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The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits. One Air Force sergeant said he was “betrayed and devastated” by the move. The move means that transgender service members will now be faced with the choice of either taking a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be removed from the service. (Toropin, 8/7)

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced Wednesday it was ending collective bargaining agreements with most federal unions -- a move that affects roughly 80% of its total workforce. Members of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO, the National Association of Government Employees, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United and the Service Employees International Union will no longer have the labor protections negotiated by their organizations. (Kime, 8/7)

A new Veterans Administration health clinic is under construction in Rolla with the goal of improving health care for veterans throughout the region. The new clinic will be 75,000 square feet, nearly 10 times as big as the facility in St. James it will replace. It will be able to accommodate 20,000 patients a year. (Ahl, 8/8)

Seven years ago, when President Donald Trump signed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act into law, it was hailed as a crucial step toward addressing the nation’s maternal mortality crisis. The law pumped tens of millions of dollars a year into a program to help fund state committees that review maternal deaths and identify their causes. The committees’ findings have led to new protocols to prevent hemorrhage, sepsis and suicide. Federal money has allowed some states to establish panels for the first time. (Jaramillo, 8/8)

Benita McKerry’s job at the Native American Disability Law Center mostly involves driving to far-off parts of the Navajo Nation, an area larger than the size of West Virginia, and checking in on the reservation’s group homes and facilities for people with disabilities. The Diné woman rarely listens to music or podcasts on these drives, instead soaking up the miles by reflecting on the countless kids and adults she’s come to know. (Broderick, 8/8)

N. Mueller wasn’t sure whether the air purifiers in his living room and bedroom were real. That was the point. The Navy veteran had signed up to have them whir away in the background of his life, either filtering or just pretending to, while he submitted to regular blood draws, nostril scrapes, and breathing tests, to help figure out whether the working machines improved chronic obstructive pulmonary disease beyond the placebo effect. (Boodman, 8/8)

President Trump's plan to levy tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals is drawing criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. "Domestic manufacturing matters, but doing it by taxing patients through tariffs is the wrong move," Natasha Murphy, MSPH, director of health policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank, said in an email to MedPage Today. "These costs won't be eaten by drugmakers and instead will be passed on to families in the form of higher premiums and tighter formularies ... This is Trump's tariff-first playbook at work, and it puts affordability and access at risk." "All tariffs are a bad idea," Michael Baker, MS, director of healthcare policy at the American Action Forum, a right-leaning Washington think tank, said in a phone interview. (Frieden, 8/7)

A federal judge Thursday ruled construction must temporarily stop at “Alligator Alcatraz” as hearings challenging the Everglades-based detention center’s environmental impact continue. District Judge Kathleen Williams ordered the state to, at the very least, stop installing additional lighting, infrastructure, pavement, filling or fencing and to halt excavation for 14 days. She called the request for the temporary restraining order from the plaintiffs, which represent environmental groups, “pretty reasonable” to prevent further interruption to the ecosystem. The judge, an Obama-era appointee, said the plaintiffs had introduced evidence of “ongoing environmental harms.” (Leonard, 8/7)

The Environmental Protection Agency said it would stop updating research that hundreds of companies use to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions after the agency suspended the database’s creator because he had signed a letter criticizing the Trump administration’s approach to scientific research. The researcher, Wesley Ingwersen, is leaving the E.P.A. to pursue his work at Stanford University. He was one of 139 E.P.A. employees suspended and investigated by the agency after signing the June letter, which charged that Mr. Trump’s policies “undermine the E.P.A. mission of protecting human health and the environment.” (Stevens, 8/8)

Adults of a certain age may remember McGruff the Crime Dog best. The animated bloodhound in a trench coat warned children about the dangers of using drugs in a series of both gritty and cheery public service announcements on TV in the 1980s and 1990s. McGruff was as frank about stranger danger and child abductions, once portraying the near-kidnapping of a little girl in pigtails in an ad: "If she gets into that car, you may be looking at Jenny for the last time." But perhaps most memorable is McGruff's persistent calls to "Take A Bite Out Of Crime." Now, the Trump administration has ended federal funding for a program that in recent years worked to bring McGruff into present-day efforts to protect young people from harm caused by fentanyl and counterfeit prescription pills. (Wright, 8/8)

How political red tape and a drug company’s thirst for profits limited the reach of a drug that experts believe could have reduced the opioid epidemic’s toll. (Walter, 8/7)