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National

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he wouldn't have nominated fake electors to help contest the 2020 race if put in Trump's shoes.  

Driving the news: Ramaswamy said "bad judgments" were made in regard to former President Trump's alleged fake electors scheme to subvert the 2020 election results while speaking to ABC's George Stephanopoulos on "This Week." 

What they're saying: "Frankly, if I were the U.S. president, I would have never let it get to that place," Ramaswamy said.

"We had systematic suppression of information. We had systematic COVID mandates, which I think actually created a lot of the frustration that led up to January 6 that was pent up," Ramaswamy said.

When asked if he thought it was wrong for Trump to "encourage the mob to storm the Capitol," Ramaswamy disagreed with the characterization, saying Trump encouraged "peaceful protest" on Jan. 6.

"Is that what I would have done that day under those circumstances? No, but I do think that that's different from a crime, and so I disagree with a lot of what he did that day," Ramaswamy said. 

Yes, but: Ramaswamy's comments echoed his enthusiasm at the first GOP presidential primary debate surrounding his commitment to support Trump as the Republican nominee, even if the former president is convicted in any of his four ongoing criminal cases.

The GOP hopeful doubled down on his debate response when questioned by Stephanopoulos on Sunday.

"What I've said is clear, if Donald Trump's the nominee, yes, I will support him. And if I'm the president, yes, I will pardon him, because that will help reunite the country, but it's not the most important thing I'm going to do as the next president," Ramaswamy said.

Zoom out: Ramaswamy has had to backpedal on previous comments he made about Trump's actions on Jan. 6. 

Back in Jan. 2021, Ramaswamy had called Trump's actions surrounding Jan. 6 "abhorrent." 

Last week, Ramaswamy disputed the claim that he criticized Trump for being a sore loser on Jan. 6. in his 2022 book, "Nation of Victims."

Go deeper: Vivek Ramaswamy's post-debate fundraising haul

Vivek Ramaswamy's post-debate fundraising haul

Ramaswamy criticizes Trump's actions in alleged fake elector scheme

"Frankly, if I were the U.S. president, I would have never let it get to that place," Ramaswamy said.

Vivek Ramaswamy takes questions in the Spin Room after the first GOP presidential primary debate in August. Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

2024 presidential election

Politics & Policy

The anticipated late summer COVID wave is here – but it's tougher than ever to measure.

The big picture: With the end of federal COVID case tracking and the prevalence of rapid at-home testing, virus-related hospitalization rates and wastewater analyses are the best bet for monitoring spread.

Driving the news: If people in your life are testing positive, you're probably not alone.

Hospitalizations have increased 31% in the last two weeks, federal data shows. 

Meanwhile, wastewater surveillance indicates an uptick in infections particularly in the West and Northeast.

Yes, but: Hospitalizations remain far below their pandemic-era peak, in both percentage change and raw terms.

The CDC reports 15,067 overall hospital admissions in the week between Aug. 13-19, compared to more than 150,000 in one week in January 2022.

Still, that's up from the weeks prior, when there was 10,320 hospital admissions from July 30-Aug. 5.

Of note: Hospitalizations aren't a perfect metric or an early-warning tool, but rather a reflection of what's already happened.

Because older people are more vulnerable to severe COVID, for example, hospitalization rates are likely to be higher in states or communities with older populations, Axios' Alex Fitzpatrick and Kavya Beheraj report.

Hospitalization rates are also a lagging indicator, as it takes time for infected people to become sick, and then to become sick enough to require hospitalization. 

The BA.2.86 variant has been identified in several countries, including at least four states in the U.S., the CDC announced this week.

But the current increases in cases and hospitalizations in the U.S. are likely being driven by infections with XBB lineage viruses, not the new variant.

There is currently no evidence that this variant is causing more severe illness, per the CDC.

Wastewater can reveal broad trends across wide areas, particularly after the CDC ended case tracking.

The wasterwater analyses are also more useful than ever for detecting COVID since there is less individual testing than before and less reported testing from mass nose-swabbing campaigns.

Don't we all have immunity from COVID by now?

"Immunity is stronger today than at any other point in the outbreak," CDC Director Mandy Cohen said Thursday. "But we still need to be cautious because that protection does decrease over time."

COVID is becoming a more manageable and less severe illness but the virus continues to change. 

"Even this week, we're seeing a new change in the virus pop up, and we're learning more about what that means," Cohen said. "But it's a reminder that we need to stay ahead of this virus.

The newly updated COVID-19 booster is expected to be available in mid-September.

It's been over a year for many Americans since their last booster and so immunity has started to wane.

If you get the currently available vaccine, it could delay your eligibility for the updated booster, Cohen said.

Yes, you can get a flu shot and COVID booster at the same time.

A late summer COVID wave is here, but it's trickier than ever to track

If it seems like everyone around you has COVID, you might be on to something.

Illustration of the sun, encircled with coronavirus protrusions that are fading from left to right.

COVID-19

The U.S. health system faces critical questions about cost, access and equity. Technological advances and new discoveries about diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s are transforming patient care and reshaping public health.

Health

Data: Lauren Bauer, the Hamilton Project at Brookings; Note: Includes all mothers whose youngest child is under 5. Chart: Axios Visuals

Defying all expectations, the percentage of women in the workforce with young children is significantly higher than it's ever been, says a new report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

Why it matters: This could represent a "level shift" for working mothers — with potential lifetime consequences in terms of higher earnings and improved career trajectories.

Driving the news: In June, 70.4% of women with children under 5 were in the workforce — compared to a peak of 68.9% before the pandemic, per the report.

"In labor force participation rate terms, that's really big," said Lauren Bauer, a fellow at Brookings, who co-authored the report.

What they found: The paper looked at participation rates for all women, those with elementary school-aged kids and those with teens. No other categories have rebounded past their pre-pandemic levels.

The numbers surprised Bauer, who called them "shocking." Along with many others, she'd worried that the pandemic would push more mothers out of the workforce. 

What happened: More research needs to be done, but it looks like a big factor is remote work, which enabled more women to stay attached to the workforce.

The women who were highly educated, and more likely to work from home, were among those more likely to be in the workforce now than  pre-pandemic.

Plus, as other research has found, the pandemic — and ability to work remotely— may also have led more families to decide to have babies.

Big picture: Advocates for women in the workforce have long argued that more flexibility at work would allow mothers to hang on to their jobs.

It's easy to understand why — if you're able to telework, you can handle a call from daycare to come pick up a feverish child, manage a midday doctor appointment, or take someone to a playdate.

If you can't get that flexibility, you're more likely to leave a high-demand full-time job to go part-time, or exit the workforce entirely.

Reality check: Overall, mothers with very young kids continue to be less likely to be in the workforce than women with older children — or those with no kids, whose labor force participation rate is at about 80%.

What's next: COVID appears to have put new norms in place that actually gave some workers — not just women — more flexibility. The question now is: Are these norms here to stay? 

Certainly, there are a lot of CEOs (typically men who may not be thinking of these kinds of macro consequences) who are desperate to curtail remote work. 

Bottom line: Typically, when women first have a baby that's when they get off track in their career, said Bauer. And that affects the rest of their lives in terms of income, job selection, promotions, etc. 

It's possible that pattern's been disrupted — and the impact from that will be huge.

"Shocking": More mothers are working than ever before

The workforce's share of women with young children is higher than it's ever been.

Economy

A line chart showing the labor force participation rate for mothers with children under five. It rose steadily from 1990 to 2000, dropped until 2005, and has been rising bumpily since. In June 2023, 70.4% of such mothers were in the labor force.

Top stories & latest news on the Federal Reserve, real-time data, plus the biggest shifts happening in the U.S. and global economy.

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

Whats Next

Axios What's Next

The news that West Virginia University (WVU) may ax its entire world languages program sent humanities scholars and others into a tailspin — so much so that the university backpedaled a bit late Tuesday.

The concern is less for what the plan says about the ongoing decline of language education than for how it might imperil socioeconomic opportunity for students in the poor, rural state — and for what it may portend for humanities education more broadly.

Why it matters: Yes, you can learn bits and pieces of a foreign language on a smartphone app. But scholars call WVU's decision a dangerous inflection point — one with political overtones that may augur more cuts throughout higher education.

"It's a story about state higher education thinking that public school students don't deserve or need a liberal arts education," Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, tells Axios.

"They start here in a state with weak institutions and weak governance and no oversight on university administration, and it's easy to push this kind of thing through," adds Jonah Katz, associate professor of linguistics at WVU.

"But once these people have laid their blueprint for how to basically dismantle a large research university ... maybe the next target will be something not quite so soft."

Driving the news: West Virginia University announced Aug. 11 it would eliminate 9% of the majors offered at its main Morgantown campus (32 of the total 338), dissolve the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, and fire 7% of its faculty members (169 people) — all for financial reasons.

The school's Board of Governors is scheduled to vote on the proposal on Sept. 15.

Students, families and scholars nationwide are pointing fingers at WVU President E. Gordon Gee, saying the school's financial woes are a result of mismanagement and a fig leaf for pivoting to vocational/trade education.

What's happening: Late yesterday, the school relented somewhat, saying it would continue offering instruction in Spanish and Chinese and retain five professors, while continuing to pursue the elimination of the undergraduate language requirement.

The softening follows an appeals hearing last Friday — and a large outcry in the news media over the situation.

What they're saying: "Our department has been under sustained attack since I got here in 2014," Katz tells Axios, estimating that the number of faculty has dwindled from 30-plus to 18 in that time.

"I'm working under the assumption that I'm going to be without a job in May."

Katz's research on speech and pronunciation — funded with a National Science Foundation grant — was recently the focus of a glowing university write-up, and the department routinely wins grants from the U.S. State Department and Duolingo, he said.

"We've been able to expose humanities students to scientific ideas that they might not have been exposed to otherwise, as well as exposing high-achieving STEM students to ideas about language and human sciences that they might not have otherwise been exposed to," Katz said.

Katz's opinion — echoed by many WVU faculty and students — is that administrators "have been extremely dishonest with their data," manipulating the numbers to make interest in language education look lower than it actually is.

Krebs, from the Modern Language Association, expressed the same view: "What the cuts are about is [eliminating] small classes," she said.

"There's plenty of demand for creative writing courses all around the country, but they don't want to pay people to teach a 20-student class when they can put 300 people in a computer science class."

By the numbers: While WVU is staring down a $45 million budget deficit, the world languages department brings in $800,000 a year in profit, according to a report by the provost's office.

Public colleges have been spending money hand over fist, building fancy edifices without the enrollment figures to back them up, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows — and WVU is no exception.

The dynamic has led to tuition hikes and pleas for state bailouts.

In West Virginia, this has led to objections from the American Federation of Teachers about the proposed cuts — and corresponding accusations from a conservative lawmaker that the group is "a 'socialist ideologue institution.'"

The other side: WVU says the $45 million deficit is "not a crisis, given this is a small percentage (less than 3.5%) of the university's $1.3 billion budget."

"We've been working [for] several months on an accelerated timeline for the Academic Transformation, which began back in 2020," a WVU spokesperson told Axios by email. 

"Importantly, this process had already started and continues, regardless of the budget challenge. That challenge has simply accelerated and intensified it."

Between the lines: It's no secret that language study enrollment has been declining for decades — a result of translation software that makes communication easy and the growing worship of U.S. students at the vocational altar of STEM.

"Language programs are often the first to go" amid budget cuts, said Nancy Tittler, who has taught Russian at Binghamton University in New York since 1980 — and recalled with a chill when, in 2010, SUNY Albany eviscerated its language offerings. "It's seen as a commodity we don't need."

On top of being a worthy intellectual pursuit, learning languages "makes you more of a citizen" and more hireable, said Tittler, who signed a petition against WVU's cuts.

But "we have to constantly make this argument," Tittler tells Axios. "What does language give you if it doesn't give you a salary at Goldman Sachs or something?"

Yes, but: The number of foreign language majors doesn't tell the whole story since lots of students want to learn a new language as part of a well-rounded education — and plenty of schools continue to build their language departments.

In schools that have invested in language arts, "enrollments rise," Krebs said, "and programs in schools where they're making cuts, the enrollments fall. This is absolutely natural."

The Modern Language Association, which tracks the number of college students who take foreign languages, says overall enrollment in language courses dropped 15.4% between 2016 and 2020. 

West Virginia's foreign language cuts could be a "blueprint" for higher ed attacks

"It's just devastating," says a West Virginia linguistics professor, who sees politics at play.

Axios

Sunday's top stories

Ramaswamy criticizes Trump's actions in alleged fake elector scheme

A late summer COVID wave is here, but it's trickier than ever to track

"Shocking": More mothers are working than ever before

West Virginia's foreign language cuts could be a "blueprint" for higher ed attacks

Americans are saving and earning less. But they won't stop spending.

The new playbook for conservative chart-toppers

Charted: College football makes no progress on head coach diversity

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The American workplace's bias against age

Poll: 56% of Americans say debt ceiling fight made them trust government less