Up First from NPR - Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

The Justice Department is moving to implement President Trump's agenda for the agency, some large companies in the US are deleting or softening DEI language from their investor disclosures and influenza is peaking twice this winter.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 Anna Yukhananov, Rafael Nam, Scott Hensley, Janaya Williams, Alice Woelfle and Ben Adler. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Patrick Murray, our technical director is Zac Coleman. And our Executive Producer is Kelley Dickens.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Pam Bondi was sworn in this week as U.S. Attorney General. One of her early memos has workers at the Justice Department worried about the possibility of mass firings. Will those who investigated the president be singled out? I'm Michelle Martin, that's Amy Martinez, and this is Up First from NPR News. Under political pressure, some big companies have quietly ended their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. We have seen companies start to decide that the reward is not necessarily outweighed by the risk anymore.

Is this the end of corporate DEI? Plus, it is respiratory virus season and the flu is peaking for a second time, but there's better news on the horizon about COVID. This is the smallest winter wave we've had since the pandemic began. Stay with us. We've got all the news you need to start your day. If you love NPR podcasts, you don't need me to tell you the value of public media in your life. To support our mission and get perks like sponsor-free podcast listening across more than 20 NPR podcasts and exclusive bonus episodes, sign up for the NPR Plus bundle at plus.npr.org.

Technologist Pau Garcia is using AI to create photos of people's most precious memories. How her mother was dressed, the haircut that she remembered. We generated tens of images and then she saw two images that was like, that was it. Ideas about the future of memory. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. Wanna know what it's like to play behind the tiny desk? If you've got the talent, we've got the desk.

Unsigned artists, enter the 2025 Tiny Desk Contest for an opportunity to play your own tiny desk concert. Our nationwide star search starts now and the winner will play their own tiny desk concert and a US tour. To learn more visit npr.org slash tiny desk contest. This week the Senate voted to confirm Pam Bondi as President Trump's new Attorney General. Bondi takes over at the Justice Department as the Trump administration makes aggressive moves to take over the federal bureaucracy. Over the past few weeks, the new administration has already pushed out senior career officials

at the department and at the FBI, setting off fears about mass firings. MPR Justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has been following this. Ryan, let's start with the new attorney general, Pam Bondi, sworn in this week in the Oval Office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. So now that she's on the job, what has she done? One of the first things that she did was sign a whole bunch of memos, more than a dozen of them that aim to advance the president's agenda and the department's role in it. These things address a whole range of topics.

Bondi revived the federal death penalty. She set up an October 7 task force to focus on the threat posed by Hamas. Other memos address immigration enforcement, the drug cartels. This sort of thing reflects the shift in priorities that we often see out of the Justice Department with the change in administration. Saying that though, there's one memo in particular that really stood out and it raises questions about whether the department under Bondi aims to go after the people who investigated Trump. Tell us about that memo.

The subject line is restoring the integrity and credibility of the Department of Justice, but what the memo does is establish what it calls a weaponization working group that will review the criminal and civil cases that were brought against Trump over the past four years by federal and state prosecutors. It will also look at the capital riot investigations and what the memo calls the pursuit of improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions relating to the Capitol attack. Now, Bondi has been a fierce defender of Trump over the years before she was attorney general. She talked about investigating the investigators and there are certainly concerns that that that that's what's going on here. And look, in the in the past few weeks, the department has already fired more than a dozen

prosecutors who worked on Trump investigations because the new leadership said those folks couldn't be trusted to carry out the president's agenda. There's also been turmoil at the FBI. So where do things stand now? Right. There's been a lot of nervousness and fear at the FBI over the past week. Remember, the FBI falls under the authority of the Justice Department.

But the panic at the FBI started after the number two official at the Justice Department ordered the firing of eight senior career FBI officials and at the same time demanded a list of all FBI personnel who worked on any January 6th case. That's around 5,000 FBI employees and all. Now that set off fears at the FBI of possible mass firings. Sources told me about FBI agents printing out their HR files because they were worried that they'd be fired immediately. They wouldn't have access to the system. Things have settled down a bit in the past few days. The FBI handed over a list of employees who worked January 6 cases,

but not the agents names, to the Justice Department. The department says this is part of a review process related to ending what it calls the weaponization of the justice system. There are still concerns though about FBI agents' names possibly being made public, and then they or their families facing threats. Remember Trump pardoned some 1,500 January 6th defendants, including people who were convicted of violence. Agents have actually filed two lawsuits to try to prevent agents' names from being made public, so there's a lot of concern here.

There's a court hearing scheduled on those lawsuits today. So there will certainly be more to come. Yeah, that's MPRs. Ryan Lucas, Ryan, thanks for breaking it all down. Thank you. Some big companies are literally erasing diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI. GM, Pepsi, Disney, and others have scrubbed some or all of those words from their annual reports to investors. MPR business correspondent Maria Aspen is

the first to report this. Maria, tell us what you found. Hey, good morning. So as you know, we've been seeing some big companies announcing for months that they're ending or changing their DEI programs. They include Walmart, Target, Amazon, and just this week Google told employees that it's ending its hiring targets for underrepresented workers. But what I discovered this week is that many more big companies are backing away from the language of DEI without making a big announcement.

I went digging into the new annual reports that companies have been publishing for their investors, and I compared them with what they were saying a year ago. And I found that this year, at least a dozen big companies have all deleted or softened the language they use to talk about diversity. These companies include GM, Intel, Disney, Pepsi, and Chipotle. Now some of these companies wouldn't talk about these changes with me, so we don't know

for sure why they've done this. We just know that they've stopped talking about DEI in public. But some of the companies did give me some clues. Ooh, all right. What did they tell you? Well, there's a lot going on, but a few of these companies referred specifically to President Trump's new executive orders ending DEI in the federal government. These orders also threaten to sanction private companies that are federal contractors that have what Trump called illegal DEI programs. And Google, for example, is a federal contractor.

A spokesperson this week told me that Google is evaluating the changes required by Trump's executive orders and Google I should note is one of NPR's funders Another company I talked to was 3M. It's that big glomerate that makes post-it notes and chemicals and a bunch of other stuff it's also a federal contractor and 3M also deleted some references to diversity from its latest annual report and a spokesperson specifically mentioned the executive orders when he talked to me. Yeah, but not every company that's making these changes is a federal contractor. I mean, so what else is happening here?

So Trump's executive orders are definitely adding to the pressure, but corporate America was already facing a lot of pressure from critics of DEI who say that it is self-discriminatory. The bigger picture here is just that big companies are pretty risk averse. I talked about this with Becky Baker, who's an employment lawyer with FinCEN and Elkins. She says that DEI was a really popular buzzword in corporate America five years ago,

but now it's kind of politically toxic. We have seen companies start to decide that, you know, the reward in doing so is not necessarily outweighed by the risk anymore. So she's not surprised by the changes all of these companies are making, and she's expecting us to see a lot more. So is this the end of DEI?

Yes and no. There are still some companies that are standing by their promises to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion. And they're still talking about it using those words. For example, Costco said in its most recent annual report that promoting DEI is part of taking care of its employees. And meanwhile, some of the people doing this work

tell me that they hope that most companies are going to continue making their workplaces more inclusive for all employees, even if they're not using words and phrases like DEI. All right. That's NPR's Maria Aspin. Thanks a lot, Maria. Thank you. Lots of people are feeling pretty crummy these days as the winter stew of respiratory viruses

simmers. But there are a couple of unusual trends driving all the coughing, sneezing, and fevers this year. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein joins us now to explain. Rob, what's happening out there with all these viruses? Well, this is kind of a good news, bad news story. Let's start with the good news. This winter's COVID surge looks like the mildest since the virus first emerged. Here's Caitlin Rivers. She's an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. This year's winter wave

is low compared to previous winters. This is the smallest winter wave we've had since the pandemic began. There are still plenty of people getting it and even ending up in the hospital or worse, so River says people shouldn't let down their guard. When it comes to COVID though, I mean, why is this winter's COVID wave so mild? Well, 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. Here's Aubrey Gordon. She's an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. It's possible that viral interference is playing a role. This year there's a lot of influenza circulating. It may generate some non-specific immunity, so some non-specific protection, which then prevents people from getting other respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2, sort of crowds it out.

Now you probably noticed she said there's a lot of flu out there. And that brings us to the bad news. Yeah, the flu. So tell us what's up with the flu. Well this year's flu season started unusually early and has been pretty intense. And now it looks like we're getting hit by a second winter surge of flu. Here's Caitlin Rivers again from Johns Hopkins. Influenza activity first peaked around the turn of the new year, late December, early

January. Activity then declined for several weeks in a row, which is usually a sign that the season is on its way out. But then it really took an unusual turn and started to rise again. So activity is now at a second peak, just as high as it was around the turn of the new year. So it's looking like the intensity of this year's flu season

could have a long tail. So Rob, any idea why this is happening? I mean, I'm gonna try and connect to things that might not have anything to do with each other. Could it have anything to do with the bird flu? No, no, which is good news. So far testing hasn't spotted any signs that the worrying bird flu that's infecting dairy cows and poultry is spreading widely in people. So it's a bit of a mystery. It could just be kind of natural

variation that happens with the flu. That said, the more people who catch the flu, the greater the chances that people could get infected with both viruses, the regular flu and bird flu, and that could give the bird flu the opportunity to kind of swap genes with the regular flu and evolve into something more dangerous, even potentially cause another pandemic. That's MPR health correspondent, Rob Stein.

Rob, thanks. You bet. This Sunday on Up First, tech companies are creating AI chat bots that seem human but are not. They give you the illusion of intimacy without there being anyone home. The danger of human like chat bots on the next episode of The Sunday Story right here in the Up First podcast. And that's Up First for Friday, February 7th.

I'm Amay Martinez. And I'm Michelle Martin. Just a reminder, Up First airs on Saturdays too. Ayesha Roscoe and Scott Simon will have the news. Look for it wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Anna Yukhaninoff, Rafael Nam, Scott Hensley, Janaya Williams, and Alice Wolfley.

It was edited by Ben Adler. Today is Ben's last day with us, and we will definitely miss him dearly. It was produced by Zia Butch, Deanna Dumas, and Christopher Thomas. We get engineer support from Patrick Murray and our technical director Zach Coleman. Our executive producer is Kelly Dickens. Join us again tomorrow. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air, and I just talked to Pamela Anderson about her big career comeback after years in the tabloids and not being taken seriously.

She's entered a new era on stage and screen. Suzanne Somers had a great line. She said, you can't play a dumb blonde and be a dumb blonde. Find this interview with Pamela Anderson wherever you listen to Fresh Air. Hey, it's Robin Hilton from NPR Music. Find this interview with Pamela Anderson wherever you listen to fresh air.