LONDON — Boris Johnson, look away now. The 800-page report from Britain’s official inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic landed Thursday evening. It makes for grim reading for the country’s former prime minister, and much of his top team. Johnson has yet to respond. But the inquiry machine-guns a “too little, too late” government response to the early raging of the virus in 2020, a “toxic culture” in No. 10 Downing Street under the then-PM — and a serious failure to take heed of mistakes made. “Unless the lessons are learned and fundamental change is implemented, the human and financial cost and sacrifice of the Covid-19 pandemic will have been in vain,” the inquiry’s chair Heather Hallett, warned as the report was published Thursday. POLITICO pored over the full report to full out some of the biggest recipients of criticism. 1) BORIS JOHNSON COULDN’T MAKE HIS MIND UP Johnson is roundly criticized for failing to take the virus seriously enough in the initial months, for “oscillating” between different decisions on whether to actually introduce a lockdown, and for a host of controversial comments which caused offense to victims’ families when they came out during the inquiry’s evidence gathering process.  Particular criticism is reserved for Johnson as boss. The culture in Johnson’s No. 10 is described as “toxic and chaotic.” He is accused of “reinforcing” a workplace where the views of others, particularly women, were ignored — and of “encouraging” the behavior of his chief aide, Dominic Cummings. 2) DOMINIC CUMMINGS MADE THE CULTURE WAY WORSE — BUT SAVED LIVES Cummings arguably comes in for even harder criticism than Johnson. The report accuses the then-PM’s chief aide of having “materially contributed to the toxic and sexist workplace culture at the heart of the U.K. government.” It says he was a “destabilising influence” at a time of crisis — and that he was at fault for a “culture of fear, mutual suspicion and distrust” in government. Cummings is, however, praised by the report for his “commendable action” in bringing about a change in the government’s early pandemic strategy, which saved lives.  The culture in Boris Johnson’s No. 10 is described as “toxic and chaotic.” | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Getty Images 3) MATT HANCOCK WASN’T TRUSTED TO BE STRAIGHT WITH PEOPLE The short-lived reality TV star Matt Hancock is a figure of fun in U.K. politics these days — but he once held a role of enormous importance as health secretary during the pandemic.  For his contribution to Britain’s efforts as the virus initially spread, Hancock earns multiple instances of harsh criticism in the report.  Hancock is slammed for the “overenthusiastic impression” he gave to Johnson and top officials on his department’s readiness to face a pandemic, and it is said he gained a reputation for “overpromising and underdelivering.” The report even says concerns were raised about Hancock’s reliability and trustworthiness in meetings as Britain grappled with how to respond in the early days. The report ultimately says Britain should have locked down a week earlier than it did in March 2020, blaming officials, politicians and scientists for not moving quicker. It argues that the failure to do so came at a cost of around 23,000 lives. 4) CHRIS WORMALD SHOULD’VE DONE MORE Government officials were concerned that the Covid inquiry could prove embarrassing for Chris Wormald — who now serves as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet secretary, a supremely powerful role at the head of Britain’s civil service. During the pandemic, Wormald was the top civil servant at Hancock’s Department of Health and Social Care, which is repeatedly criticized for giving false impressions on how prepared it was. While Hancock is widely blamed for this, the report does slam Wormald for failing to “rectify” the health secretary’s overconfidence. It says his failure to take any action “gave rise to additional concerns about the effectiveness of Wormald’s leadership.  That was as bad as it got for the current Cabinet Secretary, who might breathe a sigh of relief. Dominic Cummings is praised by the report for his “commendable action” in bringing about a change in the government’s early pandemic strategy, which saved lives. | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Getty Images 5) BITS OF THE BRITISH STATE ITSELF WERE SERIOUSLY SHAKY Whitehall itself comes in for some stark criticism, although the report stops short of a damning indictment of the whole system. The Cabinet Office — often referred to as the wiring at the center of government — is particularly slammed for failing to take more of a lead in early pandemic decision making. The report says that the government’s decision making structures “required improvement” during the pandemic, and that Johnson often sidelined his cabinet in favor of “centralised decision making.”  Brief sections on Welsh and Scottish governing cultures during the pandemic conclude that neither had real issues with relationships, though then-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is accused of hogging the limelight with her daily lockdown press conferences, even if there’s praise for her “serious and diligent” approach to leading Scotland through the pandemic.

The mastermind of President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the federal workforce, Russ Vought, promised to use the government shutdown to advance his goal of “shuttering the bureaucracy.” Presented with a layoff plan that would have moved in that direction, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services scaled it way back, POLITICO has learned. It was another example, like several during the layoffs led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency this spring, in which Trump’s agency heads have pushed back successfully against top-down cuts they viewed as reckless. POLITICO obtained an HHS document from late September, the shutdown’s eve, that said the department wanted to cut nearly 8,000 jobs, based on guidance from Vought’s budget office. On Oct. 10, HHS only went ahead with 1,760. In the two weeks since, the number has dwindled to 954, as the department has rescinded nearly half of the total, blaming a coding error. The disorganized handling of the layoffs is reminiscent of Musk’s DOGE effort, in which employees were rehired after being fired, sometimes on court orders, sometimes because agency officials objected. In each case, the layoffs rattled agency managers and traumatized employees, as Vought wanted, but haven’t gone nearly as far in downsizing the government as forecast. While the nearly 8,000-person layoff plan this month was largely scuttled by top agency officials who intervened before the cuts could be made, the whiplash manner in which it was proposed and then scaled back shows that the administration is still following the DOGE playbook. “These appear to be leftovers from DOGE. I don’t know anyone — including in the White House — who supports such cuts,” a senior administration official told POLITICO in explaining the pullback from the promised mass layoffs. The official, granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters, pointed to the involvement of a staffer who was part of the DOGE effort in producing the administration document. That document came to its initial tally of 7,885 layoffs at HHS by adding employees who would be furloughed during the shutdown, as well as workers in divisions that would be shuttered if Congress passed Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal. Trump’s May budget plan called for a 25 percent cut to HHS, but lawmakers have rejected it in the appropriations bills now in process. HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told POLITICO in a statement that HHS made its layoff list “based upon positions designated as non-essential prior to the Democrat-led government shutdown.” She added: “Due to a recent court order, HHS is not currently taking actions to implement or administer the reduction-in-force notices.” According to the document reviewed by POLITICO, the National Institutes of Health was to take the hardest hit among HHS agencies, 4,545 layoffs, or roughly a quarter of its workforce. It ended up firing no one. A federal judge in San Francisco blocked the firing of 362 of the 954 HHS employees who did receive the October layoff notices. More will be shielded after additional federal employee unions joined the lawsuit on Wednesday. In congressional testimony earlier this year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had downsized his department’s staff to 62,000 from 82,000 when he took office. He’s nowhere close. An HHS contingency plan produced in advance of the shutdown said the department still employed 79,717. Employees who took a Sept. 30 buyout offer from Musk would bring that lower, though the number who did is unknown because the White House has not released agency-by-agency totals and has stopped publishing agency employment updates. It’s unclear who within the Trump administration came up with the initial plan for the shutdown layoffs. Hilliard did not respond to POLITICO’s question about who within HHS was responsible. Thomas Nagy, the HHS deputy assistant secretary for human resources, has been the one updating the judge, Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, about the layoffs. The experience of the fired 954, whose last work day is scheduled for early December, mirrors the chaos of DOGE’s spring layoffs, in which employees were left wondering whether they still had jobs amidst lawsuits and officials were forced to backtrack and rehire fired workers. In one such instance, Kennedy told a House panel in June that he had appealed directly to Vought to make sure Head Start funding was protected after the early education and health care program was left out of the president’s budget proposal. In another case, HHS fired and then rehired an award-winning Parkinson’s researcher. Kennedy also told senators that he brought back hundreds of staffers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. That came after West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and others protested. Now many HHS employees are having déjà vu. The situation is reminiscent of the experience some former employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development had during the Trump administration dismantling of the foreign aid agency early this year. Some furloughed employees at HHS, for example, didn’t have access to their work emails to receive notices informing them they were laid off this month. “There were individuals who didn’t even know if they were in RIF status until they got the hard copy packet in the mail two days ago,” a laid-off employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, using the acronym for “reduction-in-force.” A similar situation played out at HHS’ Office of Population Affairs, where nearly all of the roughly 50 employees were laid off two weeks ago, according to one person with knowledge of the situation speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. The office, which is congressionally mandated, manages hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for family planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs. Three fired employees from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — granted anonymity to provide details about the firings without fear of retribution — said that many of the roughly 170 employees cut from the agency earlier this month are getting physical copies of their termination notices mailed to them because they’re shut out of their email accounts. “DOGE never really left, it just looks different now,” one of the SAMHSA employees said. Amanda Friedman and Sophie Gardner contributed reporting. Tim Röhn is a global reporter at Axel Springer and head of investigations for WELT, POLITICO Germany and Business Insider Germany.

Donald Trump this spring dubbed himself the “fertilization president.” But some conservative family policy advocates say he’s done little so far to publicly back that up and are pushing to get the White House in the remaining months of the year to prioritize family policy — and help Americans make more babies. A top priority is a pronatalist or family policy summit that spotlights the U.S.’s declining fertility rate. Other asks, which typically run through the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, include loosening regulations on day cares and child car seats, further increasing the child tax credit and requiring insurers to cover birth as well as pre- and post-natal care at no out-of-pocket cost. While the Trump administration has advanced a handful of policies explicitly billed as “pro-family,” some conservative advocates are dismayed that the president has not done more on one of his campaign’s most animating issues. The lack of movement threatens to dampen enthusiasm among parts of the Republican Party’s big tent coalition, including New Right populists, who worry about the erosion of the U.S. workforce, and techno-natalists, who advocate using reproductive technology to boost population growth, as the GOP stares down a challenging midterm election. “I think there are people, including the [vice president] and people in the White House, who really want to push pro-family stuff,” said Tim Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently wrote “Family Unfriendly,” a book that has become popular in conservative circles. But “it hasn’t risen to the forefront of the actual decision-making tree in the White House, the people who can put some velocity on things.” “It’s all nascent,” Carney added, but “it is going to be something that Republicans want to talk about in the midterms.” White House aides acknowledge advocates’ restlessness, but argue that even as it has yet to take action on the suite of explicitly pro-family proposals advocates want, they have taken a whole-of-government approach to family policy. Privately, the White House is deliberating its next moves now that the GOP’s tax and policy bill passed. It’s taking a two-pronged approach: addressing financial pressures and infertility issues that prevent people from having children; and helping couples raise kids in alignment with their values. That latter bucket includes bolstering school choice and parental rights, promoting kin- and faith-based child care, and other actions that can help with the costs of raising children, including health care and housing. “You saw what we were able to accomplish in 200 days. It was a lot. Just wait for the next three-and-a-half years,” said a White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy. “There’s a lot of opportunity to accomplish a lot through pure administrative action, through the bully pulpit and, of course, if we need to, through working with Congress.” The official couldn’t rule out a family policy event hosted by the White House in the future. “Look, the president loves to convene stakeholders and thought leaders and policy leaders,” the official added. While they understand the White House has had its attention fixed on other issues, like foreign policy, immigration, and trade, pronatalists are anxious for the administration to do something about the declining birth rate. They see it as, quite literally, an existential crisis. “Demographic collapse has become the global warming of the New Right,” said Malcolm Collins, who along with his wife Simone, are two of the most outspoken techno-natalists and have pitched the White House on several policies. “And this is true, not just for me, but for many individuals within the administration, and many individuals within the think tanks that are informing the administration.” The Trump administration has advanced a handful of policies that conservatives argue will support families and, they hope, encourage people to have children. The president’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill made permanent the child tax credit first passed as part of Trump’s first-term Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, increased the rate and adjusted it for inflation on an ongoing basis. The legislation also established a one-time $1,000 so-called baby bonus for children born in 2025 through 2028. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy instructed his agency to give preference in competitive grants to communities with higher-than-average birth and marriage rates. Critics of the administration note that the megalaw will make it harder for people to keep their Medicaid insurance, the president’s proposed 2026 budget eliminates childcare subsidies for parents in college, and Trump’s CDC eliminated a research team responsible for collecting national data on IVF success rates. But family policy advocates say on the whole they see progress, though not nearly enough to reverse the trend of declining birth rates. “From my conversations with folks in the administration, there is definitely interest in doing something visible on the family stuff. They feel like they’re going down the list — homelessness, crime, obviously immigration — of different things and families’ time will come,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who focuses on family policy. The U.S. birth rate has been declining since the Baby Boom ended in the early 1960s, falling from 3.65 births per woman in 1960 to 1.599 in 2024, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. There are similar trends across high-income nations, in part the result of easier access to contraception, changing societal values favoring careers over having children and high costs of living. The issue came to the fore during the campaign when Trump promised government-funded in vitro fertilization in an effort to allay concerns over his anti-abortion stance. A few months later, then-Sen. JD Vance doubled down on controversial comments about the country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” and argued for more babies in the U.S. Elon Musk, perhaps the most prominent pronatalist, was Trump’s biggest financial booster during the campaign and a key adviser in the early days of the administration. There is no agreed-upon solution to the problem of a declining birth rate. Hungary is held up as a model by pronatalists for its family friendly policies but its birth rate remains low, despite exempting women with four or more children from paying income tax, among other incentives. The birth rate also remains low in Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland that have generous paid parental leave and heavily subsidized childcare. Still, advocates in the U.S. have a list for the Trump administration they believe will make a difference, arguing that even if they fail to increase the birth rate, they would support families. Some policies that pronatalists hope the Trump administration will pursue are more typically associated with the left, such as expanding child tax credits, which Trump did in the GOP megalaw, and reducing the costs of child care. But others have a home in the libertarian wing of the GOP, such as cutting regulations on day care and curbing car seat rules. Some of these proposals, pronatalists acknowledge, come with more risk but would overall result in more births. For decades, social conservatives led the GOP’s charge on families, arguing in support of policies that promote two-parent, heterosexual families. But declining birth rates, coupled with a broadening of the GOP coalition, has broadened the lens to focus on increasing the birth rate, a new pronatalist tinge. In an effort to keep their nascent and fragile coalition unified, neither social conservatives nor the techno-natalists are pushing policies at the extremes — like banning IVF or creating genetically modified super soldiers. That helps explain why the president has not taken action on one of his most concrete promises, making IVF free, despite receiving a report on it in May. A second White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said expanding IVF access for families remains “a key priority,” but declined to offer specifics on the status of any policy moves. “This issue is a winner for the Republican Party, it’s a winner for women, it’s a pro-life issue,” said Kaylen Silverberg, a fertility doctor in Texas who has consulted with the White House on IVF. “This will result in more babies, period.” But social conservatives are morally opposed to IVF both because of a belief life begins at conception and because they don’t think that science should interfere with the natural act of procreation. The proposal would also be quite costly. Instead, they want the White House to support something called reproductive restorative medicine, which can include supplements and hormone therapy, that they say will help women naturally improve their fertility. “The point of President Trump’s campaign pledge was to help couples with infertility have children. There’s a way to do that that’s cheaper, faster, less painful and more preferable to couples,” said Katelyn Shelton, a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics, Technology and Human Flourishing Program who worked at the Department of Health and Human Services during the first Trump administration. While most of the family policy conversation has been concentrated on the right, it’s also starting to grow on the left, alongside the so-called “abundance” movement focused on reducing government bureaucracy. Both the National Conservative Conference and the Abundance Conference this week in Washington hosted panels on family policy. Reducing barriers to building housing is “good for families,” said Leah Libresco Sargeant, a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that describes itself as supporting free markets and effective government, who co-moderated the Abundance Conference’s family policy panel. “That’s not kind of a family centered policy per se, [but] it’s a good policy that’s good for families.” Ultimately, many conservative family policy advocates argue there is only so much government can do to address what they see as a fundamentally cultural and religious problem. It’s a posture that the GOP’s historically small-government contingent takes as it pushes back on their new populist bedfellows. “I do not think that the problem of people not having enough kids is a problem of economics. I think that is very often a line that is used in order to promote a larger government populism,” said conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. “This is a predominantly religious problem, it’s a cultural problem.” Pronatalists have a lot of hope in the future of the GOP in part because of Vance, the administration’s most prominent and ideologically committed proponent of family policies, to carry the mantle, either during Trump’s presidency or as part of his own 2028 presidential bid. They love that Vance brings his children on official trips and is open about carving out time during the day to spend with them. “Our political leaders are inherently cultural leaders,” Carney said. “Bringing his kids with him to Europe and at the inauguration — where the little one, she was sucking on her fingers, so they had put Band-Aids on some of them so she wasn’t sucking all of them at once — all of those things that show a loving family and that kind of stuff, I think that can be culturally really productive.”