What happened
The Senate yesterday confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s first permanent director in nearly a year. Schwartz (pictured above) is “widely considered a qualified and traditional selection for the role,” Politico said. She “has repeatedly affirmed the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines,” The New York Times said, but the 51-44 vote “fell mostly along partisan lines.”

Who said what
Schwartz will take over a “public health agency beleaguered by political meddling and low morale,” The Associated Press said. Her predecessor, Susan Monarez, was ousted after less than a month following a clash with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy, The Wall Street Journal said, and the White House was “looking for a CDC nominee who would minimize controversy” this time around.

What next?
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said he joined Republicans in voting for Schwartz because of her qualifications and the urgent need for public health leadership amid the outbreaks of measles and cyclosporiasis in the U.S. and Ebola in Congo. “It’s becoming very obvious what happens when the invisible workings of public health are not functioning the way we need them to,” Johns Hopkins biosecurity expert Gigi Gronvall told The New York Times. But it’s not clear “how much good” Schwartz can do when “the main problem is RFK Jr.”

What happened
The Trump administration has refunded about $100 billion of the roughly $166 billion collected through President Donald Trump’s 2025 “liberation day” tariffs, according to a court-ordered progress report filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of International Trade. The Supreme Court ruled in February that those import taxes had been collected illegally using an authority the president did not have, and a judge subsequently ordered their return to the importers. 

Who said what
Trump has “placed heavy-handed tariffs at the center of his economic and foreign policy agendas,” CNBC said, and he has “vented his rage over the court rulings.” The “speed at which the money has been refunded has surprised trade lawyers and analysts” alike, the Financial Times said. White House officials had “warned that the refunds would depend on further litigation.”

What next?
Trump’s administration has “recently taken a series of steps to effectively re-create” his initial sweeping tariffs “using other legal authorities,” said CNBC. On Monday, 25 states sued the administration over the new tariffs, “calling them a pretext for replacing” the axed “liberation day” levies, The Associated Press said.

Plastic products could soon have a built-in self-destruct feature. According to a study published in the journal ACS Applied Polymer Materials, scientists have created a plastic capable of degrading quickly without producing microplastics.

The key is using microbes. Living plastics “contain dormant microbes capable of degrading the surrounding polymer,” the American Chemical Society said in a release on the study. Earlier living plastic designs “often depended on a single enzyme, which limited how efficiently the material could be broken down.” However, in the new study, researchers created a bacterium that will “produce two polymer-degrading enzymes that work together.” 

The researchers “incorporated dormant spores from the engineered bacteria into polycaprolactone, a biodegradable polyester,” said Food & Wine. The living plastic material “retained the strength and structure of conventional plastic but could be triggered to degrade when no longer needed.” The scientists “activated the dormant spores by placing the material in a warm nutrient broth,” producing the enzymes that together completely broke down the plastic “within six days.”

Most of the world’s plastic ends up in landfills or the ocean, taking hundreds of years to degrade because of its chemical structure. The refuse can also release microplastics, which have “turned up in water, food and even human bodies,” raising a number of health concerns, said The Cool Down. Creating plastic that can break down completely rather than releasing tiny fragments “could reduce one path for that contamination” and also make “life easier for consumers by reducing the buildup of everyday products that turn into long-lasting trash.”