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- [00:00]
A
Hey, guys. Welcome to Morning Shots Live. I am Andrew Egger, White House correspondent for the Bulwark, joined as always by Bill Kristol, our editor at large. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every Tuesday. Sorry. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every day. We come to you live every Tuesday. I have not been coming to you live every Tuesday for a couple of Tuesdays. I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks. This is the first video I've done in weeks. I'm. I'm terrified it's live. We're going to see if I've remembered how to do any of this at all. We're going to. We have put out a couple newsletters, so that part of my brain at least is limbered back up. Bill, you are in front of a great backdrop today. You always are. You have some books and things usually, but where are you? Is this just a different part of your home or are you someplace else?
- [00:41]
B
Yeah, no, I'm in the sort of kitchen table as opposed to the study for various reasons I won't bore you with, but.
- [00:46]
A
Yeah.
- [00:47]
B
You like it? It's okay. I can do this more often.
- [00:49]
A
You look good. I have one little leaf kind of poking into my shot from the right in the way we have this set up now. And I like the foliage you've got going on.
- [00:57]
B
It's in nature as opposed to studious library. Look, it's the, you know, communing with nature look. It's not really who I am, but it's. It's a good. It's a good look occasionally, you know.
- [01:08]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the communing with nature stuff, this is. This. This doesn't make any sense at all, but I'll just do it. Maybe that is the better backdrop for what our first thing that we have to talk about today is given. Given the fact it's out there. It's science, it's nature. It is cyclosporiasis. It is the parasite, the. The food. Foodborne parasite leading to all kinds of gastrointestinal problems for a bunch of people all around the country over the past couple of weeks, it has really blossomed into a big story. And even though I was on vacation up in northern Michigan, this seemed to be a thing everybody was talking about up there too. So I actually was a little bit more read up on this than on things like the war in Iran, which we will get to in a little bit as well. But this is. We wrote about this in. In Morning Shots today. I wrote about this. How Elon ruins salad That's a little tangent tendentious. You know, it's, I, it's, it's a little, it's a little maybe overselling to, to a certain extent. But here's the thing with this. I mean, we, we, we've been tracking this outbreak. The weird thing about this story is, and, and so many of these stories right now is how many different things keep ending up coming back like there's some bad thing going on in the world. It's, it's, you know, the kind of thing that previously would not have really been a political story at all, except that it happens to have some nexus, some connection to some cut that Doge made when Doge went rampaging through the federal government last year. So, so, so I was talking in this piece a little bit about this report we got from CNN just yesterday, which we can, which we can throw up here. Trump's funding cuts created the perfect storm that slowed the government's cyclosporiasis response. They report there they talked to a guy, Dr. Joel Barrett, who formerly ran a task force within a specific CDC lab on specifically parasite prevention in the United States. He talked to them, he says. By the time his 11 person team was reduced to three in September, Barrett said he had had enough and resigned. But before leaving, he said he sent emails to higher ups at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the risks of losing staff and how it could hurt the response to future outbreaks. Now those warnings have become reality, with the employees working to rein in a growing cyclospora outbreak in the Midwest. Forced to do more with less, their response is being hampered by the loss of specialized staff and the loss of hands on deck needed to identify the source of the outbreaks, he said. And CNN goes on to talk about how it's not just personnel, it's funding also nearly $30 million in funding that had previously, previously gone toward a division like that that happened to be partially funded by usaid, which might seem a little strange until you remember that a lot of what USAID was up to was international disease surveillance and control, especially things like malaria. And this was a guy they were talking to who was in charge of such efforts here. Bill, I don't know how much you have followed this cyclospora story. Obviously you have been doing yeoman's work while I've been gone, keeping everybody abreast on everything else that's going on in the news. I have been a little surprised by how much, and again, maybe it's just because I was in Michigan, which has been sort of the epicenter of at least the reporting on this, although maybe not the epicenter of the outbreak, as we've learned. But is this a thing that has been breaking through nationally as much as it has seemed or seemed to be when I was out there a little west of here?
- [04:28]
B
Oh, I think so. Just judging from family and friends, text chains and stuff. Look, people buy lettuce, they buy iceberg lettuce, they buy sometimes the bags where it's already, you know, broken up for you, and sometimes they buy the whole heads. And then you sort of read that a particular provider is. And then there's the Taco Bell side of it, which is a pretty big company, and a lot of people drop by there occasionally. And then the whole. So you just, you know, what can we eat? What can we buy? People look at. You look at your sandwich. You know, you get a BLT in a restaurant and you look at it and you think, maybe I'll have it without the L. So I know we've had a lot of conversations about it in various circles and also just in a, a couple of social gatherings, people joke, joking or half joking about it or looking at the little orders, you know, and thinking this is good because there's no lettuce on this one. So, yeah, it's a little bad pad for the lettuce growers, I suppose, in general. But no, it's a big thing. And look on the broader point, which you should elaborate on a little more. I mean, I do think the degree to which the Doge cuts did real damage. DOGE is in the rearview mirror. People don't talk about it much now. It ended, but the damage was done. A lot of it remains. Some of it's been fixed a little. But I would say I'm struck. I talked to some people about a totally different issue the other day who were talking about the damage DOGE did in a different area of government. And it's not fully fixed, even if it's sort of been you know, corrected or rolled back some. And then, of course, the rest of the Trump administration has chugged ahead for a year with further cuts and further, in the case of hhs, further ignoring science and so forth. So it's. It Doge was sort of the, the entry wedge, which. But then, if anything, that you think the thing is, kind of the momentum has continued a little bit, or at least certainly hasn't been turned around.
- [06:11]
A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and I mean, I think this is a, this story kind of illustrates one of Those sort of knock on effects of what we've seen from Doge. Because this is not a guy, this guy they interviewed, this is not a guy who was fired by Doge. This is a guy who saw Doge go through, lost a bunch of people on his team, maybe some of them took buyouts, maybe some of them were fired outright, saw a bunch of the funding for his lab dry up. As they go on to elaborate in this story, saw a bunch of the people not right on his team, but the kind of people who would have been pulled in at a moment when cyclosporiasis is suddenly not just one of a million different things that they're tracking, but is suddenly actually the story a lot of the other resources that would have been suddenly rushed to, that are, are now lacking. And this is a guy who saw all that and was like, well, look, I can't do this job with, under the conditions that you have, that you have created for me. And I just quit. He quit back in September. And we have a government right now that doesn't really see that as a problem. I mean, if you remember going back to the beginning of Doge, this was a big part of the plan, as they hoped it would proceed, right? They would fire anybody that they could fire, but they also wanted to make the conditions so bad for everybody that was left that a bunch of them would just quit and not be backfilled. And I, and I. So I have struggled a little bit to know quite how hard to twist this particular knife, right? Because on the one hand you could see outbreaks like this and at any time, and they are, I mean, there's been a lot of reporting on this. Jonathan Cohn had had a great video for us, I think last week, maybe, maybe already now, the week before, again, I was on vacation, but, but, but, you know, kind of getting into some of the specifics of this, some of the difficulties of why it is just hard to track a thing like this when, when, when you have an outbreak of this particular parasite. You're talking about people who were infected weeks and weeks before they ever started showing symptoms. You're talking about, you know, first of all, making them go in for a bunch of undignified tests, you know, basically stool samples. Nobody likes that. And also trying to reconstruct what they were eating, you know, weeks before, and then trying to sift through that data, maybe barely remember data, and try to reconstruct, you know, possible common points of infection for all these different people. So it's hard, it's hard work. At the same time, this is the kind of thing. And what I mean when I say it's hard work is that, like, it could have happened under anybody. And we don't really know to what extent it's worse now than it would have been prior to these cuts. But when you talk about it as a political story, all of that complicated stuff can sort of be set to one side. When you just talk about anything that touches Doge, because Doge is such a compelling story on its own. Right. Doge is just, it was so shoddy, it was so slapdash. It was just these kids who didn't know anything and weren't really allowed to be there or shouldn't have been allowed to be there. They that were just allowed to go through and pull whatever wiring out of the walls that they wanted to throughout the whole federal government. And then it just stayed that way. And so when it comes to stories like this, yeah, you can kind of dice it very fine and try to be like, well, we don't really know how much worse or how much better it could be in a different world, but it's not at all hard to make the sale that some things are somewhat worse and that we know who's responsible. And it is interesting to see Democrats jumping more and more on this particular thing. We saw, for instance, John Ossoff, senator from Georgia, sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Last week, basically talking about a whole different thing that was cut, this different food monitoring, parasite monitoring program that was cut under HHS specifically for cyclospora. So I don't know, I just think it seems like this is a thing we're going to keep seeing. Right? I mean, we have not run through all of the possible things that could go wrong under doge, that, you know, whatever, whatever momentary thing might crop up next week or next month or next year in terms of a small scandal or a small bad thing happening, small scale disaster here or there, that previously would not have been a political story that gets to now be a political story because it has some connection to the remarkably widespread cutting they were doing at Doge.
- [10:27]
B
And I think this is not an administration that looks terribly eager to highlight things like this. I think previous administrations, some of us on the kind of conservative side, 10, 20 years ago, when I was in government, 30 years ago, little concerned that FDA, CDC, those kinds of organizations, were too conservative with a small C in terms of, you know, not understanding what we were saying. You were saying before these things happen in any world, you know, nothing's perfect. And, and, but, and maybe we should be a little more relaxed than some of the, you know, some of what some of the government inspection programs and so forth, while preserving obviously basic safety standards and all this. But this administration has gone to the other extreme, both in terms of the regulatory side and in being so pro business and apparently, well, not apparently, certainly giving breaks to businesses they like now, hopefully not on core safety issues, but we don't know. And there are plenty of reporting that suggests that in a whole range of areas there's a kind of, hey, we love oil and gas and coal and don't worry so much about some of these safety or regulatory or clean air provisions and we love agriculture, as Trump keeps saying over and over again, so we're going to actually damage you with terrorists. But on the other hand, we're not going to enforce certain things. Now ultimately it comes back to bite them, obviously, like here if you talk to lettuce growers, I'm sure. But so yeah, so I think it's perfectly fair really politically to say you guys have chosen to go way over onto one side of the spectrum of kind of, you know, government regulation versus non regulation. And so it's reasonable to at least for everyone to raise questions when something like this happens. Could it, would it have happened in the past? Would it have been addressed more earlier in the past? Would it have been addressed more vociferously and candidly perhaps, and as opposed to being very reluctant to name someone. And so anyway, I think, yeah, I think it's all, it's fair enough, you know, and it's look, it is what it is. It's a, it's an outbreak. We'll see how now how well it gets under control and we'll see what happens at other areas. Ebola has been in the news a bit lately and it made me really think back to 2014, where I've got to say we at the Weekly Standard then this is why you were in college, I guess were pretty, were alarmed. I mean, JVL knows a fair amount about some of the scientific and medical stuff and he really thought this thing could be terrible. And a lot of people did incidentally, and it probably could have been terrible. And the Obama administration, for all of its faults, brought Ron Klain in specially, who had a lot of government experience, not a scientist or a medical guy, but had worked with on those kinds of issues. Some in government brought him in, put him in the White House, gave him a huge amount of authority and they did grapple it to a Reasonable outcome. Right. And I give them credit for it, and I think we gave them credit at the time for that. And maybe they needed a little pressure for our side. That pressure was healthy. You sort of can't imagine Trump doing that. Right. You can't imagine Trump bringing in a respected senior former government official and say, you got the power to really get this thing, you know, get this thing under control and override Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And some of the like, slightly crazy people he's put in at hhs, or override Russell Vaught and his concern about getting rid of every regulation that any business anywhere has ever thought was burdensome and so forth.
- [13:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me, the thing that just keeps being really alarming is that anytime you have one of these stories, one of these things that's going wrong in some way and the spotlight is suddenly shown on some new piece of the sort of administrative apparatus or the scientific apparatus that has not had cause to be in the news, you are not typically seeing these days, these stories of, all right, we're all ready. You know, we have everything set up and ready to go. We've been waiting for this moment. You know, we've been, we've been funded for this. We, this is what we are here to do, is to step up in a moment like this instead of, again, you just keep getting these stories of, you know, you shine a spotlight on some new part of the government that nobody's been paying attention to before, and you find out they are still reeling from all of this stuff that's been happening over the last year. And again, it's not specific, it's not even like specific matters of political leadership, although that sort of stuff is bad enough, as you say. And we have seen a lot of alarming instances of these specific, you know, cabinet level leaders or just other, you know, political appointees who, who have been gumming up the works. But it's just sort of baseline, you know, office morale and functionality, stuff that has just really been under threat and under siege. I mean, I still remember from last year, obviously the, the science stuff tends to be the worst because that's some of the parts of the government that, that got shafted the most under Doge. But it's not just like science stuff. It's not just, you know, epidemiologists and people who track parasites. I've been trying to think, is there a word for like a corresponding word for epidemiologists for people who track parasitic outbreaks? I don't know, I've just been saying people who track parasites, parasite chasers. But, but, but it's not just that kind of stuff. I mean, I remember reporting last year on the, the way that Doge had run through very early the National Nuclear Safety Administration and, and just really fired a bunch of people who absolutely should not have been fired, who are like some of our nation's top people in terms of handling and disposing nuclear waste and all of these sorts of things, and supervising various parts of the construction process for nuclear arms, nuclear weapons, nuclear warheads. And that they had kind of very quickly after there was a lot of reporting, including hours about what had happened there. They had kind of very quickly reversed some of those firings and put some of those people back in place. But just the way that, that you can't really just glue a vase back together in a lot of these, in a lot of these times and a lot of these places where like a bunch of people who had quit were not going to come back. A bunch of people who had, who were fired and then brought back were still really shell shocked by the whole thing. And we're thinking, well, do I need to look for another job somewhere else? And we're still actively kind of pursuing that. And then we all moved on to something else. But that story's still there, right? And like, God knows, I hope the National Nuclear Safety Administration is not making headlines again in a year or so for some reason that's related to this sort of thing. But if you were to shine the spotlight back on, seems perfectly reasonable to fear that this is the kind of thing you'd see that they're just under the surface, outside the news, all across the government, there are these teams who are there for a reason but have been monkeyed with and are just not quite able to do the job that to the same extent that they were before. And I don't think that's like, to a certain extent that's speculative, but it is also the sort of thing that we have seen actually borne out because it's what they said they wanted. It's what they, they said from the outset of Doge is we're going to fire a bunch of people and we hope more quit and then the government will be smaller and that will be good. So, so I don't know anything else on, on cyclist Floor and all this?
- [17:15]
B
Well, sort of. One point I was looking at the Federalist Papers for just to find a quotation that I have remembered the other day, sort of reminded by this obvious fact when you look at them. And if you've read them as you have studied them. The latter half of the federal papers really is all about can Republican government be good government. Both good in the sense of preserving liberty. And that's the most famous part of balance, the separation of powers, constraints on the different powers, but also good government, just in the more commonsensical sense, meaning of, you know, competent policies that are designed to do something, actually do accomplish what they're designed to do. And it sounds dorky to talk about good government or sound policy and a little bit expertise. Ish. And I don't know, not fashionable these days, but it is actually important. It was always thought to be important. It was always thought to be one of the questions about Republican government that it could be so susceptible to demagogues and popular moods and sentiments and distrust of expertise in a sense that it would not produce just good results. And Hamilton and Addison say if you don't produce good results, ultimately the faith in popular government is going to dwindle. It's not going to be a success Republican experiment anyway. It's always been balancing that with obviously popular accountability and stuff is a big challenge. And we've done a decent job of that over a couple of centuries, I think. But yeah, I do think we need to have a little more respect just for competence and results. Sound results in good government. Such a key part of the conservative critique when I was younger of liberal failures of good intentions and, you know, and not understanding how. How a complex system works. And we spent a lot of. And the conservatives made some very useful changes to the kind of liberal way of doing it in the 80s and 90s, I would say, and 2000s even Clinton, Gore was sort of conservative. Ish. Some of those changes in government reform, just to throw it out though, is very. It's both dangerous in terms of you get bad results and people get sick. Obviously that's the main thing. But also ultimately it corrodes confidence in the government and it makes you more susceptible to even other. To different demagogues. Right. I mean, it's sort of a vicious cycle of demagoguery once the government seems unable to do anything that it says it's going to do.
- [19:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. And you could. I don't know how any of this stuff is going to go because you could see it cutting one of two ways. Right. I mean, you could see doge as. And specifically the cuts to science and epidemiology and these sorts of things. You could see it as the sort of decadent move where everybody who just assumes that, you know, you get to take all of the sort of proper functioning of the scientific apparatus for granted and that you can just sort of yank a bunch of people out of there without doing real harm and all these sorts of things. You could see it as a learning experience. You could see a world where we sort of thermostatically rebalance back and say, well, actually it does really matter to have these sorts of things. And we have now sort of learned how important some of this stuff is in its absence or in its poor functioning. But I also do worry that maybe we don't get that sort of response. And maybe, as you mentioned, it triggers further rounds of demagoguery and further rounds of sort of recrimination toward public health and toward, you know, the poor people who are left trying to hold all this stuff together with scotch tape and chewing gum. And it leads to even more sort of populist rabble rousing and even more know nothing type rhetoric and policy and politicians getting in there who are hostile to the whole thing. And I guess we'll have to see. But it doesn't feel very good. I'm not very excited about having to find out which direction we go. I would have preferred sort of never, never having to stress test this particular question. Okay, so Bill, like I said, I've been out of town. I've been following some stories more closely than others. One thing that you don't really realize until you actually get out of the daily grind of it is just how easy it is to miss gigantic things that are happening in the country. I mean, I still get all the same emails and all the same push notifications and stuff that I've been getting all along, but it was not really until I got back from vacation that I was like, oh no, we are really back at war. It's just, it is actually happening. The United States is engaged in this conflict and I guess people are just.