Up First from NPR - House Budget Plan, DOGE Resignations, Battle Against Bird Flu

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

House Republicans passed a sweeping new budget plan but disagree on spending cuts. A group of civil servants on Elon Musk's DOGE team resigned, and egg farmers on the front lines of the latest bird flu outbreaks say they are losing the battle with the disease.Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Jason Breslow, Padmananda Rama, Carrie Feibel, Janaya Williams and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

House Republicans barely passed a budget plan making room for tax cuts and cuts to programs like Medicaid. Some Republicans hope to avoid the spending cuts later and Democrats all voted no. So how do they work out the details? I'm Leila Fadid, that's Steven Schiepp and this is Up First from NPR News. The president holds a cabinet meeting today and will bring along an aide. The White House insists Elon Musk is not in charge of anything, and some departments ignored his most recent order. So who is making decisions?

Also, egg farmers say they're losing the battle against bird flu. The mental toll on our team of dealing with that many dead chickens is just, I mean, you can't imagine. Why is the outbreak so hard to contain? Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day. This message comes from Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies. Sending or spending money abroad, hidden fees may be taking a cut. With WISE, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit WISE.com.

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come from Dignity Memorial. When your celebration of life is prepaid today, your family is protected tomorrow. Planning ahead is truly one of the best gifts you can give your family. For additional information visit dignitymemorial.com. House Republicans last night began a long process of trying to reshape the government to their liking. Republicans passed a budget plan without a single vote to spare. Speaker Mike Johnson had a problem with some lawmakers reluctant

to sign on until they switched at the last moment. We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the American First Agenda. We're going to deliver all of it, not just parts of it, and this was the first step in that process. Now the spending cuts in this budget blueprint are different from the ones announced so far by Elon Musk's Department of Government efficiency. For one thing, the cuts are big. For another, they would be legal, assuming Congress follows through on the rest of a very long process. NPR congressional correspondent, Claudia Grisales, has covered that process in the past, is covering it once again.

Good morning. Good morning, Steve. Okay, so I'm thinking this through. Democrats all voted no, said they were just gross spending cuts. Some Republicans were worried about this, also worried about too much borrowing, they said, still. So what's the final package say? So lots of sweeping changes if Republicans can get to the finish line with the final

product. But the framework that was passed last night spells out plans for new immigration, defense, energy, and tax policy. And there's a lot of big numbers here for one. It calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. That's tied to an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts that are expiring at the end of the year. And then campaign promises are also included in this plan that Trump made about eliminating

taxes on tips. It also calls for $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending that would dramatically reshape the federal budget numbers that help fuel a lot of internal disagreement for the party. Yeah, and I guess we should mention that's over the course of 10 years. These unbelievably large numbers are over the course of a decade, but they're still pretty big on an annual basis. It sounds like the party's right wing ultimately caused more trouble than the more moderate wing. Exactly. We saw a lot of those that were worried about the spending as holdout at the beginning of the day. That includes Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio, Victoria Sparts of Indiana, and Tim Burchett of Tennessee. But they all flipped in the end. They were facing, the party was facing a very

tight margin in, could only lose perhaps one member, that was it. So it set up this chaotic vote that was on, it was off and back on again in a matter of 10 minutes, but members such as Burchett switched to a yes after a phone call with Trump. So in the end, Kentucky Republican Thomas Massey was the only no, he's a loyal fiscal hawk

who was opposed to the trillions in new spending. The spending cut plans kept the other fiscal hawks in line, but there's still remaining concerns about the potential to cuts to Medicaid, which could impact more than 70 million Americans who depend on this health insurance. And that's something Republicans will have to iron out in the coming weeks. Uh, Claudia, I just want to underline the process here.

Uh, as Layla mentioned, whatever Elon Musk has done is being challenged in court. In many cases seems to be illegal, uh, as we've reported has hardly saved any money in the larger sense. Uh, but this is like real numbers through a legal process. So what comes next in that process? Right. This kicks off a process. It's known as reconciliation. It's an obscure budget tool, but it lets Republicans overcome a

democratic filibuster in the Senate. Next steps involve actually writing the text for the budget that will become law. Last night was supposed to be the easy part, but it took them weeks to get here. So we'll see if they can seal the deal in the coming weeks. Pete Slauson Got to reconcile it with what's happening in the Senate and you have all these other appropriations bills and so forth to come. Claudia, thanks so much. Claudia Grazales Thank you. Pete Slauson NPR's Claudia Grazales.

All right, today the president holds his first meeting with his cabinet secretaries since taking office. Yeah, also expected to show up special government employee, Elon Musk. He has been telling federal employees what to do, though the White House denies he's in charge of anything and some cabinet secretaries have asserted their own authority over agencies. NPR Stephen Fowler is covering all this. Stephen good morning. Good morning. So are all the people around the president on the same page? Well the White House says everyone is working as a team but there's a few people claiming to be captain here especially around this attempted restructuring of the federal government. Think of it this way Steve. There's a Venn diagram of what

Elon Musk says and does and posts, what the government has said in many court cases challenging Musk's decrees, and what federal agencies have actually done. And that Venn diagram has very little overlap right now. Okay. And I guess an example of that would be this email over the weekend. It appeared over the weekend in everybody's mailboxes, like 2 million federal employees is what I mean, asking them to just explain what they're doing with their time or what they did last week.

How much overlap do you see there in that Venn diagram? This is a pretty great example where Elon Musk's preference is not government policy, is not what the government does in practice. Musk was repeatedly posting on the platform that he owns this threat of basically respond or lose your job. But he's not the boss of anyone within the federal government. And for the purposes of this request, neither is the agency that sent the email, the Office of Personnel Management.

In fact, OPM previously noted in a privacy assessment, these government-wide emails are totally optional to respond to. And after some agencies told their people to ignore the request other people said do it. OPM muddied the water even more with a memo that had more contradictory guidance about how to respond and or not respond and or maybe punish employees who didn't. Did you get all that? No, I didn't but please go on. Well, so to that point yesterday White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt wrapped it all up with this sort of walk back into some semblance of harmony. So again, the agency heads will determine the best practices for their employees at their specific agencies. Again, this was an idea that Elon come

up with, Doge worked with OPM to actually implement the idea, and the secretaries are responsible for their specific workforce. Now, Levitt did say that a million workers responded by the deadline, but we just don't know what that means or what comes next for them there. I appreciate hearing that Elon came up with the idea, according to the White House spokesperson there, because we hear then that a CEO did this thing that, as I understand it, business people will sometimes do.

They'll send out a memo like that to everybody, but this is very different than the government has set up and the government works. So where does this go from here? Well, this cabinet meeting is going to be worth watching because it's one of the first major public sources of tension between the Trump administration and the implementation of Musk's Doge effort. But there's some other simmering conflicts in the background. Many of the actions that Musk and Doge have taken are in court

after running afoul of very particular and explicit set of rules and laws that govern the government. And on the same day, the White House acknowledged someone else is nominally running the US Doge service, nearly two dozen people who worked for the precursor USDS say they're quitting instead of using their skills to, quote, compromise core government systems. Finally, as we await more details about a planned reduction in force of the remaining workforce, last night the Merit Systems Protection

Board issued a stay on the firing of six probationary employees. Wow, hard to keep track of it all, but we'll do the best we can. NPR Stephen Fowler, thanks so much. Thank you. Bird flu has been spreading in the United States. Yeah. The first person to die from bird flu is reported last month and two people were recently hospitalized in Wyoming and Ohio. The CDC still says the risk to humans is low, but inside the poultry industry, there's

a fight brewing over how to take the battle against bird flu to the next level. Kate Wells of Michigan Public and KFF Health News is reporting on all this. Kate, good morning. Good morning. Okay, so what are you hearing from egg farmers here? Yeah, they say that they are just flat out losing this battle against bird flu at this point. They are desperate for new tools at this point.

They say what they have been doing to try to contain the outbreak just is not working. I talked with Greg Herbrook. He's the CEO of Herbrook's poultry ranch. It's one of the largest egg producers in the US. And in April, three of his sites got hit with bird flu, one right after the other, and he ended up having to kill six and a half million chickens. Wow. The mental toll on our team of dealing with that many dead chickens is just I mean you can't imagine. So he used the USDA like tried and true playbook here. It's the stamping out method right after detection like within 24 to 48 hours. The whole flock

has to be culled. There's a bunch of cleaning and sanitizing, and this is to prevent the birds from dying really painful, grisly deaths, but it's also to try to keep the virus from spreading even further. And this works, like in the 2014 and 2015 outbreak, ever since then,

pharmacists have put in tens of millions of dollars in biosecurity, like employees showering in and out, lasers that can stop potentially infected wild birds from landing, but none of it is working this time. Why? Well, so flu viruses are constantly evolving, right? And this particular strain of the virus has gotten so good at infecting new species,

not just wild birds that migrate, but also more than 40 species of mammals. You've heard about dairy cows, but you know also dolphins, rats, skunks. And by this point, bird flu is just too embedded in our environment for us to just stamp it out. I also talked with David Swain. He is a former USDA official. He's one of the leading avian influenza experts. And he says, look, it's time for the U S to try vaccinating poultry for bird flu. He says this is good as a tool, not just to reduce

the virus in animals. Here's Swain. But also a tool that reduces chances for human infection. But egg producers, they will need the green light from the federal government before they can try this. What about poultry farmers that raise chicken for meat? Well, so they are very against this vaccination plan because they could lose billions of dollars a

year in trade deals if the U S does start vaccinating poultry. And that's because a lot of countries, they don't want to buy meat from a country that is vaccinating any chickens. Those countries are worried that the vaccine can mask symptoms in birds and that the virus could maybe get across their borders in that meat undetected. But the pressure on the US government to do something new is clearly growing.

Kate, thanks so much. Really appreciate the reporting. Thank you. That's Kate Wells with Michigan Public and KFF health news. And that's a first for this Wednesday, February 26th. I'm Steve Inskeep. And I'm Laila Fadl. Make your next listen.

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