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For a focus now on President-elect Trump's cabinet picks and what comes next, we're joined by Washington Times White House reporter Jeff Murdock.
And first, just bring us up to speed on what happened over the weekend, what's left that we're waiting for to see.
So what happened over the weekend is President-elect Trump focused on two key things, his energy policy and his communications team.
For energy policy, the most important pick there is Doug Burnham to be his Department of Interior, Secretary of the Department of Interior.
It's an interesting pick because Doug Burnham has been very critical of the Biden administration policy of capping drilling within the U.S.
He has talked about how opening lands up in North Dakota has really brought back the North Dakota economy.
And he's going to come in to implement, you know, President Trump, his phrase is drill, baby, drill.
Doug Burnham is very on board with that.
He will obviously be championing that policy.
The president-elect has also created a National Energy Council, which is new, which is going to focus on trying to generate, you know, generate new energy, increase drilling, transportation, everything that impacts how the U.S. drills, transports, sells energy overseas.
This council will overlook.
Has Secretary of Interior, if confirmed, Doug Burnham will also be leading that.
Now, the other focus he did, the president-elect did, is his communications team.
He appointed Stephen Chung, who has been a spokesperson on all three of his presidential campaigns, to be his communications director.
And Caroline Leavitt has his press secretary, making her the youngest press secretary.
And she's been the press secretary for this 2024 campaign.
What should we know about Caroline Leavitt?
We're going to be seeing a lot more of her, obviously, in the White House, the Brady briefing room.
Exactly.
That's going to be her responsibility as press secretary.
She's going to be the public face of the administration.
And also, she's going to be conducting the daily briefings.
Now, it'll be interesting to see how many daily White House briefings this administration has.
Under the first Trump administration, there were not a lot of daily White House briefings.
The Biden administration has brought that back.
They have them every day the president is in town.
Obviously, the president of South America today, there isn't one.
But for the most part, they've had them on a daily basis.
It'll be really interesting to see what happens when the second Trump administration comes in.
Caroline Leavitt, 27 years old.
Do you expect Donald Trump to make appearances in the White House briefing room as much as he did in the first administration?
I don't, and it'll be interesting to see.
I don't know because he goes on, when he takes trips or when he leaves the White House to go to Marine One to take it to Joint Base Andrews, he always stops and talks to the press.
So that kind of doesn't really need to be in the briefing room because he's not shy about standing there taking questions.
And in the first administration, he was often very late for things because he stood there and took all of our questions.
So if he feels, and it seemed like towards the end of the first administration, they felt that having Trump come out and answer questions on his way to Marine One or when he's deboarding Air Force One after a stop and answering reporters' questions or pool reporters' questions was a sufficient substitute for having him in the briefing room.
So it'll be interesting to see that sort of shifted at the end of the first Trump administration if they continue that through his second administration.
Coming back to the cabinet picks, we're about halfway through what we're expecting from the president.
We're less than two weeks away from Election Day at this point.
Are these coming unusually fast?
Yes, they are.
And I think what it is, is I think the president-elect learned a lot from his first time where it took him a long time to put nominees up.
And then the Senate also, there were a lot of delays.
And some of these positions almost took a year to fill.
And I think he learned a lesson from that last time, and he's trying to move at a fast pace.
And it looks like from what he's been talking about, he's had four years to think about who he wants if he returns to the White House.
So he's put a lot of thought into this.
And you can see it with how quickly these picks have come.
So what's your take?
Who's got the toughest path?
Who's got the easiest path?
I think the toughest path is obviously Matt Gates.
One thing I want to point out before we get into the individuals is there's three threads that run through all of these candidates that he has nominated.
One is loyalty to the president-elect.
Every one of them has expressed their loyalty.
Two is a lack of management experience.
You know, Christy Noam is a great example.
The South Dakota government employs 12,000 people.
She's now going to be in charge of a department of 260,000 people.
Homeland Security.
Homeland Security, yes.
And that is the most, and 1200, 12, excuse me, the 12,000 is the most management experience we've seen from any of these nominees.
The third is they've all been heavy critics of this administration.
I'm sorry, excuse me, of the departments they're going to run.
The current administration, I meant to say.
They've been heavy critics of how these departments have run.
A great example is Pete Hegseth, who was nominated to be Defense Secretary and run the Department of Defense, has been extremely critical.
Matt, of saying that under Biden, the Department of Defense has been too focused on his words, woke initiatives, trying to bring in diversity while eroding the military's values.
Again, his words.
You've got Matt Gates, who has called for abolishing the DOJ and the FBI.
So I think that's really interesting to point out that all three threads run through everybody the president has nominated so far.
Now, back to answering your question.
I think the toughest goes to Matt Gaetz.
He's embroiled in some sexual misconduct allegation.
There's a House ethics report coming out.
Could be very damning.
Do you think that report's going to come out?
I think at some point it will.
Everything on the Hill gets leaked at some point.
Everybody's like, when it'll come out, it comes out eventually.
So we've got that.
It's interesting because Mike Johnson is refusing.
So how it's going to come out is what I said.
It's going to end up in the desk of some staffer who's going to call a news network and leak it to them.
It'll come out.
But yes, Mike Johnson, Mike Johnson's argument for not releasing it is Matt Gaetz resigned the day after he was nominated, which headed off the release of that ethics report.
And Mike Johnson's argument is we only have jurisdiction if they're an active member of Congress.
If he's no longer a member of Congress, that sets a dangerous precedent that we're now releasing ethics reports of what essentially amounts to a private citizen.
So I think that is very, I think that's going to be difficult.
Also, he doesn't have any prosecutorial experience.
You know, it's a position, and that goes back to what I was saying about earlier, one of the threads is the lack of management experience.
He practiced law for two years, right out of law, school at a law firm in Florida, and then he went into politics.
I'm not even sure how much he's really practiced as a lawyer.
That's a question a lot of people have asked, but he definitely does not have, you know, for a position where you're in charge of prosecuting people on behalf of the federal government, he does not have that prosecutorial experience.
And then who's got the easiest path?
I would say Doug Collins at the Veterans Administration.
He's got friends up on the Hill.
You know, it's a position where he's talked about reform.
There's bipartisan support for reforming the VA.
There always has been.
And there's really nothing controversial about him.
And that's the largest of the government agencies by civilian employees, some 450,000 civilian employees because it runs all of these veterans hospitals.
Doug Collins, the former Republican congressman from Georgia, not South Carolina.
Yes.
So I expect he'll have the easiest pass because it's one of the few things everybody can still agree on at this point in Washington is that the VA is in need of reform.
And like I said, he's made a lot of connections during his time on the Hill.
Taking your phone calls with Jeff Murdock this morning, talking about Donald Trump's cabinet picks, the path ahead, phone lines, as usual.
Democrats, it's 202-748-8,000.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
As folks are calling in, can you just explain recess nominations, recess appointments, and that process right now?
I think recess appointments is going to be the most interesting thing we see over the next couple of months.
And what recess appointments is, is the president has the authority, it's in the Constitution, to adjourn Congress, and when Congress is on recess, he can fill appointments.
It's an older part of the Constitution because it goes back from when people were traveling by horse and buggy, and it took them months to get back to Washington from their home district.
Now, so what that would essentially do is it would give the president unlimited authority to appoint whoever he wanted to whatever position he wanted without consent of the Senate, because the Senate's job is to consent and advise, and they do that by holding confirmation hearings.
Some of these confirmation hearings are going to be extremely messy.
Like I said, we've talked about Matt Gates, who's embroiled.
I mean, we've got three nominees embroiled in sexual misconduct scandals or allegations.
Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Matt Gates.
Those could get very messy.
If nothing, they could get embarrassing.
An easy way to avoid that is through recess appointments, which is adjourning, as I said earlier, adjourning Congress and then having the president appoint whoever he wants.
It's an extreme test of presidential authority.
President-elect Trump has talked about it.
He has not laid out a plan of how he would do it.
Mike Johnson would need to be on board with this, although we haven't seen any signs that Mike Johnson would oppose anything the president wanted to do.
One of the things I think is really interesting is back in 2013, President Obama tried this, and he made a couple of recess appointments during the holiday.
The Republican Congress tried to push back by having pro forma sessions.
It went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court swatted Obama down, telling him that this was unconstitutional, because as long as they were having the pro forma sessions, that counted as them being in session.
Now, a couple of things about that.
Even though they swatted Obama down, they did not define where the powers end in terms of making recess appointments.
So that's still vague and nebulous out there.
And if this goes to another Supreme Court, you've got a Supreme Court that leans conservative.
President-elect Trump has put three people on that court.
You know, likely they would be on his side.
Who gets to decide if the Senate goes into recess and how long the recess is?
It would be the president would.
That's the authority in the Constitution through, obviously, Congress adjourning them, and that would also affect the Senate.
So it's a combination of the President and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Paul is in Indianapolis, Indiana Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I worked in the federal government and the Department of Defense for many years.
And I think maybe you're under, or rather you're overestimating the importance of the secretaries when it comes to management.
It was my experience over like 25 years that the secretary, the top guy, basically set the policy, or at least tried to.
And most of the actual management was done by the permanent senior executive service type of courier civil servants who were right up under the secretary that did the actual management.
Plus, I think that the real problem that Trump has is that most of the people in D.C. are denizens of the bubble, so to speak.
They all believe that they know what the policy ought to be.
And if the president-elect doesn't do it their way, they need to resist him.
And you saw that a lot in his first administration.
You saw it in Bush's administration.
You saw it in Reagan's administration, especially in the IRS.
And my most, the deepest experience I have with people outside DOD was State Department.
They just simply believe that the State Department knows what the foreign policy ought to be.
If the president doesn't do it, he's wrong.
And that they need to block it.
And you see that even down to the GS7 level.
So I think that the real challenge for these new secretaries is whether or not they can convince these permanent civil servants to actually do what the people elected the president-elect to do.
Paul, thanks for the call from Indianapolis.
To his point, I think we're going to see a dramatic rethinking of the federal government in which, because he is right, prior to coming into this current administration, the secretary sort of set the agenda, but it was up to the government workers to carry it out.
And we have seen time and time again where we've had government workers, you know, career employees, go against the secretary, dispute the secretary.
A lot of this happened when Bill Barr was running the Justice Department, and they know that time is on their side because at some point, the Secretary or the Cabinet Head they disagree with will be gone and they will still have their job.
And one of the ways I think in which the Trump administration is going to change that and rethink how we look at the federal government is by thinning out the workforce and thinning out a lot of these career bureaucrats and career employees who've been there for a long time.
And that will give the cabinet head or the secretary more power to carry out their agenda, obviously, which is obviously Trump's agenda.
You know, a great example of that is the Department of Government Efficiency launched by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk.
There's a lot in this government that they could cut.
And I find it interesting that when you see Ramaswamy talk, he's talking about way more than Musk has in the public sector, talk about it.
He seems to be going back to jobs in cuts.
And it's fascinating to me for a couple of reasons because one, it looks at that, it looks at, it shows that they look at thinning out the government workforce as a way to achieve the president's agenda.
But also, you're not going to get to what they want to cut, which is $2 trillion.
You're not going to get that by just laying off workers.
I think, and I had the statistic in a story recently.
If you laid off 20% of the government workforce, you're saving probably about $7.6 billion.
That does not cut.
That's a rounding error for the federal government.
That's hardly anything.
That's not going to get you to the $2 trillion you want to get.
So I find it interesting that that's what they're focused on is job cuts.
But if they want the cuts, they want to achieve the cuts that they plan to achieve, they're going to have to do way more than that.
And I know they've thrown out ideas.
It'll be interesting to see what they can and can't do.
One of the things I want to point that I think has kind of gotten lost in the discussion about the DOGE is Trump is the fourth president to try this.
And it has never really worked.
Who are the others?
Ronald Reagan formed the Grace Commission, led by businessman W.R., I'm sorry, Peter Grace, excuse me.
And he recommended 2,500 recommendations in how to improve the government, cut costs, and improve efficiency.
None of those were enacted.
Clinton started his own commission about improving government efficiency and cutting government waste.
They did have some layoffs.
They did improve some automation of the government.
Most of that never, most of those jobs, most of those layoffs eventually came back.
It was a drop in the bucket compared to what needed to be done.
Obama formed Simpson Bowles, which was a bipartisan commission of 18 members.
And all that was was just infighting about how, where cuts should come, how cuts should be made.
And in the end, they had to have 14 of those 18 members agree on the recommendations.
They could only get 11.
And there was so much infighting in the commission that Congress didn't want to touch it because Congress deemed their recommendations to be too toxic.
So they never went anywhere.
So I'm really be interested to see if Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have learned anything or have looked at those three other commissions to how to avoid the pitfalls that they're going to, that these are going to avoid.
Because one of the things, to cut departments, which they're talking about, Ramaswamy's come out and said that there's a lot of authorized government agencies, programs that have been out there that have since lapsed and we should do away with them.
But to cut those, you need Congress to cut them.
Everything they want to do with the exception of layoffs, they're going to need congressional approval.
And I just don't see them getting that.
You mentioned Vivek Ramaswamy has talked about this a decent amount in the week or so since we first learned about it.
He was on Fox News yesterday.
This is a minute and a half.
Let me just show viewers what he said.
The dirty little secret right now, Maria, is the people we elect to run the government, they're not the ones who actually run the government.
It's the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state.
That was created through executive action.
It's going to be fixed through executive action.
Think about the Supreme Court's environment over the last several years.
They've held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale.
Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and then that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state.
And the beauty of all of this is that can be achieved just through executive action without Congress.
Score some early wins, and then you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one.
So I think that's one way to think about this is how can the president of the United States, who's been elected with a historic mandate, actually do the thing that the voters have voted for?
They haven't voted for incremental change here this time, Maria.
We have voted for sweeping change, and the voters actually deserve to get it.
And we're focused on how to do that as early and as quickly as possible.
So President-elect Trump just said on that soundbite that you're going to make recommendations.
So you're going to make recommendations in terms of where to cut after all that you've just said.
Then what?
Look, we're not going to be cutting ribbons.
We're going to be cutting costs.
And so those recommendations are going to be on a real-time basis.
Are you expecting to close down entire agencies?
Like President Trump has talked about the Department of Education, for example.
Are you going to be closing down departments?
We expect mass reductions.
We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright.
We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated.
We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government.
So yes, we expect all of the above.
And I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we're able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us.
Jeff Murdoch, one thing I keyed on there was he said we expect certain agencies to be deleted outright.
He did not say we expect certain departments to be deleted outright.
Right.
And there's agencies under which each department's that they could cut.
But again, he's going to need congressional approval of Congress.
And all of those agencies, everything is funded through Congress.
They control the purse strings.
And even with a Republican-controlled Senate and a Republican-controlled House, it's still going to be a tough ask.
The current Republicans on the Senate and the House, they ran on reducing inflation.
They ran on cutting back, cutting down on illegal immigration.
They ran on crime.
This is not the Tea Party Republicans from a decade ago where they ran on government reform and cutting costs.
It's a completely, and I think we're going to have as much resistance from Republicans because these Republicans play Santa Claus almost as much as the Democrats.
And you don't want to go back to your district and there's a program that has funded, that has brought money to your district or has a satellite office in your district and say you had to cut that and people lost their jobs.
That's not going to play well.
And I think they're going to be surprised for how much resistance they see within their own party.
Alex out of Minnesota, Republican, good morning.
You're on with Jeff Murdoch.
Hey, good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
I hope you can hear me.
So first of all, just real quick on cutting the government.
I think they can just move civil servants to other locations they might not want to go to, like Guam, and that would cause them to resign.
So that's dual from the executive branch.
But what I really want to talk about was quickly Matt Gates.
And I think one thing that needs to be pointed out is how much Trump's own Department of Justice really undercut him and also just was politicized to support the left.
And I'll just give one really quick example.
If you just bear with me, feel free to fact check it.
So there was one of the business people who was involved with Hunter Biden was arrested for international bribery.
And in 2018, he stood trial and he was convicted.
In that trial, there was an email that referenced Hunter Biden as one of the people he was doing business with.
And the DOJ in the Southern District of New York chose to redact Hunter Biden's name out of evidence.
And then when the laptop came out, you could see the email they were referring to.
And it was Hunter Biden.
And the reason they're bringing this up is because the DOJ's choice to redact Hunter Biden's name out for political reasons, they even say that in the transcript, that put the country on the path to the whole issue with the laptop and its authenticity.
And it really sacrificed the credibility of the intelligence community and the Department of Justice just because they were playing politics.
And we need to keep in mind that this was the Department of Justice under, I believe, probably Bill Barr at the time, playing politics to support the left or to protect the Bidens.
And this is what happened.
And this is why I think so many people in the country feel that the more that people oppose folks like Matt Gates, no matter what their background is, the more they want someone like that because they know that there are deep, deep problems and things that have been covered up.
And they want someone who will take an adversarial position and get those things rooted out.
And I would appreciate you all fact checking me if it's not true.
I mean, it's 100% true.
Jeff Murdoch.
Let me let Jeff Murdoch jump in.
Well, I'd like to, he's right about in terms of people do want some, you know, Trump ran on a, he won the popular vote.
He got the House.
He got the Senate.
He has a mandate.
There's no other way to look at that.
And people are, to his point, they are frustrated with how some of these departments have run.
And they want to bring people in here who are going to clean house and over overhaul because they feel that they've gotten too political and that they're making political decisions.
And that goes back to what I said earlier, that one of the common threads that runs through all of these candidates is the fact that they have been very, very strong critics of the departments that they're about to lead.
Take me to today's lead story in the Washington Times.
trust issue impairs FBI vetting of nominees, the exclusive story by you and your colleague Kerry Pickett?
Basically what it is, so the nominees will have to go through a go through an FBI background check.
There's no constitutional requirement that the FBI has to do it.
They've just been doing it since I believe Truman, or I'm sorry, excuse me, Eisenhower was in office.
And it's just something that they've been doing.
And these have gotten increasingly political.
And what we have found is an FBI whistleblower saying that they are looking for reasons to they're looking to turn down nominees.
And one thing I want to mention is there's over 4,000 people who get nominated by the president that requires Senate confirmation.
We think of the Attorney General, we think of the Health and Human Services Director, but we don't, which is something we should get into at some point too.
But what we don't think of is that there's U.S. attorneys, there's judges, there's career appointees.
There's all kinds of people who require Senate confirmation.
And what we have found from this whistleblower is what they're talking is what's happening is these people that they're looking for reasons to either slow walk or hold back some of these nominees.
And they're looking for things like, did they attend a Trump rally?
Were they online complaining about COVID restrictions?
Things like that.
That they're looking for things that show that they have a conservative bent and using that has a disqualifying factor in the background checks, either to slow walk it or to spike it altogether.
What determines whether somebody passes or fails a background check?
Well, it goes into, well, they look for a lot of things.
They're going to look for anything, you know, questionable judgment.
They're going to look for any crime that they have committed.
And it goes up to a section in the FBI called SCCD, SECD.
And what they do is that they sort of make the determination.
It still obviously has to go to the Senate for approval, but they will make the determination on whether or not somebody can get a security clearance.
And this was a problem actually in the first Trump administration, was that there were 25 people who did not get security clearances.
And we've never gotten the full story on that.
The debate was there was a whistleblower within the White House who said, well, these 25 people didn't qualify.
There was one, we still know to this day who it is, but there was one high-level official that they said had three to four real serious red flags that they were concerned about.
But if you, the White House have always said that these things were blown out of proportion.
And since we don't know what the red flags were, we don't know who the person is, it's hard to say what the truth is.
Do you think we will find out who those people were and what those red flags were once Donald Trump comes back for a second administration and has the levers of power over those things?
I think we're going to get a lot of disclosures on a lot of things.
A lot of things that stymied the president the first time.
I think we will see a lot of disclosures about that.
I think he's going to release everything.
I think some of that's the point of putting Matt Gates at the Justice Department.
Always a lot to talk about when you're on.
A lot of callers too.
Jared, California, Democrat.
Thanks for waiting.
Yes.
This is Jared from California.
Thanks, Don.
My thing is, Donald Trump is different kinds of people.
He has Spanish people, black people.
Well, my question is, why is he only selecting white people to be in his cabinet?
And another thing, one more thing.
Why do we have to have all these sexual assault people being heads of cabinets?
You know, It's just wrong to have those people with those type of records running the country.
All right, John, thanks for taking my call, man.
It's Jared in California.
I'll just show this one Newsweek headline that we showed earlier.
Donald Trump's cabinet is on track to be the least diverse in this century.
Jeff Murdoch.
It's true.
But the president's argument is that these people have diverse experience, that he's not plucking people who were the number two at their department and then putting them in the top role.
That he's bringing people from outside, business executives, a talk show host, a governors.
And he's trying to argue that the diversity is not under race or gender, but under experience, is what the president is arguing.
But yes, they're all white.
They're all roughly around the same age.
There's not, in terms of what we traditionally think of diversity, there's not a lot.
I do want to address what the caller said about the sexual misconduct allegations.
We've got three nominees, and I don't recall any period in this town where we've ever had three nominees for level positions with very serious sexual misconduct allegations lodged against them.
Pete Hegseth, Matt Gates, and RFK Jr.
And it'll be real interesting to see how that plays out and how seriously some people in the Senate take this and what we learn about these investigations as we move forward, as the confirmation process moves forward.
I just wanted to note one paragraph from your White House correspondent colleague Peter Baker in the New York Times.
He says this, in the past, none of these selections, the ones that you were just referring to, would have passed muster in Washington, where a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny used to be enough to disqualify a cabinet nominee.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, has bully passed the old red lines opening or opting for nominees who are so provocative that even some fellow Republicans wondered whether he is trolling them.
Yeah, then that's a great point.
And I think some of this is: you know, is he trying to test the loyalty and how compliant his Senate is going to be before he moves forward with other things?
It's kind of interesting to me that the president, as I said, is coming in with a mandate.
He's built a lot of political capital.
I'm somewhat surprised he's going to try to use up a lot of that on Matt Gates.
You know, there's other people you could put in the position who don't have the baggage Matt Gaetz does that could carry out his agenda.
But all three of them, we're going to learn a lot about.
Like, one of the things that's interesting, nobody seemed to know anything about the Pete Hegseth sexual assault allegation until he was the nominee.
Now, all of a sudden, that came out.
And that is a seven-year-old allegation that sort of was brushed under the rug because he was not in the public eye.
Well, I mean, he was a talk show host on Fox News, so I don't listen to not in the public eye, but not in the political arena.
And now he's in the political arena.
That's coming out.
And you wonder, not just with him, but with all some of these other nominees, what else is out there that we just haven't heard because these people have not been in the spotlight to the extent they're about to be.
Great Falls, Virginia.
Ian, Independent, good morning.
Thanks for waiting.
Thanks for waiting.
Hey there.
Yes.
Hey, you know, I would argue that our government is a lot more entrepreneurial and market-driven than a lot of people would understand.
I think there's a lot of tension in what President Trump, the pillars that got him into office.
He said, you know, there was a big concern about all these entitlement and social programs that are actually very popular.
I mean, that's just one example of the benefits of government.
But, you know, as far as the market-driven stuff, Mr. Musk has greatly, greatly benefited from, you know, government programs and different stimulus monies for himself and his companies.
It's kind of ironic that he's going to be heading this agency, but I would say, you know, let's cut back the entitlement programs.
Let's deport all the illegals and let's get these boomers back into these jobs and have them start working to contribute to this great new economy we're going to have.
Jeff Murdoch, what do you want to pick up on?
So a couple of things.
His point about cutting the government.
Musk and Ramaswamy have talked about slashing $2 trillion from the Fed.
Right now, the federal government budget is $6.7 trillion.
In 2019, as recently as 2012, it's not that long ago, our budget was $4 trillion.
And people weren't dying in the streets.
The government seemed to function fine.
So we definitely have $2 trillion we can cut from this government.
Again, the question is, where is the will to do it from anybody beyond Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy?
That'll be very interesting to see where that goes.
One of the things that I think is going to be their biggest challenge, the easiest, the lowest hanging fruit, is the money the government just wastes on studies that go nowhere.
You know, for example, they spent several million dollars on a study, I believe it was out of a university in North Carolina, to teach monkeys how to gamble.
This is a real thing.
That's a real thing.
You can look that up.
That's a real thing.
And it was an HHS study to determine what is the risk factor that impacts people's brains that make them gambling addicts.
And the solution is that, and there's photos from this of like monkeys holding cards with like poker chips in front of them.
There's another study out there that cost, you can look this up too.
I'm looking for the picture.
Yeah.
Transgender monkeys, where they took male monkeys, again, another HHS study, and this was a couple billion dollars.
H8, where they took money, they took male monkeys and they pumped them up with female hormones to see if men pumped with female hormones are more susceptible to HIV.
And this cost a lot of money.
And then in doing the study, they realized the recessed monkeys, the type of monkeys they were using in that study, were not susceptible to HIV at all, basically rendering the study a complete waste.
The monkeys gambling, I was just able to find a Johns Hopkins headline on it.
Gambling monkeys like big bets, the study finds.
Scientists locate the area of the brain linked to high-risk behavior, a possible step towards improved treatments for destructive risky behaviors in humans.
The Johns Hopkins University headline on it.
But the study that you're referring to, I'm assuming.
Yes, that's exactly the study.
I think I said it was in North Carolina, but yes, you're right.
It was John Hopkins.
That was a mistake on my part, but yes.
Taking your phone calls, just about five minutes left with Jeff Murdoch of the Washington Times.
Want to ask, before we do run out of time, what changes in the White House briefing room for you and your colleagues in a second Trump administration?
Have you been told about any changes?
We have not been told about any changes.
Carolyn Levitt has just been in the job.
It was announced Friday night.
So we've had the weekend, so we haven't had the time to see what she's going to do, how she's going to handle the position.
It's a position where a lot of people under Trump and the first administration did not have a lot of success.
He churned through press secretaries until he got to Sarah Sanders.
And I was interested on your end of who gets seats in the White House briefing room, who gets access to the White House briefing room.
What are you thinking on that front from the seats looking forward, not looking forward back?
Well, I think, well, so the WHCA, the White House Correspondents Association, they set up who has seats and where everybody's seats.
And it's something that outlets pay into.
So your seat is pretty much guaranteed.
Where the real challenge is going to come in is who they, there's always a lot of people standing on the side who are not from who are from smaller outlets, maybe podcasters.
They've, under the Biden administration, they were coming in, they were asking questions.
There were a couple of issues.
The Biden administration sought to crack down on that by making everybody you needed to have a White House hard pass to come to start coming to the briefings.
Or if you didn't, you had to put in for it and they would have somebody escort you to visiting reporters.
You had to do that.
Yes, exactly.
You were very limited in what you could do.
Whereas before, if you had a day pass, you could come in, you could grab a seat back where the reporters sit, where I have my desk, all of that, and just spend your day working there.
You really can't do that anymore because of some changes, because of some issue.
So it'd be interesting to see if they are more easier on who they grant press passes to, who they, you know, if outlets we don't traditionally think of as news outlets are coming in.
And then on top of that, if they get questions, one of the big criticisms of Karine Jinpierre and the Biden administration is the way the White House briefing room is set up.
The first three rows go to the legacy meeting, the media.
The first rows are all the news outlets, Fox News, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC.
And then you go back and it's Wall Street Journal, New York Times.
Corrine has been very shy about going past the third row in the briefing room.
And that has cut off a lot of outlets from asking questions.
And that has been a recurring problem that's been brought to her attention for three years.
And there's never been a change.
There's no will to change it on behalf of this administration.
I'll be real interested to see how much Caroline Leavitt moves around the briefing room if she starts to ask, get reporters and take their questions in the fourth row or the fifth row.
Taking your phone calls, taking your questions.
This is Keith in Denver, Colorado.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning.
So I look at these cabinet nominees, Pulsey Gabbert, Matt Gates, Eve Hegseth, and RFK Jr.
And I have to say, it appears to me that these threats of recess appointments are in fact Trump acting as dictator before day one.
I also think it's a prime example of a cacistocracy, which is government by the worst.
And my question is: What will the anti-woke agenda?
How will that impact?
Because what will be the litmus test?
How does it implement?
And what is woke?
Keith, let me take your question at the time we have left.
And just for callers who may be confused, behind Jeff Murdoch is our screen.
There's a camera on the roof.
We have one that's faced towards the Capitol and one that faces towards Union Station.
I've never actually seen somebody step in front of that camera, but they did while you were talking last time.
I guess somebody's on the roof doing some work and stepped right in front of the camera.
So for viewers who might be confused, that's what you just saw.
Jeff Murdoch, you've got the final minute and a half here.
Go ahead.
One thing I want to say is he brought up Christine No.
We've talked a lot about the baggage of Pete Hegseth, Matt Gates, and RFK Jr.
She's got a lot of baggage too.
It'll be interesting to see how strong the fight is, but we're not even talking about her because we're so focused on everybody else.
Jeff Murdoch is a White House correspondent for the Washington Times.
You're familiar with his work if you read the front page of the Washington Times.
He often appears there.
And we always appreciate your time.
Thank you, John.
I really appreciate it.
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