Trump moves to slap tariffs on nearly every nation | The Excerpt
On Friday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: President Donald Trump made another major move on tariffs Thursday. Paste BN World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard takes a look at the impact from President Trump's executive order to freeze spending, pending a review, at the U.S. Agency for International Development. RFK Jr. was sworn in Thursday as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney resigns over a 'rushed' DOJ process to drop charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Paste BN Money Reporter Bailey Schulz discusses what's going on with recent tech layoffs.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more Paste BN podcasts right here
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Friday, February 14th, 2025. This is the Excerpt. Today, a look at the impact on global aid after USAID cuts. Plus, RFK is sworn in to lead Health and Human Services. And how worried should we be about recent tech layoffs?
♦
President Trump signed a memorandum yesterday instructing his administration to pursue reciprocal tariffs against nations that put fees on US exports, escalating a trade war that could lead to higher costs for Americans.
Donald Trump:
They can build a factory here, a plant or whatever it might be here, and that includes the medical, that includes cars, that includes chips and semiconductors. That includes everything. If you build here, you have no tariffs whatsoever, and I think that's what's going to happen. I think our country's going to be flooded with jobs.
Taylor Wilson:
Trump did not immediately put tariffs in place, but directed trade officials to go country by country and put together a slate of tailored countermeasures. The tariffs are expected to be equivalent to the fees that individual countries put on products that are imported from the US, including tariffs and taxes, and take into account regulatory requirements and subsidies affecting US businesses and consumers.
♦
After President Donald Trump's Executive Order to free spending pending a review at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, we're seeing an impact already on a global level. My colleague, Dana Taylor, spoke with Paste BN World Affairs correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard for more.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks for joining us, Kim.
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
I know things are changing rapidly on the ground, both in Washington and abroad, with regards to USAID status. Where do things stand now?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Some of the unions that cover many of these USAID employees are mounting legal challenges to the Trump administration, trying to argue that these attempts to freeze the organization or pause the funding amounts to executive power overreach, and it's unconstitutional. There's almost 10,000 USAID employees around the world, and many of them are just dispersed in dozens of countries, and they're sort of in limbo, waiting to understand exactly what all this is going to mean for them.
So currently, there's a number of legal challenges on behalf of USAID employees wending their way through the courts. Some of the programs that this organization funds have received emergency waivers. That means they can carry on doing the work that they've been doing around the world, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have funds to pay for the work that they've been doing, so they've had to stop it.
Dana Taylor:
The Trump White House released a statement last week entitled, "At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep." Were they able to provide proof of this?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Yes and no. So what the White House did was it released a fact sheet, and the fact sheet had about 11, 12 different examples of what they described as waste, abuse, mismanagement of this money, billions of dollars of money that the US gives every year, and they described some of the scenarios that they claimed are illustrative of this waste. So for example, they said that an organization in Egypt was given money to promote Egyptian tourism, or that in another country, money was given to a group to promote electric vehicles.
Fact-checkers who have been looking at this very closely have determined that in most of those instances, that they're either kind of misleading, lacking context, or they're outright wrong. There's no question that big U.S agencies like USAID are wasteful. The organization itself has done audit after audit trying to make itself slimmer and work more effectively. Its leaders have acknowledged that over the years. The question is, is this money being so woefully mismanaged? Is it being deliberately mismanaged? And the Trump administration is saying, yes, absolutely. Now, it's worth pointing out that a lot of the examples that they gave on that fact sheet tend to overlap in areas where there's been DEI initiatives, which of course, they are quite opposed to.
Dana Taylor:
You noted that food grown by American farmers is now going to waste in warehouses. How much food are we talking about here, and where is it being stored?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
So we're talking about a lot of food. So it's about 475,000 metric tons, which is enough to feed almost 40 million people. The bottom line here is that there are millions of people around the world going hungry. We should say at this point, as of about 24, 36 hours ago, some of this food that was halted in warehouses around the United States, these food programs are given waivers, so it has been able to move on.
Dana Taylor:
The pause in USAID is also creating a crisis in ISIS prison camps in Syria. What's going on there?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
USAID workers aren't directly involved in some of the prison camps in Syria where a lot of former ISIS fighters and their families are being held. But what USAID money does is, it funds specific organizations to hand out bread, to hand out water, to give fuel. When these freezes were first announced, a lot of those workers in those camps just walked off the job. And there's a larger question over some of the local authorities there, this is Syrian Kurds who look after the security, whether they're going to be able to do that longer term. Some security experts are looking at that spot and wondering whether it's going to, over the longer term, lead to an uptick potentially in terrorism around the world, probably first and foremost, initially in the Middle East, then Europe, and then maybe eventually in the United States.
Dana Taylor:
Is there any end in sight for resolving all the uncertainty about USAID's future? What are your thoughts here?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
How long is a piece of string? Like much of the Trump administration action that's taking place right now, it's wending its way through courts. That's a process that's very difficult to understand how long that's going to take. Obviously, the core actions need to play out, and that'll give some clarity about USAID employees and how many will be able to stay and how many won't.
I think there's a larger, more important point here to make for Americans to understand, which is that some of the work that these folks do around the world, it's not just about caring for people in specific locations, although that, of course, is a big part of it. It's also about monitoring and understanding diseases and potential pandemics, because they don't always care for borders, and a lot of that activity is at risk now.
Dana Taylor:
We always appreciate you coming on. Thanks for your insights here, Kim.
Kim Hjelmgaard:
Thanks so much for having me.
♦
Taylor Wilson:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was officially sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services in a ceremony at the White House yesterday.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
For 20 years, I've gotten every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country. On August 23rd of last year, God sent me President Trump.
Taylor Wilson:
Kennedy there is referring to the date last year when he suspended his own presidential campaign and put his support behind Trump.
Earlier in the day, the Senate confirmed Kennedy in a 52-48 vote. The opposition included every Democratic senator, along with a lone Republican detractor, Senator Mitch McConnell. A childhood polio survivor, he said he took issue with Kennedy's vaccine skepticism.
Kennedy has no academic background in health or medicine, but he's become an idolized figure in the so-called Make America Healthy Again movement. Many supporters of touted Kennedy in particular for his criticism of food dyes and other additives. He's also said he will reorient federal health agencies toward chronic disease and rid of Big Pharma's influence.
But ever since Trump announced Kennedy as his pick to lead HHS, medical professionals and public officials have been sounding the alarm on Kennedy's earlier statements undermining confidence in vaccines, including falsely linking them to autism. Decades of studies show vaccines do not cause autism. Other controversial statements by him have been discredited, including that fluoride in public water systems causes bone cancer and IQ loss.
Now that he's been sworn into the position, Kennedy will oversee the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, among other agencies. For his part, Trump has said he'll let Kennedy go wild on food, health and medicine.
♦
Federal prosecutors were planning to hit New York Mayor Eric Adams with new charges when the Justice Department ordered them to drop the case. That's according to the US Attorney in Manhattan in a letter yesterday, as she and other top officials resigned in protest. Acting US attorney Danielle Sassoon, the Trump administration's recent pick to temporarily lead the office prosecuting Mayor Eric Adams, announced her resignation, writing that her office had planned to charge the mayor with destroying evidence and telling others to do so, and to lie to the FBI.
But she said in the letter, published by the New York Post, that her office was undermined by the Department of Justice after the acting Deputy Attorney directed her to dismiss the indictment against Adams. Adams was indicted on corruption charges in September, and his trial was scheduled to begin in April. The move to drop the charges came as Adams had grown closer to President Donald Trump. Both claim to have been unfairly targeted by former President Joe Biden's Justice Department.
♦
We've seen several tech giants lay off staff in recent days. I caught up with Paste BN Money Reporter Bailey Schulz, to take a closer look at what's going on and the expectations for hiring later this year. Bailey, always a pleasure.
Bailey Schulz:
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
So Bailey, what are we seeing with tech layoffs in this moment?
Bailey Schulz:
Yeah, so I think there are some big name tech companies that have made headlines in recent weeks for trimming staff. Meta, for example, cut about 5% of staff this week. Workday, which is a software company, laid off about 8.5% of staff, and then we're seeing Google offering voluntary buyouts at this time. So, just a few examples of some of the tech companies that have made headlines recently.
Taylor Wilson:
And how does all this compare to, say, the big waves of layoffs we saw in this sector during 2022 and 2023? And Bailey, how do these layoffs compare even to an average start to any year?
Bailey Schulz:
The good news is that the number of layoffs we're seeing in tech does not really compare to what we saw in the 2022, 2023 years, when we saw just these massive waves of layoffs in that industry. So for example, in January, we saw about 2,500 employees laid off in tech, and that's according to Layoffs at FYI, which has been tracking this since 2020. If you go back a year, January, 2024, that number was closer to 35,000. So even since then, we've seen the number of layoffs in tech has just dropped. Things have picked up a little bit in February, but still not really close to what we saw in those 2022, 2023 time span, when we just saw massive waves of layoffs.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, well as for this recent pickup, I mean, why are big tech companies laying off workers in this moment? Is this just kind of an annual thing, a re-correction, or is there something else going on here?
Bailey Schulz:
What experts told me is that it's pretty normal to see layoffs around this time of the year. If you are going to see layoffs from a company, start of the new year is sort of when companies are looking at their annual budgets, when they're reassessing priorities. And so, if you're going to see layoffs, it'll usually be around this time of year for companies. We might be seeing a little bit of a spike in the beginning of 2025, but there are experts who expect that to sort of level off as we continue into the new year.
Taylor Wilson:
And what kind of hiring environment, Bailey, are those who get laid off in this moment finding in the job market?
Bailey Schulz:
A little bit of a double-side coin, where good news is, we're seeing less of these tech layoffs. Bad news is that experts are saying that this is a bit of a more challenging environment for job seekers, where we are just seeing hiring has dipped a little bit in recent years, compared to what we saw during some of those previous waves of layoffs. And so, we are seeing companies expressing some more optimism for 2025, where there are surveys that show more employers are hopeful of expanding head counts. More employers in tech are optimistic for the new years. I think we'll have to wait and see exactly how inflation, interest rates play out in 2025. But yeah, it sounds like, based on surveys, based on what experts have told me, there is some optimism in the space.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Bailey Schulz covers money for Paste BN. Thank you, Bailey.
Bailey Schulz:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
♦
Taylor Wilson:
And today is Valentine's Day. Wherever you are, whoever you're with, I hope you have a chance to express and feel some love today.
♦
Thanks for listening to the Excerpt. We're produced by Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for the Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of the Excerpt, from Paste BN.