U.S. and Russia discuss Black Sea ceasefire | The Excerpt
On Monday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: U.S. officials are meeting with Russian officials Monday for talks in Saudi Arabia. Paste BN National Correspondent Trevor Hughes explains that experts warn federal spending cuts will make the country sicker and poorer as healthcare costs rise without new treatments. An independent government watchdog agency will review the health and safety effects of President Donald Trump's mass firings. Paste BN Investigative Reporter Kenny Jacoby discusses how an NHL team's executives milked youth hockey families for profit. Here's what readers told us about the economy.
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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.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and today is Monday, March 24th, 2025. This is The Excerpt. Today, the latest on Russia, Ukraine ceasefire talks and what the US role is. Plus some experts warn that federal spending cuts jeopardize medical advances and how executives at an NHL team milk youth hockey families for profit.
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US and Russian officials began talks in Saudi Arabia earlier today aimed at making progress toward a cease fire in Ukraine. The US is currently looking at a separate Black Sea ceasefire deal before a potential wider agreement. Today's talks come after negotiations with Ukraine and Saudi Arabia yesterday. President Donald Trump has pushed to end the conflict speaking with both Ukrainian President Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin last week.
But talks amid skepticism from some in Europe about whether Putin is ready to make concessions. Trump said over the weekend that efforts to stop further escalation in the Ukraine Russia conflict were somewhat under control.
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Experts are warning that federal spending cuts jeopardize decades of medical advances. I spoke with Paste BN national Correspondent, Trevor Hughes, for more. Howdy, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
Hey, how's it going?
Taylor Wilson:
Good, good. Thanks for hopping on this another important story from you, Trevor. So I just want to start by hearing a little bit about Anne Morgan Giroux. This is who you mentioned at the top of this story. What can you tell us about her and her family's background on this?
Trevor Hughes:
They had a daughter who was born with epilepsy and epilepsy affects a surprising number of Americans every year. There is no known cure for it. There are treatments that are effective for many people but not for everyone. And so she and her husband wanted to help, and they began raising money for essentially pie in the sky, extremely experimental research, not dangerous research, but research that mainstream wasn't already looking at. And they worked on it and worked on it. They got to a point where they could get a federal grant that said, "You've proven enough. We think that you are on the right track here." And so they think they may have found maybe a cure for epilepsy.
Taylor Wilson:
And fast-forward to this moment, Trevor, I mean, how has this government slashing from the Trump administration had an impact potentially on this epilepsy solution that they were hoping on?
Trevor Hughes:
The Trump administration has essentially halted funding for National Institutes of Health grants. They're handed out in this sort of very formal process, and a court has ruled that the Trump administration has to spend that money because it was appropriated, but they haven't held the meetings necessary to actually give out the grants. And so this $3.3 million grant that this research lab in the University of Madison, Wisconsin is waiting for is essentially sitting in a bank account somewhere waiting to be spent.
Taylor Wilson:
And how else is this slashing, Trevor, impacting health? What have we seen over the last few weeks?
Trevor Hughes:
There's a huge concern essentially among health researchers that by halting this funding, the Trump administration is setting us back, not just weeks or months, but literally decades. And that's because research like this takes years to produce. You've got to do the initial experiments, you've got to do animal trials, you've got to do human trials. I mean, this is not a quick process. And so the concern among researchers is that even a relatively short hiccup in funding will lose generations of knowledge, essentially decades of lab management knowledge, PhD research or knowledge because folks are losing their jobs and have to go somewhere else. And so they probably won't loop back to the exact research they were doing.
Taylor Wilson:
So, Trevor, cost and spending waste are obviously at the heart of these Trump-Musk cuts. I'm curious, what do these cuts actually mean to the economics of health, what experts say on the money side here?
Trevor Hughes:
I mean, I think we all agree that we don't want to spend our tax money poorly. The question is what impact does this research have? And so there are a couple of knock-on effects. The National Institutes of Health is the single largest funder of scientific health research in the world in history. It generates a vast amount of money, not just in terms of salaries but products. I mean, one of the examples that often gets used is Ozempic, right? It took 30 years to develop. It was a drug that got its start by someone studying how yeast living on grapes absorbed sugars. That's a drug that's something like 6% of all Americans are on now. Diabetes is another example. If we don't find a way to solve diabetes, our healthcare costs are going to just continue to grow. And there is a concern that one of the cuts the Trump administration has made will halt some preventative efforts. Literally diet and exercise support for people that will dramatically raise health care costs for the rest of us.
Taylor Wilson:
Trevor, I know we've heard some other criticisms from the right about the National Institutes of Health specifically. I mean, what else did they say? How did defenders push back against those arguments?
Trevor Hughes:
The NIH made a lot of enemies or gained a lot of criticism, particularly during the COVID-nineteen pandemic. But there have been a lot of questions raised about fetal research, stem cell research, and then conservatives have a lot of problems with how the NIH has been administered. The folks I talked to, all the scientists I talked to said, "The NIH is the gold standard. Everyone else copies what we do because our system is so successful. That's one of the reasons China has adopted our model of this funding for research."
Taylor Wilson:
Can the private industry fill the void here? What do experts say on that?
Trevor Hughes:
I talked to a number of folks in venture capitalists even, and they basically said, "Look, we are willing to step in when people are close to getting something that we can sell." But there's just not a lot of research that gets done by the private sector to do these sort of pie in the sky things, that's literally what the National Institutes of Health Funds. And then those products get spun off and commercialized. The drugs that you take every day, generally speaking, had their genesis with NIH funding that were then developed by private industry.
Taylor Wilson:
And I know a federal judge earlier this month blocked the administration from cutting funding at the NIH. What does that functionally mean, Trevor? Does that mean money will start flowing again and where do we go from here?
Trevor Hughes:
That's a great question to which we don't have a good answer. There are a lot of folks out there, researchers out there who are saying, "What do I do? Do I lay everybody off and then expect to get the money back next week?" This sort of large scale uncertainty within this very, very important part of the US economy, I think, has really frustrated a lot of folks and has thrown this level of uncertainty is just really frustrating. Researchers who are used to sort of working on long-term projects without a ton of disruption.
Taylor Wilson:
Another interesting piece from you, Trevor. Trevor Hughes is a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thanks, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
You bet.
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Taylor Wilson:
An independent government watchdog agency will probe how the Trump administration's mass firings of early tenure employees affect air travel, the spread of diseases, nuclear safety, food safety, veterans healthcare, the opioid epidemic, and the ability to respond to floods and wildfires. The government accountability office, a nonpartisan watchdog agency that investigates audits and evaluates government operations for Congress said it would open the investigation in response to a request earlier this month from a group of Democrats led by Senator Elizabeth Warren. States, workers unions, nonprofits, and an independent watchdog have all brought legal challenges to the Trump administration's firings of tens of thousands of federal employees and their probationary periods and federal judges have reinstated many, but little information is available about the downstream effects of having fewer workers.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Paste BN in February, quote, "President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud and abuse," unquote. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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Executives of the Dallas Stars NHL hockey team used their positions to profit off of youth hockey tournaments. I spoke with Paste BN investigative reporter Kenny Jacoby about his story and some of the ethical questions it opens. Kenny, thank you so much for giving me some time on this.
Kenny Jacoby:
Thank you for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
So Kenny, what can you tell us about these employees and how they use their positions in the league to profit at the expense of youth hockey families?
Kenny Jacoby:
So these three employees who work for the Dallas Stars in high ranking positions as part of their jobs for the Stars, they organized dozens of Stars run youth hockey tournaments over a four and a half year period. These tournaments required out of town participants to book a minimum number of nights at select hotels. At the same time, these three employees separately ran a company called State of Play LLC that acted as a middleman between the Stars and the hotels taking a cut of the revenue. So over this four and a half year period, we found that there were at least 20,000 participants at these tournaments who were subject to these requirements and whose hotel payments may have unknowingly padded the bank accounts of these three Stars employees.
Taylor Wilson:
Interesting. So you call them requirements, Kenny. I mean, did any parents try to skirt this system? What happened to anyone who really tried avoiding this type of middleman?
Kenny Jacoby:
So there's some pretty strict language in the tournament rules outlining the consequences for trying to skirt the requirements. Parents often considered trying to find a cheaper hotel or split an Airbnb with some other teammates, but those who did would risk their children being kicked out of the tournament and the forfeiture of all their team's games without a refund of entry fees that usually were between a thousand and $2,000 per team. Instead, they were just forced to pay hundreds of dollars for hotel rooms. They did not always want our need.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. So these, I guess, so-called state of play requirements are somewhat common across youth sports nationwide. Kenny, can you talk through that? I mean, what's the bigger issue there and what's different in this specific instance?
Kenny Jacoby:
Like you said, state of play requirements are somewhat common across youth sports and maddening to a lot of parents. The organization hosting the tournament usually gets a kickback from the hotel booking revenue, and sometimes there's a third party company that coordinates with the hotels that also takes a cut that is fairly commonplace. The difference here is that the kickbacks went to the same people tasked with organizing, overseeing, and shaping the rules for these tournaments as opposed to some independent entity. And those people had multiple conflicts of interest. The three employees carried out this operation not only while they were Star's employees, but while one of them served as the president of the nonprofit Texas Amateur Hockey Association, which is the USA Hockey affiliate that acts as the governing body overseeing youth hockey in Texas and Oklahoma.
And another of the employees served as its secretary. One of this organization's primary responsibilities is facilitating the tournaments for its members, the same tournaments from which the employees were personally profiting, and parents who pay membership fees to these organizations have an expectation that its board members are going to act in their interests. But in this case, two of the board members had a financial incentive to ensure that families kept paying for unwanted hotel stays.
Taylor Wilson:
Kenny, did you hear back from any of these three individuals that you circle in this story?
Kenny Jacoby:
We reached out to the three individuals by phone and email multiple times. We asked them a long series of questions. They did not respond to our inquiries. We did hear from the Dallas Stars who acknowledged that they did have a relationship with this company formed by the three employees. They said they are no longer in business with this company though they are looking for a different company to start coordinating state of play tournaments with them. We did hear from the nonprofit organization, the Texas Amateur Hockey Association, and some attorneys for them who said that they did not consider this to be a conflict of interest under USA Hockey rules. However, a look at USA Hockey rules suggests that this does meet the bill for a conflict of interest.
Taylor Wilson:
Kenny, is this a matter of three, I guess, rogue individuals or do the Dallas Stars or National Hockey League large have any responsibility in all this?
Kenny Jacoby:
This is somewhat of an unusual arrangement. In most states, the NHL team in that state does not run the youth hockey organizations, but in Texas it does. Now, the question is when you have a conflict of interest like this, were the Stars aware that it was happening and were they okay with it? Not all conflicts of interest are inherently illegal or unethical, but to be above board, a lot of criteria must be met. Some of those criteria include the deal has to be disclosed to the highest officers of the organization. They have to independently discuss it and decide whether it's in their financial interest. The deal has to be as arm's length as possible. And we asked the Stars if those criteria were met in this case and they did not answer our specific questions.
Taylor Wilson:
Essentially, Kenny, these state of play requirements continue for youth hockey families around the country. What's next here? Is there anything stopping something similar in the future in this way?
Kenny Jacoby:
There's nothing really stopping that. In fact, the Stars have suggested that they're just going to go find a different company to make these arrangements for them. Now, one thing that could potentially happen here would be that the Texas Amateur Hockey Association step in and say, "Hey, we don't think these state of play requirements are actually in the interest of our membership. We're going to adopt a policy that says, 'We're no longer going to sanction tournaments that have state of play requirements.'" But the thing stopping that from happening in this case is that two of the employees who started this company continue to serve on the board of the Texas Amateur Hockey Association. And so as long as they're in charge, it's unlikely that such a policy would be passed.
Taylor Wilson:
Great piece. Kenny Jacoby is an investigative reporter with Paste BN. Thanks, Kenny.
Kenny Jacoby:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
And later today we'll have another episode of Forum. Here's that show's host Michael McCarter.
Michael McCarter:
How do you think President Trump is doing when it comes to the economy? Hi, I'm Michael McCarter, vice president of the Gannett Opinion Group. We asked readers this question as part of a new initiative from Paste BN's Opinion team that we're calling for. Each week we hone in on a different issue that are starkly divided on. Tune in today at 4:00 PM eastern to hear our third bonus episode of Forum with voices of listeners and readers just like you.
Taylor Wilson:
And we've dropped a link to the written version of Forum in today's show notes.
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Thanks for listening to the Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, 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.