Dustin Corcoran, chief executive of the California Medical Association, which opposed the billionaire tax, said he also does not view its defeat “as an endorsement of wealth inequality or the status quo.”

The state still needs to find a way to securely finance healthcare, education and other core services, Corcoran said, and the medical association is exploring future ballot initiative options to generate revenue.

Not even Prop. 40’s supporters view its defeat as a reason to stop trying to tax the ultra-wealthy in California. Dave Regan, president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the primary proponents of the billionaire tax, vowed to come back in 2028 with another billionaire tax initiative.

Regan also pushed back on the notion that Democrats were divided on wealth taxes, arguing that polling showed between 60% to 70% of Democrats supported the measure and only Democratic leaders such as Newsom and Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra opposed it.

“At the very highest levels of state officials there’s actually, you know, a different point of view, but that’s out of step with where regular people are at,” Regan said.

Still, fiscal conservatives, the state’s non-partisan budget analyst, and even some moderate Democrats say taxation cannot be the only solution to California’s budget woes. The state has faced four consecutive deficit years and spending that outpaces revenue despite the budget as a whole growing. The current state budget calls for $351.7 billion in total spending — a 64% increase over the $214.8 billion Newsom signed in his first year as governor seven years ago.

“California’s budget is structurally overextended despite booming and near-record revenues,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote in a new budget assessment. “This overextended budget reflects a higher ongoing spending base; diminished reserves; an already accumulated wall of debt; and annual, out-year operating deficits of $8 billion to $10 billion.”

Updated November 14, 2026 at 13:52 PM ET

WASHINGTON— Friday's nationwide ground stop started when a contractor updated old Federal Aviation Administration telecommunication lines, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday.

Tens of thousands of passengers across the U.S. are still stranded Saturday after the rare ground stop. Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator who joined Duffy at Saturday's media briefing, said schedule problems should be resolved by Sunday evening.

Nearly 25,000 flights were delayed, and over 9,000 were cancelled on Friday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking site. The disruption seeped into Saturday morning with more than 4,000 cancellations recorded, which is 18% of flights departing the U.S., according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

L3Harris, a long time contractor for the FAA, was doing routine maintenance in at least one remote location changing copper wire to fiber optics, Duffy said. "When I tell you that we're using old equipment, we're using old equipment," he said.

He said the FAA is still investigating the exact error that started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system, and if L3Harris was at all responsible.

"It's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?"

L3Harris did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.

These updates have been happening in American institutions for decades, Duffy said.

"Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital," Duffy said. "Just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made, but this is not complicated."

Bedford said there was no evidence of anything nefarious happening or any AI-related issues.

Since his time in office, Duffy said he's been asking Congress for money to make more upgrades. In July 2025, Congress approved $12.5 billion to modernize the nation's aging air traffic control system.

With that money, 70% of copper communications have been replaced to high-speed fiber, Bedford said. Duffy called the innovations and the need for more a "bipartisan moment."

"This is the moment, if we don't start to switch out our systems, when, how long are we going to wait, America, and Congress?" Duffy asked.

Thousands of passengers miss flights

Passengers wait at boarding gates at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, DC on November 13, 2026.

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Zina Desmazes

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AFP via Getty Images

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For about four hours on Friday, thousands of flights at U.S. airports were grounded in one of the biggest disruptions of the nation's air travel system since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The aviation system is back online and slowly returning to normal Saturday morning, but delays and cancellations will continue, Duffy said. Bedford said all passengers will be put on new flights or they'll get a full refund, but that people should reach out to their airlines directly.

Flight boards at airports across the country Saturday morning continued to be riddled with red cancelled marks. At Tampa International Airport in Florida, people in the main terminal area before security curled up in chairs to grab a wink of sleep.

On Friday night, a flight board at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C. showed dozens of flights delayed into the early morning hours or cancelled.

Passengers Erin and Jake Britt spent half the day at the airport in D.C. on Friday. Their plane to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. boarded at 3 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., they were getting off the plane — but they were still in D.C.

"Overall, our plane was definitely annoyed, but reasonable," Erin Britt said, as the couple left the airport at 8 p.m. "People being upset and asking like, 'Well, how are you not prepared for this?' And it was like, 'Well, no one was prepared.'"

She said neither the pilot nor flight attendants had any more information than passengers."They seem just as in the dark," she said.

The pair decided to cancel their weekend trip, but the night didn't end there. They spent over nine hours overnight waiting on the JetBlue customer service call line to be reimbursed. "I was setting alarms in 20 minute intervals in case I fell asleep," Erin Britt said.

For people who had events or plans over the weekend – the delay added an extra layer of stress. Joe Romano and Maddie Cabana had a cruise leaving Orlando, Fla. Saturday afternoon.

"It was a big eye roll. I mean, I travel a lot for work already, so I'm constantly dealing with flight delays," Romano said. "When this happened, I was just like, 'Of course, it always happens to me.'"

"Just rather inconvenient and frustrating," Cabana added, as the pair contemplated checking their bags or going home. They even thought about driving to Florida. "Hopefully, everything will be fine. It'll all work out. It always does."

And it did— eventually. After their JetBlue flight was ultimately cancelled, they quickly booked another one on Southwest Airlines and made it early Saturday morning.

Others, like Suze DiPietro decided flying wasn't worth it anymore. Her husband drove about four hours down from Ocean City, New Jersey to pick her up in D.C. Luckily, they had friends in the area where they spent the night.

"My husband, my hero, is driving down from New Jersey to come get me," DiPietro said.

Other alternatives included people switching to Amtrak trains as they struggled to get to their destination. Although, even Amtrak's system had a brief outage Friday night.

This was only the second nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001. The U.S. last issued a ground stop of this scale in 2023, when all U.S. airports were shut down due to an outage in the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which alerts pilots and airports of real-time hazards.

That outage prompted fears of a cyberattack, but the FAA later determined the issue was caused when contract workers inadvertently deleted critical files.

The FAA has recently begun rolling out an AI-enhanced software tool known as the SMART system as part of its ambitious overhaul of the nation's air traffic control system. But Air Space Intelligence, the company that makes the tool, quickly dismissed speculation that its product could be connected to the flight disruptions.

"The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC," the company said on social media.

Ava Pukatch contributed to reporting.

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