The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Announces New Tariffs And Gets Supreme Court's OK On Layoff Plans

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

The Supreme Court gave President Trump the green light to move forward with plans to lay off thousands of federal workers. We discuss the potential impacts of the ruling, plus new tariffs Trump announced this week. This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, labor and workplace correspondent Andrea Hsu, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, and senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith. This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Listen to the It's Been A Minute podcast today. Hey, this is Dez from Bridgewater, New Jersey. I'm currently working on storyboards for this short film that a few of my friends are making. This podcast was recorded at 1237 PM Eastern time on Friday, July 11th, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully we'll have started filming by then

and my storyboards will be used as a reference for all the shots we need to take. Okay, here's the show. Very cool. Filming what? Now I'm like very, I'm curious. They said a short film. Yeah. I know. What is it about? New Jersey just makes me think of like all those Kevin Smith movies, but I'm probably dating myself.

You probably are. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. We also have NPR's Andrea Hsu here. She covers labor for the network.

Hi, Andrea. Hi. And today we're talking about the latest developments in President Trump's efforts to downsize the federal workforce. You've been covering this a lot. And there was a big Supreme Court ruling this week on that front. Can you tell me what it did and what this means for federal workers across the board? Yeah. So this was a case that was heard on what's called the Supreme Court's emergency

docket. The Trump administration had asked the court to stay a lower court ruling that had halted mass layoffs and restructuring at around 20 different federal agencies. You know, a lower court judge had found that Trump's executive order announcing the sweeping overhaul of the government and a subsequent memo telling agencies how to carry out layoffs and cuts, that those were likely unlawful and that Trump needed to have gotten authorization from Congress before doing this. So for about two months that was paused, but a majority in the Supreme Court lifted that order.

The court did not weigh in on whether the reorganization and layoff plans themselves were legal. But for now, the Trump administration can carry on asking agencies to resume what they had started putting these plans into motion. And indeed, today we saw the State Department announce layoffs of some 1,300 employees, including a couple hundred Foreign Service officers. Now, the lower court can still consider whether the agency plans for these layoffs are legal, but that's ahead.

Yeah. Does this remove any hurdle for any future layoffs as well, or is this pretty limited? This is somewhat limited in that there are still other lawsuits specific to agencies. So for example, there are lawsuits that are blocking layoffs at the moment at parts of the Health and Human Services Department, the Department of Education,

the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and several others. And there might be still more lawsuits coming as agencies start putting their plans into motion. Now, we also have seen some agencies change up plans that they had earlier announced for layoffs without lawsuits. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs, they announced earlier this week that they were not going to do mass layoff because they had enough people leaving through things like early retirement and the deferred resignation program. You know, a lot of these agency plans are really in flux. A lot of what we heard earlier this year about, you know, cuts of 40 to 50 percent, it hasn't happened yet, but it's

not to say that won't happen or they might not try to do it. It's just everything is sort of still in a state of limbo. Yeah, gotcha. Well, Domenico, what do you think this means for all these cases mean for President Trump and I guess his ability to move forward with his larger plan to shrink the workforce? Well, first of all, it just shows that the Supreme Court continues to side with Trump on a lot of different ways when they didn't necessarily have to take up some of these cases that they wind up siding with Trump on. For the time being, obviously, he can continue his restructuring, but there are, as Andrea

noted there, cases about specific agencies is not clear. Also just how much of a priority that this government restructuring is with Elon Musk gone and Trump at the helm and Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, not really in Trump's sort of front and center inside circle, it seems, anymore. It just doesn't seem to be as much of a priority as Trump is dealing with all of these other international and domestic issues. Yeah, like not in his ear as much on this.

Not in his ear as much on this. Not in his ear. And there's nobody really who could really replace Musk as, you know, that sort of person who could be as big a personality. We're not going to see some other General Services Administration official standing by Trump in the Oval Office while Trump sits behind a desk. That is not what's going to be happening. Yeah. And, Andrea, for the federal workers here that we're talking about, what's next for them? Yeah, there's still a ton of uncertainty. There's very little information. Tens of

thousands of them have already left, as I mentioned, either through the Deferred Resignation Program or early retirement. But still, the ones who are still there, they don't know whether the cuts that have been floated, that have been rumored, are gonna be as deep as originally promised. You know, there have been announcements of, you know, agency headquarters moving to different buildings. There's litigation over whether employees who are in unions still will have collective bargaining rights. So just a lot of questions for them. You know, things are far from settled. They don't know what the future is really going to look like.

And a lot of this looks like Trump got the intended effect, which is to be a deterrent for people to want to be part of government. I mean, government was seen as a job that was secure, as the kind of job you could stay in your entire life. And as the VA tells Andrea, they've already gotten rid of enough people through those early retirements and deferred resignations. Yeah, and Andrea, I mean, I wonder if there's like a bigger vision here, if like the administration has any sort of plan behind these layoffs or is it simply just, I want fewer people on the payroll?

Well, you know, I'll go back to the State Department because that's, you know, where there has been some action this week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has talked a lot about the bloated bureaucracy. A senior State Department official this week gave examples of people who were going to be laid off. He said, you know, for example, there were three different offices handling sanctions. And he said, you know, no one said any one of them was doing a bad job, but that made more sense to combine them into one office. But you know, critics of what's happening say this is gutting the State Department of valuable institutional knowledge, it's going to diminish

the U.S. presence around the world, they worry about what's going to happen to the work that the U.S. has done for decades promoting democracy and human rights. And you know they say these effects might not be felt immediately but you know probably will over time. Yeah, that will be the big question is what will the loss of all this institutional knowledge mean for all these agencies? Well thank you so much Andrea for over time. Yeah, that will be the big question is, what will the loss of all this institutional knowledge mean for all these agencies? Well, thank you so much, Andrea, for your time. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.

All right, we're gonna take a quick break. More in a moment. This summer, ditch land with short waves, sea camp. Because when's the last time you had an ocean getaway? Every Monday, we bring you insights from a different ocean zone, starting with the sunlit surface until we hit the deep sea floor where there's marine snow, weird critters,

carbon sinks, and so much more. But first, you got to take the plunge. Follow NPR's shortwave wherever you get your podcasts. Have you heard people saying things like palm colored people? That would be white people. Or unalive. Could be, depending on context, it could be kill, murder, suicide, anything related to death. Listen to how self-centrorship online impacts the way we talk about real-life issues. That's on Code Switch from NPR wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back and Senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith is here with us too.

Hi, Tam. Hello. So it's been a busy week in Washington, which I guess we can say all the time now, this time with a lot of tariff news. Tam, did we get any clarity over what tariffs are going to look like this week? Well, we got some clarity that things are not clear. And also that the trade war is ramping back up again. The president has been sending letters to various trading partners, assigning a tariff

to them. The letters say something to the effect of, congratulations, you can continue doing business with America, but you're going to face this tariff. And the tariffs have been, you know, a wide range from 20% to 25% to 30% to 50% for Brazil. And he says that these tariffs will go into effect August 1st. Now, if this all sounds like kind of familiar, that's because this has been sort of a rolling party. We have to go

back to April, which he called Liberation Day, where he had these big poster boards listing tariffs for more than 100 countries. The markets did not react well to these very high tariffs. The bond markets really didn't react well, and Trump backed down. He put a pause in place for 90 days, dropped the tariffs mostly down to about 10%. And one of his top aides said there would be 90 deals in 90 days. And 90 days later, we had one and a half deals and Trump extended the deadline. But he says he's very serious. And like the reality is he likes tariffs. It's never quite clear if this is strategic uncertainty, whether he's trying to put countries off balance and make them really want to negotiate or if he really just doesn't

care whether the deals happen or not. Yeah. I mean, Trump's a little penned in by Wall Street and people like Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who Trump obviously has issues with. He wants him to lower rates. And again, it's Trump boasting of things that he says he can do easily that are really complicated, complex problems. And even though he likes tariffs, economists, Wall Street do not like tariffs.

And they're very hard to unwind being able to figure out supply chains and all the like. And we're just seeing this as the result of all of that complicated mess. And he has not been able to really nail down never mind the 90, but the but two trade deals at this point. So I want to talk about one of the latest announcements, tariff announcements from Trump, which is this proposed 50% tariff on copper. Can you tell me what impact that would have? Yeah, the theory here is he has been putting tariffs on all kinds of things like steel and aluminum, sort of sectoral tariffs on really important inputs that go into a lot of things Americans use and need. And that the argument is that this is a national security issue, that the US needs to be producing more steel, more copper, more aluminum on its own. And

so he announced these tariffs on copper. The issue is that the US does actually import a lot of copper. It produces a lot, but it also imports a lot. And copper goes into all kinds of things like batteries. And like, I mean, you might remember all of these stories about copper pipes being stolen because copper is so expensive. Like demand for copper is really high in this country. Well, Domenico, as you mentioned, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, this is a person who Trump has been ramping up attacks for, I guess, most of his second term now, but he's back at it. What do you think this is about? Like, why is he talking about him once more?

Well, it's about money, first and foremost. I mean, Trump knows that the amount of interest that the US pays on its debt is directly related to how much the interest rate is in the country. And it's also more difficult for people to borrow, to buy houses, to buy cars if the interest rate is high. Now the Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, who I think stylistically Trump probably doesn't like either because he's pretty dry, he's very serious, and Trump likes showmen at the front of a lot of things and people who are going to echo his message. Yeah, and the Federal Reserve has two main jobs. Those jobs are to maximize employment and minimize inflation, to keep the economy strong. Well, right now, employment continues to be strong. There's some underlying weakness, but the numbers are still pretty solid.

The president wants the economy to be supercharged, and if you lower president wants the economy to be supercharged. And if you lower rates, the economy will be supercharged. The fascinating thing here is that Jerome Powell is not the only person who determines what the rates are. And so just firing the Fed chair wouldn't really fix the president's problems. However, if he did fire the Fed chair, the markets would go nuts. And that is why President Trump hasn't done that. But members of his administration are calling for him to resign, calling for investigations

of construction costs around a remodel of the Fed building. And they are really just ratcheting up pressure to somehow try to convince him to resign before his term is up. And Powell's term as Fed chair ends less than a year from now. Not soon enough, though, for President Trump and his allies in the administration who are making it very uncomfortable for the Fed chair. I mean, Powell's not the only person that Trump has been criticizing. I mean, Elon Musk, you know, announced this week that he plans to start a new political party. I know, Ashley, you've been doing some reporting about that, right?

Yeah, mostly I've been looking into like, you know, how easy this would be, the sort of history we have of this. I mean, this is not a great time to start a third party. The rules lately have only gotten harder. It's really not easy to get on a ballot, which presumably Elon Musk would want to, at least in some races. You know really not easy to get on a ballot, which presumably Elon Musk would want to, at least in some races. You know, I want to say, like, I don't know how serious to take this because it's not like Elon Musk has filed any formal paperwork yet. So we'll see. I do think, like, his theory of the case about politics, which is that there's this 80% of voters are centrist voters, I think is wrong. It is wrong. I would say 80% of voters have some issues with the two parties.

However, then they go vote and they vote like partisans. Like hardcore partisans. Nobody's voting for moderation. Yeah, I mean that's what we've seen over the years. You know, the Pew Research Center has done these typologies that show that we're more something like eight or nine different political parties, and the people who are most disengaged with politics rarely agree on a policy front. You know, this has been the problem with a lot of these third party groups that have popped up. There's disaffection that they can agree on, but they can't agree on a policy platform.

And every time I've asked these groups, what are your policies? What will your candidates be running on? They sort of demur and say, well, we're waiting on a candidate first. You got to have policies that a party can get together on and form an alliance on. That's not to say that this country isn't ripe for a potential third party or fourth party or fifth party, but the structures being what they are, the amount of money that it takes to do it. Certainly Elon Musk's the richest guy in the world.

Maybe he could do it, but how focused is he going to be on that when he's got other issues with his businesses also, which is a big reason why he left the government in the first place. Yeah. I think he's looking at at like eight to ten house seats and I mean getting on the ballot in congressional districts is really hard, like boundary, like you could go to a like an area and get voters but like the chances that they're in this like sliver of that district is actually not that like, it's like a really hard task. So we'll see. I mean, I guess we're skeptical. Yeah. I guess we remain skeptical.

All right. We're going to take a quick break and when we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back and it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go. That's the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop talking about, politics or otherwise. I guess I'll go first. Okay. So what I can't let go of this week is, so I have been avoiding the plethora of comedy

podcasts that have been in our feeds for the past couple of years. I think this started with Marc Maron. But lately I have gotten really into Amy Poehler started a podcast called Good Hang. And I just I'm surprised I liked it because I think comedy podcasts are like, it's what happens to comedians when they're kind of tired of, I think, doing stand-up and touring the country. They're like, I get to just be in my LA studio and do this from here and make money that way.

But hers is actually really good. I think the quality of the personality of the person doing the podcast really matters, and this was a good reminder of that. Her latest episode with Andy Samberg was really fun. So if anyone wants to check it out. I will have to check it out. That sounds like a good duo. Yeah.

So yeah, sounds fun. I've always enjoyed Conan O'Brien's podcast, whatever it's called. Those are always really interesting because you get like sort of the of the behind-the-scenes stories of movies and other comedic things that you've seen. And then you get to learn what happened when you weren't watching. Yeah.

And like Conan, I think Amy Poehler has been in this world for a long time. So she brings in people that she's worked with on SNL because she was on SNL for many years. It's interesting to hear the history of a lot of that stuff, too. So I think it's like Conan's shown that way. All right, Tam, what can't you let go of this week? What I can't let go of is what the president can't let go of. So earlier-

Terrence? Well, that's his favorite word. But no. So you might remember earlier this week, he had a cabinet meeting and it lasted about 90 minutes. But the remarkable thing was the final 15 minutes. And here's how it started. And I actually spent time in the vaults. The vaults are where we have a lot of great pictures

and artwork. And I picked it all myself. I'm very proud of it. That's Andrew Jackson, great Andrew Jackson. And then he literally spoke for 15 minutes about the decor in the cabinet room, including about the frames, like the portraits, but also the frames that the portraits were in. But I think the best part was when he talked about the clock. So this is a grandfather clock that is now in the cabinet room. He lifted it from Marco Rubio's office. That's Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio's office. I tried to talk him into it first and it sort of worked and then I had to use a little more. I'd love to take that clock out and put it in the cabinet room. He said, no, are you serious?

I said, Marco, I have the right to do it, Marco. He muscled a clock away. I don't know. All I know is he also talked about the lighting and how he had them add medallions above the lights. Yeah, but I feel like this has come up before, right? Like I've seen him talk about decor in the White House a million times, which usually you'd see like the First Lady do it, but he seems way more invested in the look of the

White House. And I feel like in the second term, he is really going all in on the decor. Like he is spending a lot of time and effort on, you know, making it, putting his stamp on the White House. Well, okay, well Domenico, what can't you let go of this week? I'm going back a bit further, 65 million years to be exact.

Oh boy. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which has massive skeletons of T-Rexes and all kinds of other stuff that kids love, they found a dinosaur fossil in their parking lot. What? Can you believe that? A museum. They bore a 5 centimeter hole down 763 feet in an effort to study geothermal heating. This is a completely unrelated project and they found a vertebra of a smallish

plant-eating dinosaur. Not a very exciting find. It's not a massive T. rex, but still they found something that was one of the oldest fossils to be found in the Denver area. And you know, those who know the American West know that it's hugely rich in dinosaur fossils. So, you know, also thinking about other things that people take great pride in and enjoy really being super excited about was also nice to sort of read some of the quotes from some of the people involved. I did find this

quote from the museum's curator of geology really fascinating. He said, finding a dinosaur bone in a core is like hitting a hole in one from the moon. It's like winning the Willy Wonka factory. It's incredible. It's super rare. So nerd excitement. So are they gonna install the the geothermal heating system? I have no idea. They're there to study geothermal heating. I assume that project will continue. That's like so coincidental too, like it was like right beneath them. At the museum. Yeah. Yeah. I mean there are a few things more exciting than like finding a dinosaur bone.

Yeah. Like that's pretty cool. Right. I found a shark tooth once and it was very cool. Calvert Cliffs in Maryland at State Park. All right. That's a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Mithoni Maturi.

Our editor is Rachel Bay. Our producers are Casey Morrell and Rhea Suggs. Thanks to Krishna Dev Kalamer. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Tamara Kupak. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. This is going to be terrific. What did you find that terrifying? Terrible. Oh my god. Tinnaco.