TAPPER: You were screamed at for four hours this week at a town hall on homelessness. Homelessness is nearly up 50 percent in your city since you became mayor, according to the Los Angeles Times. Now there’s a typhus outbreak likely due to the booming number of rats attracted by all the food and human waste on Skid Row and other places. Some critics may be saying why are you campaigning for Democrats in the midterms and traveling when you have this huge crisis in your backyard?

GARCETTI: I think they’re linked together and I welcome a national conversation in Washington, D.C. where you see more homeless per capita, than you see in Seattle, in San Francisco, you see in red and blue cities. We have a a mental health crisis. Mayors can’t avoid that. A lot of people told me never touch the issue of homelessness. I am so passionate about it. People are dying on our streets from opioid addiction. I’m so proud of our voters in Los Angeles who passed two largest matters to combat homelessness. This is what people say is an unsolvable problem and I’m committed to solving it. We’re opening up new beds. Our typhus numbers are about the same as they have been in past years. We are focused on preventing homelessness. We’ve got veterans, kids emancipating from foster care, my wife and i are foster parents. We have folks coming out of sexual violence. To understand homelessness we really do need leadership from Washington, D.C. I’m leading a group of mayors around the country saying we need housing policy, take care of the least among us and a Washington that will listen is absolutely the link between both national politics and local politics.

Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless.

Researchers who have studied gender issues and provided health care to people who do not fit the typical M/F pigeonholes said that the Trump administration’s latest plan to define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge.

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“The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades,” said Dr. Joshua D. Safer, an endocrinologist and executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. He is also president of the United States Professional Association of Transgender Health.

But exactly what does determine gender identity — a person’s powerful, core knowledge of who they are — is not so clear.

The largest increases were in the following categories:

• In total, spending for the three largest mandatory programs increased by 4 percent:
  • Outlays for Social Security benefits rose by $43 billion (or 5 percent), because of increases both in the number of beneficiaries and in the average benefit payment.
  • Medicare spending increased by $16 billion (or 3 percent) because of increases both in the number of beneficiaries and in the amount and cost of services.
  • Medicaid outlays rose by $14 billion (or 4 percent), in part because more new enrollees were added through expansions of coverage authorized by the Affordable Care Act.
• Outlays for net interest on the public debt increased by $62 billion (or 20 percent), partly because of a higher rate of inflation. To account for inflation, the Treasury Department adjusts the principal of its inflation-protected securities each month by using the change in the consumer price index for all urban consumers that was recorded two months earlier. That adjustment was $33 billion in fiscal year 2017 but $60 billion in the current fiscal year. The remaining increase reflects higher interest rates and larger debt in 2018.
• Spending for military programs of the Department of Defense rose by $36 billion (or 6 percent).
• The government received $19 billion less in total payments from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two entities made quarterly payments to the Treasury in December, March, June, and September. Those payments, which are included in the “Other” category in the table below, are recorded as offsets to spending; thus, lower payments have the effect of increasing net outlays. In fiscal year 2017, those payments totaled $29 billion; in fiscal year 2018, they totaled $14 billion. The government also made a cash infusion of $4 billion to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in March 2018, which increased outlays. That payment from the Treasury occurred because the entities’ net worth was negative for the quarter as a result of write-downs they took on their tax-deferred assets in response to P.L. 115-97.
• Outlays of the Department of Homeland Security (included in “Other” below), increased by $18 billion (or 36 percent), largely because of activities related to disaster relief.
• Spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs (also included in the “Other” category) rose by $9 billion, in part because of typical growth in the number of veterans receiving disability compensation and the amount of those payments, and in part because of continued growth in the number of veterans receiving health benefits at nondepartmental medical facilities.
• Outlays for subsidies for health insurance purchased through the marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act, which are included in “Other” in the table below, rose by about $7 billion (or 17 percent). Spending climbed largely because the premiums for those plans rose this year.