Lina Khan’s FTC has passed a sorely needed ban on junk fees. But it won’t come into effect until she—and President Biden—is long gone.

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced a rule that will require companies to show full prices for things like a hotel room, concert ticket, or sporting event at the beginning of a purchase rather than hiding it until the very last step of the checkout process.

“People deserve to know up front what they’re being asked to pay—without worrying that they’ll later be saddled with mysterious fees that they haven’t budgeted for and can’t avoid,” the Biden-appointed FTC chair said in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will put an end to junk fees around live event tickets, hotels, and vacation rentals, saving Americans billions of dollars and millions of hours in wasted time.”

Junk fees came into the light particularly after Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in 2022, when thousands of fans were enraged by hidden or unknown service fees from Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

“Wherever big corporations try to sneak fees onto bills, my administration has been fighting on behalf of American families to ban them,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday.

There’s just one problem: The regulation will only take effect in April, well into Donald Trump’s term, allowing him to claim credit in the minds of most consumers.

The only FTC member to reject the regulations was Republican Andrew Ferguson, who is expected to take over the FTC for Trump. The impact of his leadership on this current set of regulations remains to be seen. 

Ferguson said in a statement that he didn’t actually disagree with the rules on principle, he just didn’t want it to happen while Khan and Biden were in charge.  

“I dissent only on the ground that the time for rule-making by the Biden-Harris FTC is over,” he said.

President-elect Donald Trump’s press conference Monday was riddled with inaccuracies, but one repeated lie about vaccines and autism stood out as the “most dangerous” to at least one network fact-checker.

“I think the most dangerous part was an equivocation,” CNN fact-checking reporter Daniel Dale said on air Monday evening. “It wasn’t really a claim, but he was asked whether he thought there was a link between vaccines and autism and he equivocated. He said, ‘Well, we have some brilliant people looking at this,’ and he talked about the increased prevalence of autism diagnoses.”

Trump opined about the false link while defending his choice to tap Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. While highlighting rising autism numbers (that researchers attribute to changing diagnostic criteria), Trump claimed to reporters at Mar-a-Lago that “something’s wrong.”

“There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it,” Trump said.

Kennedy is currently courting lawmakers on Capitol Hill ahead of what will likely be a difficult Senate confirmation process, given his raucous lifestyle that included dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, unscientific beliefs that include theories that AIDS is not caused by HIV, a vaccine misinformation campaign sparked by his nonprofit that sent Samoa’s vaccination rate plummeting amid a measles outbreak, and claims that he allegedly groped his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s.

Last week, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates.

The researcher that sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and the jab, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

“The idea that there is some connection came from a thoroughly discredited, in fact scandalous, fraudulently altered study in the 1990s that should just be ignored, dismissed, again, because it was fraudulent, and so the idea that, ‘Well, we’re just going to look into this,’ I think is dangerous to consider because the idea is simply wrong,” Dale told CNN.

Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

Donald Trump has suggested yet again that Canada should be absorbed by the United States as the northern country grapples with the MAGA leader’s forthcoming trade plan.

The president-elect’s proposed trade tariffs on the Great White North (which include a 25 percent tariff on goods) have launched the country into a political and economic crisis. On Monday, Canada’s deputy prime minister and minister of finance, Chrystia Freeland, resigned just hours before releasing the nation’s first economic plan in response to Trump’s “America First” policies. In a stinging resignation letter, Freeland openly questioned Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ability to deal with the tariffs, prompting Trudeau to discuss his own resignation with his Cabinet, according to Canadian broadcaster CTV News.

Trump, of course, had a diplomatic and delicate reply at the ready.

“The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Monday. “Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!”

Freeland was a key figure in negotiating the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, or USMCA, in 2018 after Trump dissolved NAFTA. Now that Trump apparently sees the USMCA as less than favorable to the U.S., it’s no wonder he’s glad to see Freeland go.

Trump also made the biting state joke last week, when he falsely claimed during an interview with MSNBC’s Meet the Press that Mexico and Canada’s trade deficits with the United States were “subsidies,” rather........

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