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- [00:05]
Shemitah Basu
Good morning. It's Friday, May 30th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News today. On today's show, some Senate Republicans aren't on board with the big budget bill. Why? A cancer drug that costs a quarter to make is being sold for nearly $1,000 a pop. And the Scripps National Spelling Bee has a new champion in its hundredth year. Can you get the winning word? But first, the Elon Musk era of Doge is coming to a close. The White House said his offboarding process started Wednesday night, and it caps a tumultuous few months of the tech mogul cutting his way through Washington by dramatically reducing the size of the workforce, canceling contracts, grants and leases, and attempting to shut down several federal agencies altogether. Musk made no secret of his ambitions as he spelled out to now Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick back in October, how much do you think we can rip.
- [01:06]
David Armstrong
Out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget?
- [01:12]
William Wunn
Well, I think we could do at least 2 trillion.
- [01:14]
Shemitah Basu
Yeah. That target was never reached. Doge does claim to have saved $175 billion so far, which amounts to 2.5% of the federal budget. But that figure has been for journalists to confirm, and many outlets have identified cases of double counting and other errors in Doge's accounting. As Musk returns to his usual day job thinking about electric cars and getting to Mars, there are many people who were affected by his short tenure in D.C. and have no job to return to. Analysis from the New York Times puts the confirmed and planned job losses at around 280,000, largely achieved through buyouts, early retirements, and firing threats. Many of these now ex federal workers are struggling to figure out next steps. Washington Post reporter William Wunn and his colleagues spoke with more than 30 former and current federal workers about the chaos of the last few months, the mass firings that left people feeling demoralized, devalued, and deeply anxious. And please be advised, this story mentions suicide.
- [02:22]
William Wunn
You have people locked out of their offices. Suddenly or in some cases, they are showing up to offices and having to line up. And the way they find out that whether they still have a job or not is they swipe their badge, and if their badge doesn't work, then they're out of a paycheck.
- [02:38]
Shemitah Basu
One reports that the tactics the Doge team deployed to cut the federal workforce are unusual for both the public and private sector. Some people were fired, rehired, and then fired again. Others were locked out of their offices by police or fired for political, quote, disloyalty. At various points, President Trump or officials in his administration have called federal workers crooked, dishonest, or lazy.
- [03:03]
William Wunn
One of the most heartbreaking cases was this woman, Caitlin Cross Barnett. She was a health researcher.
- [03:11]
Shemitah Basu
She worked for the center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in Baltimore, where she used data to show that birth centers could bring down costs and emergency room visits while also contributing to higher birth weights.
- [03:23]
William Wunn
She had devoted her entire career to helping pregnant women. These are minority women, women addicted to opioids who were pregnant or from lower income, helping them not die in childbirth. In the first few weeks of Trump's administration, she started really fearing for her job, and she had struggled on and off with depression for years, but this was something she had never experienced before.
- [03:51]
Shemitah Basu
Juan says as the threats to Cross Barnett's job became more real, her mental health deteriorated. Her husband helped her check into a mental health facility, and while there, Cross Burnett killed herself. Experts told the Post. Suicide is complicated to explain, but research points to clear contributing factors. Feelings of worthlessness, stress, lack of access to healthcare and insurance, and unemployment. Since publishing this story, one says many federal workers have reached out to offer their stories.
- [04:25]
William Wunn
One person said, you know, I thought I'd been struggling with this on my own, not knowing what to do, wanting for it all to end. And they just said they were so grateful to know they're not alone.
- [04:37]
Shemitah Basu
While Musk is leaving, Doge as a department is not disbanding. Asked by reporters about its future earlier this month, Musk replied, is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Congress returns from its Memorial Day recess on Monday, and one of the top agenda items for the Republican controlled Senate will be to work on the mega tax and spending bill that narrowly passed the House last week. Over the break, some Republicans in the House who voted to approve the package heard from unhappy constituents in town halls, like Representative Ashley Hinson from Iowa, who who was booed by people from her district.
- [05:23]
Sahil Kapoor
I was also proud to vote for President Trump's one big, beautiful bill, a generational investment.
- [05:31]
Shemitah Basu
Trump supports the package, but in the Senate, there are some mixed feelings about the legislation. A number of Republicans have expressed concerns about elements of the bill, with some arguing it doesn't go far enough to reduce spending. Like Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, he.
- [05:47]
Sahil Kapoor
Is livid about the fact that this bill adds trillions of dollars to the national debt.
- [05:52]
Shemitah Basu
Sahil Kapoor is a senior national politics reporter with NBC who's been keeping track of this bill's progress.
- [05:59]
Sahil Kapoor
It goes against everything he says he believes in. He says spending cuts need to be deeper. He actually wants government spending to go back to 2019 levels, pre Covid levels, which if you consider how much retirement safety programs like Social Security and Medicare have automatically grown since then, with a bunch of new people entering retirement, that is going to be a massively difficult task. Borderline impossible, I would say.
- [06:23]
Shemitah Basu
Politically, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky shares those concerns, and other Republican senators are questioning the depths of the Medicaid cuts in the House bill, which proposes cutting $700 billion from the program.
- [06:36]
Sahil Kapoor
That includes senators like Josh Hawley, who's very culturally conservative but has fiscally liberal instincts. He's been very vocal about the fact that he does not want to cut Medicaid benefits here.
- [06:46]
Shemitah Basu
Still, Kapoor said that other Republicans are in favor of introducing some things like work assessments and legal status verifications to the Medicaid program. The White House has been saying that revenue from tariffs will help offset the bill's impact on the deficit. It's unclear what the future of those tariffs will ultimately look like. Just yesterday, an appeals court temporarily paused Wednesday's ruling that voided many of Trump's tariffs. Or, to put it plainly, the most sweeping tariffs are back on while the administration's appeal is being considered, Kapoor explained. Regardless of what does or doesn't happen with tariffs, the House bill is projected to add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. But a potential tariff freeze could impact how some Republican lawmakers see the whole economic picture.
- [07:36]
Sahil Kapoor
It could only matter if Republicans decide that the tariff revenue is not coming, or it may not come. And some of them, in their own heads when deciding how to vote, were counting on that reven to help offset some of the major deficit increases in this bill. So the short answer is it only matters if these fiscal hawks and conservative hardliners want it to matter.
- [07:59]
Shemitah Basu
Kapoor said he expects the Senate to take its time on the legislation. Their deadline is the end of July, when the debt ceiling will need to be raised to avoid a default, which could be economically disastrous. Any Senate changes would have to go back to the House for approval there. And as was the case in the House, Senate Republicans have a very narrow margin to navigate. They can only afford to lose three votes. There has been a lot of talk about the cost of prescription drugs in Washington lately, with bipartisan support for tackling this issue. Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order requesting that drug companies lower their prescription drug costs to be comparable with prices in other developed countries, an approach called Most Favored Nation pricing. Then Senators Josh Hawley, a Republican, and Peter Welsh, a Democrat introduced a bill proposing a similar idea, which would impose monetary penalties for drug companies that don't comply. Right now, pharmaceutical companies are able to set prices and raise them however they see fit. In a recent story for ProPublica, reporter David Armstrong traced the story of Revlimid, a cancer drug that costs its creator, Celgene to 25 cents to make, but sells to patients for over $800 per pill. In fact, the company has raised the price of this drug 26 times since 2006, sometimes hiking it up as much as 20% within a year. In his reporting, Armstrong found that executives at Celgene banked on cancer patients being willing to pay any price for treatment.
- [09:41]
David Armstrong
You know, if you have a drug that is gonna help you fight your cancer, put you in remission, or potentially cure your, of course, you know, anybody would do whatever they could to get that paid for.
- [09:54]
Shemitah Basu
Armstrong understands this firsthand. He takes this drug, he's a cancer patient himself. And he's my guest this week on Apple News in conversation where he shared what he learned in his reporting about why this drug is so expensive and how we all pay when drug prices climb too high.
- [10:12]
David Armstrong
Patients who have different health plans with high co pays or large out of pocket cost who can't find another way to get that recovered, they've really suffered. I've talked to patients who stopped taking the drug for a period of time because it was not financially possible for them or, you know, raided retirement funds, took out a mortgage, skimped on other things like groceries even.
- [10:35]
Shemitah Basu
And he says these latest efforts in Washington to regulate the drug industry are going to face challenges.
- [10:41]
David Armstrong
The problem becomes, how do you make this happen? What's the mechanism here? Medicare recently has been allowed through the Inflation Reduction act, very limited drug negotiating powers. Ten drugs in the first year, okay. The reaction of the pharmaceutical industry was to file lawsuit after lawsuit. There's pending litigation here. I just don't see where they're going to agree to this in any way without a fight.
- [11:09]
Shemitah Basu
To hear my full interview with David Armstrong, stick around after today's show. If you're listening in the news app, it'll play for you next. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. First, news from Texas, where state lawmakers have just passed a bill which defines men and women by their reproductive organs. It's the latest state to pass or consider laws explicitly spelling out the criteria to be considered a man or a woman. Supporters say the legislation is necessary to protect single sex spaces and to recognize, quote, the immutable biological differences that exist. Opponents say the bill is an attack on transgender people's identities and will cause hurt and confusion for those who have legally changed sex and hold documentation to that effect. While the bill carries no penalties or enforcement mechanisms, it's designed to form the basis for how laws relating to sex are applied elsewhere in the state. Now to Switzerland, where an entire Alpine village has been virtually crushed after a massive glacier collapsed, destroying everything in its path. Thanks to predictions from geologists, authorities were able to evacuate the 300 or so people who lived in Blatten in the days before. Even sheep and cows were airlifted by helicopter. The deluge of rock, mud and ice descending into the valley was captured on video and it shows the village wiped out in a matter of seconds. The authorities suspect that the collapse was caused by high altitude snowmelt, while a Zurich based geologist told the Washington Post the glacier was pushed down under the growing weight of overlying rocks and finally, the Scripps National Spelling Bee celebrated its hundredth competition last night. The winner was Faison Zaki from Texas, the favorite going into the final and the runner up from last year. The winning word? Eclairsi's Mom. Here is his moment of triumph and you can pause now if you want to have a guess again. The word eclairsisment.
- [13:18]
William Wunn
Now let's all of us take a deep breath.
- [13:24]
Shemitah Basu
That did not help at all.
- [13:27]
Sahil Kapoor
Pro Smile E C L A I R C I S S E M E N T that is correct.
- [13:40]
Shemitah Basu
The 13 year old collapsed to his knees in celebration and will take home $50,000 as a reward for his hard work. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around for my full conversation with ProPublica's David Armstrong about drug pricing in America. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News in conversation to find that episode. And I'll be back with the news on Monday.