NPR News Now - NPR News: 02-07-2025 1PM EST

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. President Trump is hosting Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba at the White House and took a series of questions from reporters a short time ago, including this. Mr. President, do you have a reaction to the new Time magazine cover that has Elon Musk sitting behind your resolute desk? No. Is Time magazine still in business? I didn't even know that.

Trump then defended his close adviser, Elon Musk, the man now in charge of the entity called the Department of Government Efficiency. He's finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste. You see it with the USAID, but you're going to see it even more so with other agencies and other parts of government. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are warning of potential conflicts of interest

when it comes to Musk's role in the federal government. And Piers Windsor-Johnson reports that Musk owns companies, including SpaceX, that have billions of dollars in federal contracts. When questioned about Elon Musk's government contracts, the White House says that he will police his own conflicts of interest. Kathleen Clark is a professor

at Washington University in St. Louis. It's absurd to rely on Elon Musk to recognize and then respond to his own conflicts of interest. The only place in the federal government that relies on officials to to his own conflicts of interest. The only place in the federal government that relies on officials to police their own conflicts is the US Supreme Court. According to usaspending.gov, SpaceX received more than $19 billion

in federal contracts since 2008. In 2024, Musk's company received nearly $4 billion. Windsor-Johnston, NPR News, Washington. More than two dozen House Democrats try to push their way into the Department of Education this morning to speak with senior leaders about Trump's plan to eliminate the agency. ... Secretary for a meeting and to answer a simple question. Security locked the doors before the Democratic lawmakers could enter. House Republicans are racing to unveil a new framework for a budget plan as early as today.

NPR's Claudia Grisales has the latest. House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson, met at the White House for about five hours on Thursday in hopes of reaching a final plan. President Trump was part of the first hour of the meeting urging the group to get it done. Senate leaders are also racing to put together their own proposal to be unveiled during a meeting with Trump in Florida this weekend. The spending plan is expected to include provisions to fund new projects along the US-Mexico border, extend tax breaks approved during

Trump's first term, as well as other campaign promises. Claudia Grisales, NPR News. U.S. stocks are trading lower this hour. The Dow is down 300 points. This is NPR. Leaders of several nationalist European parties are due to gather in Madrid under the slogan Make Europe Great Again. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini

and France's Marine Le Pen are expected to attend. The Patriots for Europe group, which convened the meeting, is the third biggest in the European Parliament. The BBC's Guy Hedgeco reports. This two-day summit hosted by Spain's Vox party comes as the radical right is performing strongly in many countries. However, Germany's AFD is a notable absence from the Patriots group, as is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party.

Boyed by the return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, the group seems to share his main priorities. They include tighter immigration controls and rolling back green policies in areas such as farming. That's the BBC's Guy Hedgeco reporting. In the United States, respiratory viruses are making the rounds, but as NPR's Rob Stein tells us, there are a couple of unusual trends driving all the coughing, sneezing, and fevers this year. One possible explanation is that we went through an unusually intense summer COVID surge that also started relatively late.

So lots of people may still have some immunity from when they had COVID this summer and no new variant has evolved that's any better about getting around the immunity people have built up. There's also a theory called viral interference. That's when the presence of one virus kind of pushes out other viruses. NPR's Rob Stein reporting. The NASDAQ is down nearly 1%, the Dow has fallen roughly half a percent. This is NPR.