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Oct. 1, 2025, 5:05 PM EDTBy Monica Alba, Laura Strickler, Dareh Gregorian and Amanda TerkelWASHINGTON — A number of federal agencies are putting out messages blaming Democratic senators for the current government shutdown, in a sharp break from how departments have handled shutdowns in the past. Traditionally, agencies provide information on the status of the funding lapse and what services won’t be available, but stay away from partisan talking points. Some civil servants, who are supposed to be nonpartisan, are being encouraged to push out the messages as well. The Department of Labor sent a message to all employees Wednesday morning, suggesting a potential out-of-office notification: Thank you for contacting me. On September 19, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. Due to the lapse in appropriations I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume. The department offered a similar message about employees who must continue working throughout the shutdown. A civil servant at the Department of Health and Human Services said their boss suggested they put up an out-of-office message that had this line: “Unfortunately, Democratic Senators are blocking its passage in the Senate, which has led to a lapse in appropriations.” Not all agencies are sending out this guidance. Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, Justice Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development said they did not get suggestions like the one given to employees at the Department of Labor. We’d like to hear from you about how you’re experiencing the government shutdown, whether you’re a federal employee who can’t work right now or someone who is feeling the effects of shuttered services in your everyday life. Please contact us at tips@nbcuni.com or reach out to us here.A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services referred NBC News to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not return a request for comment. The Department of Labor also did not respond. “What this administration is doing is unprecedented, illegal and flat-out wrong,” said Max Stier, CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. “I’ve been deeply engaged in our federal government for over 30 years and there is nothing that has come close. Federal employees who are furloughed are still subject to the same legal and ethics rules, and there is no excuse for this behavior. The administration should not be using federal employees or federal resources to wage a political battle.”Congress failed to reach a funding agreement late Tuesday night, leading to a shutdown that is expected to last at least through the week. While Republicans have full control of the federal government, including the White House and majorities of both chambers of Congress, they don’t have the 60 votes needed to end debate on legislation in the Senate and move bills forward without Democratic votes. Democrats want to include provisions to extend health care funding, as well as assurances that President Donald Trump won’t keep unilaterally withholding spending directed by Congress.Federal employees will not be paid during the shutdown — even if they’re deemed essential to operations and have to continue working. Approximately 750,000 employees will be furloughed, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Members of Congress and President Donald Trump will continue to receive paychecks. The Trump administration’s messaging on the shutdown extends to federal government websites as well. Visitors to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s site are greeted with a large red banner that reads: “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”In case visitors missed the message, a large pop-up box then appears: “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”“Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume,” reads the message on the State Department’s site. The undersecretary for management at the State Department also sent a letter criticizing Democrats to all employees on Tuesday: “Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands. If Congressional Democrats maintain their current posture and refuse to pass a clean Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded before midnight on September 30, 2025, federal appropriated funding will lapse.” Both the Forest Service and the Treasury Department also now have messages up on at the top of their websites blaming Democrats and the left for the shutdown.And VetResources, which the Department of Veterans Affairs bills as “a weekly newsletter for Veterans, their families, caregivers, and survivors,” sent an email to subscribers Wednesday blaming Democrats for any gap in resources.“President Trump opposes a lapse in appropriations, and on September 19, the House of Representatives passed, with the Trump Administration’s support, a clean continuing resolution to fund the government through November 21,” the newsletter reads. “Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands. During the current lapse in funding, the vast majority of VA benefits and services will continue uninterrupted, but the government shutdown is not without consequences to VA.”The messages have already raised questions about their ethics and legality.A former senior counsel at the Housing Department told NBC News that the agency’s message on its website likely violates the federal code of conduct for employees.“There’s no universe where that is acceptable or advisable under the code of conduct,” said Donald Sherman, who’s now executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The code says “employees shall act impartially” and without preferential treatment, he said. “This agency is meant to service every American, whether they’re right or left or have no political views whatsoever,” and now the first thing people see on the site is about “political ideology.”The group Public Citizen filed a complaint against HUD, saying the message on its website violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using their official capacities to affect or interfere with elections. A HUD spokesperson defended the site on Tuesday, telling NBC News, “The Far Left is barreling our country toward a shut down, which will hurt all Americans. At HUD, we are working to keep critical services online and support our most vulnerable. Why is the media more focused on a banner than reporting on the impact of a shutdown on the American people?” A HUD official also pushed back on Hatch Act questions, saying the message was carefully worded so as not to name a specific party or politician, but rather an ideology. The watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund on Wednesday sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office urging an investigation into HUD. “The purpose of HUD’s website is to help Americans find affordable housing and protect their rights. It is not a campaign website or a tool to advance a political party’s agenda,” said Virginia Canter, the group’s ethics and anticorruption chief counsel and director. “The Trump administration, however, turned a government agency website into a partisan billboard. It’s an abuse of power, a waste of taxpayer money, and appears to be a flat-out violation of the law.”Monica AlbaMonica Alba is a White House correspondent for NBC News.Laura StricklerLaura Strickler is the senior investigative producer on the national security team where she produces television stories and writes for NBCNews.com.Dareh GregorianDareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.Amanda TerkelAmanda Terkel is politics managing editor for NBC News Digital.Abigail Williams, Allan Smith, Kelly O’Donnell, Ryan J. Reilly, Courtney Kube, Steve Kopack and Michael Kosnar contributed.

October 20, 2025

Oct. 20, 2025, 1:45 PM EDTBy David CoxPeople with a leading cause of blindness were able to read again thanks to a tiny wireless chip implanted in the back of the eye and specialized augmented glasses, according to study results published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The trial involved 38 European patients, all of whom had an advanced stage of dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) known as geographic atrophy. There is no cure for AMD, which is driven by changes in a part of the retina called the macula and caused by inflammation and a build-up of waste. The photoreceptor cells in the macula are responsible for producing sharp, detailed and colored vision. When the disease has progressed to the geographic atrophy stage, these cells deteriorate and die, and people lose their central vision — meaning that an object straight ahead may appear blurry or covered up with a dark blotch. Roughly 22 million people in the U.S. have AMD, and about 1 million have geographic atrophy, according to the American Macular Degeneration Foundation.In the study, the participants, who had an average age of 79, were fitted with the “PRIMA device,” a system meant to replicate vision. Patients wear augmented reality glasses embedded with a camera that captures their visual field. What the camera “sees” is transmitted to the chip implanted in their eye in the form of infrared light. The chip converts the light into an electrical current, which stimulates the remaining healthy cells in the macula in a realistic way, enabling signals these cells send to be interpreted by the brain as vision. An image processor, which the user must carry, lets patients zoom in and magnify the images they see, which appear in black and white.The image on the right shows what the camera sends to the user’s implanted microchip.Science Corporation With the help of the PRIMA device, 80% of the 32 patients who returned for a reassessment one year after the chip implantation had achieved clinically meaningful visual improvements. Patients did experience side effects, predominantly related to the surgical procedure: The study reported that 26 serious adverse events occurred in 19 of the patients, ranging from elevated blood pressure in the eye to an accumulation of blood around the retina. The majority of the adverse events resolved within two months of the implantation. “It’s the first ever therapeutic approach that has led to an improvement in visual function in this group of patients,” said Dr. Frank Holz, the trial’s lead investigator and chair of the department of ophthalmology at the University Hospital of Bonn in Germany. “Late-stage age-related macular degeneration is a dismal disease. Patients are no longer capable of reading, driving a car, watching TV or even recognizing faces. So [these results] are a game-changer in my mind.”One patient, Sheila Irvine, 70, who was fitted with the PRIMA device at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, said in a statement provided by the hospital that her life before receiving the implant was akin to “having two black discs in my eyes, with the outside distorted.” A self-described “avid bookworm” before losing her vision, Irvine said she was now able to do crosswords and read prescriptions.Dr. Sunir Garg, professor of ophthalmology at the retina service of Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the study, said the results represent a breakthrough for patients with geographic atrophy. All doctors have been able to offer, he said, are visual aids, like magnifiers, and emotional support.“Even with new medical therapies, the best that we can do is slow it down,” said Garg, who works with several drugmakers involved in treatments for AMD, including Apellis Pharmaceuticals, the maker of pegcetacoplan. That drug, which slows the progression of geographic atrophy, was recently approved in the U.S. and must be injected into the eye every 1 to 2 months. “We can’t stop it, and we can’t do anything to bring back lost vision.” An actor wearing the PRIMA system glasses.Science CorporationDr. Demetrios Vavvas, director of the retina service at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, who was also not involved in the study, said that the PRIMA system is not without limitations. Vavvas noted that the surgery required to implant the chip in the eye requires a high level of surgical skill and is not without risk. “You have to lift the retina off its normal position to implant this device, which increases the atrophy,” said Vavvas, who is a consultant to Sumitomo Pharmaceuticals, a company working on stem cell therapies for patients with other forms of vision loss. Vavvas said it was important to note that the device isn’t restoring normal vision, as patients were only able to see in black and white rather than color, and the trial participants had to undergo a significant amount of training in order to learn how to see with the PRIMA device. He also said that it wasn’t clear whether the enhancements in visual ability had significantly improved the patients’ quality of life.But at the same time, Vavvas was also optimistic about its future potential, describing the current iteration of PRIMA as a key stepping stone in the field of vision restoration. “Think of this device as the pre-release iPhone,” he said. “The limitations are clear. We shouldn’t oversell that the quality of life really improved. But there were certain [visual] tasks at which the patients were clearly better. So it shows to us that there is potential in this approach. It is still in some ways, a prototype. They’re working on iterations of this device that will be better.”New upgrades to the PRIMA device could be coming in the next couple of years. The PRIMA system was invented by Stanford University ophthalmology professor Daniel Palanker and is being developed by the California-based neural engineering company Science Corporation.Palanker said technical improvements are being made to increase the number of pixels in the chip from 400 to 10,000. The new chips have already been tested in rats, and the upgraded chips are being manufactured for future human trials. With the aid of the camera’s zoom function, Palanker said that this could theoretically enable patients to achieve 20/20 visual resolution.The microchip shown next to a penny.Science Corporation“We are also working on next generation software that will allow patients to perceive not just black-and-white text, but also grey-scale natural images, such as faces,” Palanker said.Palanker suggested that the technology could be trialed in other retinal diseases that cause blindness, such as Stargardt disease, which has similar symptoms to age-related macular degeneration but is genetic and usually affects younger people. Garg and Vavvas are eager to see larger trials that provide more details about how the device improves patients’ ability to function on a day-to-day basis. Vavvas suggested that future trials should include a control arm to understand the extent to which the device yields real-world benefits, for example compared to existing electronic magnifiers. “Is it something that is good enough for patients to say, ‘Well, I’ve regained my independence because I can now do my credit card bills myself, stamp and address my envelopes myself, and look at grocery store labels?’” Garg said. “Those kinds of practical things I would like to know more about.”“This is a chronic disease that you will have for life, so we need more than one year of follow-up to see other risks, other problems,” Vavvas said. “Does that signal of efficacy that we see at 12 months, remain two years later?”While Vavvas said he would not call the device a complete panacea for blindness, the study showed that brain-computer interfaces can represent an important approach to tackling different kinds of severe visual impairment. “As the iterations of this device become better and better, it could become a real solution for a cohort of patients,” he said. David CoxDavid Cox is a freelance journalist focusing on all aspects of health, from fitness and nutrition to infectious diseases and future medicines. Prior to becoming a full-time journalist, he was a neuroscientist attempting to understand how and why the brain goes wrong.

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