| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Appearing before a House Appropriations Subcommittee. | |
| Also at 10, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson will testify on President Trump's tariffs and economic agenda before a House Appropriations Subcommittee, the Secretary's first congressional hearing since his confirmation in January, live on the free C-SPAN Now video app. | ||
| All of these events are also online at c-span.org. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump signed several executive orders related to health care during a ceremony in the Oval Office. | |
| Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin McCary also speak during the 20-minute ceremony. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| We have some important signings today and some important statements to make about what we're doing in the world of medicine with Bobby and the group. | ||
| Maybe Will will do something which will be very enlightening and I think people are going to like it. | ||
| But it was a little gift that's being presented. | ||
| So Will, do you want to take over? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So earlier today, the House of Representatives transmitted this over for you. | ||
| This is a record of the Electoral College votes in the 2024 election. | ||
| It shows your total of 312 votes. | ||
| And the letter opener at the bottom of this frame display is actually one of the letter openers that was used to open the electoral votes during the counting. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| How many votes did the other side get? | ||
| Less than you, sir. | ||
| Significantly. | ||
| By how much? | ||
| I don't want to get this wrong. | ||
| It was 226. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| But the news said it was going to be the other way around, right? | ||
| The news said it was going to be a lot close. | ||
| They said it was going to be a lot close, and then it wasn't close. | ||
| So 312 to 226, that's pretty good. | ||
| Okay, thank you. | ||
| Thank them for me. | ||
| It's very nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| We'll tell the speaker. | ||
| We have a number of executive orders for your attention today, sir. | ||
| The first relates to gain of function research. | ||
| Gain of function research is a type of biomedical research where pathogens are adulterated viruses or adulterated to make them more potent or to change the way that they function. | ||
| Many people believe that gain of function research was one of the key causes of the COVID pandemic that struck us in the last decade. | ||
| What this executive order does, first of all, it provides powerful new tools to enforce the ban on federal funding for gain of function research abroad. | ||
| It also strengthens other oversight mechanisms related to that issue and creates an overarching strategy to ensure that biomedical research in general is being conducted safely and in a way that ultimately protects human health more. | ||
| It's a big deal. | ||
| It could have been that we wouldn't have had the problem we had. | ||
| A lot of people say that, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If we had this done earlier. | |
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, go ahead. | |
| Many actions that you've taken so far in this administration, sir, are related to onshoring manufacturing and onshoring supply chains. | ||
| One of the most important supply chain issues we currently face as a country is our pharmaceutical supply chain. | ||
| This is an executive order intended to promote domestic manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. | ||
| It streamlines the permitting processes that go into building domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing sites. | ||
| It centers a lot of the environmental permitting process, which is quite significant, within the EPA, and it takes other actions designed to ensure that we're bringing pharmaceutical jobs and pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States of America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good. | |
| That's what it's all about, right? | ||
| Very important. | ||
| We're going to have a big announcement next week on some of this kind of thing, but more related to costs, the cost of medicines and drugs, because we're being ripped off, as you know, very badly, being ripped off compared to the rest of the world. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Next, we have a series of proclamations for your attention, sir. | ||
| This is a proclamation declaring National Mental Health Awareness Month. | ||
| Mental health and that basket of issues has been a major priority for Secretary Kennedy since he got into office. | ||
| It's been a major priority for your administration. | ||
| This is just a proclamation declaring this month to be National Mental Health Awareness Month. | ||
| See, you know what I've been. | ||
| Isn't it nice? | ||
| Isn't it nice to have a president that doesn't need an auto pen so that somebody that you have no idea who the person is who's actually the president of our country ought to look into that auto pen stuff? | ||
| That's not right, what took place for four years. | ||
| Very important. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Next, this is another proclamation declaring this week to be National Small Business Week. | ||
| As you've said many times before, small business is actually big business. | ||
| Small businesses are key drivers of the American economy. | ||
| Your administration has taken quite dramatic steps to improve small business to help small businesses. | ||
| This is just a proclamation that recognizes those efforts and announces the National Small Business Week. | ||
| And before I go any further, I'd like to just, as you see behind me, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing a fantastic job. | ||
| Director Jay Bonacheria, National Institute of Health, and a very special person. | ||
| I interviewed him personally. | ||
| I liked him immediately. | ||
| I interviewed a lot of people, but I liked him. | ||
| Dr. Martin McCary, likewise, FDA commissioner who's really in there plugging hard, right? | ||
| But we have some big things coming up, and Will, everybody, knows. | ||
| So I just wanted to thank all of you. | ||
| Vince Haley's around here someplace. | ||
| Where's Vince? | ||
| Vince is great. | ||
| Come on up here, Vince. | ||
| You should be up here. | ||
| He's been with me for a long time. | ||
| He's an expert on policy and speechwriting, too. | ||
| Along with Ross, right? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So great. | ||
| It's great to have you all. | ||
| Bobby, do you have anything to say? | ||
| We signed some very important documents having to do with health. | ||
| Mr. President, a gain of function, this is a historic day, the end of gain of function research funding by the federal government and also controls by private corporations on gain of function studies. | ||
| This was the kind of study that was engaged in by the United States military and intelligence agencies beginning in 1947. | ||
| By 1969, the CIA said that they had reached nuclear equivalency, that they could kill the entire U.S. population for 29 cents a person. | ||
| That year, President Nixon went to Fort Dietrich and announced a unilateral end to this kind of research, to what they called dual-use research, research that was for vaccination and also for military purposes. | ||
| He then persuaded over 180 countries to sign the bioweapons charter in 1973. | ||
| That basically ended gain-of-function research around the globe until 2002. | ||
| Or 2001, after the anthrax attacks, we passed the Patriot Act, and the Patriot Act had a provision, a little known provision in it, that said that although the bioweapons charter is still in effect and the Geneva Convention is still in effect, U.S. federal officials who violate it cannot be prosecuted. | ||
| And that relaunched a bioweapons arms race that was driven by gain of function research. | ||
| In 2014, three of those bugs escaped from U.S. labs and President Obama declared a moratorium on future use and instead a lot of that research was moved offshore to the Wuhan lab. | ||
| We have launched bioweapons arms race all around the country, all around the world, so that China is engaged in it, developing all kinds of weapons using AI and CRISPR technologies that are really devastating. | ||
| Russia is deeply engaged in it, Iran and many other countries. | ||
| It's a kind of weapon that always has blowback. | ||
| There's always bad news. | ||
| And the justification for this kind of weaponry was, and these kind of research, was always that we have to do this, develop vaccines to counter a future pandemic. | ||
| In all of the history of gain of function research, we can't point to a single good thing that's come from it. | ||
| And today I commend President Trump for his courage and his vision in ending U.S. bioweapons research. | ||
| And Jay, I'd love you to talk a little bit about that. | ||
| Yeah, Jay, sure. | ||
| This is a historic day. | ||
| The conduct of this dangerous gain of function research, which aims at taking pathogens and making them more virulent, more transmissible in humans, many scientists believe is responsible for the COVID pandemic. | ||
| The conduct of this research does not protect us against pandemics, as some people might say. | ||
| It doesn't protect us against other nations. | ||
| What it does is there's always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out just by accident even, and cause a pandemic. | ||
| Any nation that engages in this research endangers their own population as well as the world, as we saw during the COVID pandemic. | ||
| This proclamation makes it so that most science is actually, poses no threat to human populations. | ||
| The vast majority of science will go on under this as normal. | ||
| But the fraction of this research that has the risk of causing a pandemic, harming every single person on the face of the earth, we're going to put it, this proclamation, this executive order puts in place a framework to make sure that the public has a say that if such a risk is being taken, only scientists alone won't be able to decide that. | ||
| That in fact the public can say no, don't take this risk. | ||
| And I'm really, really proud to be here with President Trump, who signed this order ending this research, for the first time putting in place a real regulatory framework to make it go away forever. | ||
| So it can leak out, like from Wuhan, and a lot of people think that I think I said that right from day one. | ||
| It leaked out whether it was to the girlfriend or somebody else, but a scientist walked outside to have lunch with a girlfriend or was together with a lot of people. | ||
| But that's how it leaked out, in my opinion, and I've never changed that opinion. | ||
| So it can leak out innocently, stupidly, incompetently, but innocently, and half destroy the world, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right, Mr. President. | ||
| Mr. President, there are, I think, three leaks. | ||
| The SL3 and the SL4 labs, our highest-rated laboratories, almost every week. | ||
| There's no laboratory that does this right. | ||
| There's no laboratory that's immune from leaks, and this is going to prevent those kind of inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity. | ||
| The COVID outbreak cost 20 million lives and cost the world at least $25 trillion. | ||
| And this executive order is a precaution against us being involved in that kind of research in the future. | ||
| Very honored to do this. | ||
| Marty, what do you have to say? | ||
| It's unbelievable to think the entire nightmare of COVID was likely preventable. | ||
| And you had good instincts early on, Mr. President, in suggesting it came from the Wuhan lab. | ||
| That is now the leading theory among scientists. | ||
| It was five miles from the hospital where it first broke out. | ||
| So it's crazy to think that this entire nightmare was probably the result of some scientists messing with Mother Nature in a laboratory with technology exported from the United States that is inserting a furin cleavage site. | ||
| So I hope this does some good in the world, Mr. President. | ||
| Thank you for doing it. | ||
| Anybody have any questions on that? | ||
| Yes, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On your proclamation designating this Mental Health Awareness Month, can you speak to concerns people are having regarding your administration cutting a billion dollars in mental health programs for the US? | |
| Well, we're looking very closely at waste, fraud, and abuse, of which there's a tremendous amount people on that shouldn't be on illegal immigrants, so on, people that came into the country illegally. | ||
| We have many of them, and we're looking for that. | ||
| But for the population that's supposed to be there, it's perfecto. | ||
| And they want us to do that. | ||
| They don't want to have the waste, the fraud, and the fraud is big, by the way, or the abuse. | ||
| Question? | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. President. | |
| I actually have a question for Secretary Kennedy, if you don't mind. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You mentioned the anthrax attacks of 2001. | ||
| At Zerohead, we're working on a piece, revisiting that, and I've heard you speak at length about how that was likely a conspiracy from the inside of the Bush administration. | ||
| So with your new current position, would you consider re-looking into that, given the questions that I've heard you raise in the past? | ||
| Well, we're not at this moment going back. | ||
| I mean, the FBI has already done an extensive investigation. | ||
| They said that the anthrax was Ames anthrax came from a U.S. lab. | ||
| Their accusation was that it was released by a scientist called Bruce Ivins, who subsequently committed suicide. | ||
| There are many people who believe that Bruce Ivins was falsely accused and that it was somebody else in the lab. | ||
| It's not something that we're currently investigating, but it's something that the FBI, the fact that it came from a U.S. lab is something the FBI determined. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There have been several Maha-aligned bills being proposed throughout the country. | |
| And I wanted to know what your thought was on that and the progress that Secretary Kennedy is making first. | ||
| And second, when you know, I'm sorry. | ||
| Let's answer the question. | ||
| I mean, we've had a wave. | ||
| I think we have Maha legislation now in 36 states. | ||
| In the past two or three weeks, I've been to Arizona, to Utah, to West Virginia, to Indiana, signed SNAP waivers to get candy in the soda office, changed the school lunch program so that we're feeding our kids food instead of food-like substances that are made in laboratories. | ||
| A number of other initiatives that are being passed by, that are being driven by local MAHA movement, inspired by the president, and that are being signed into law by various governors, and we're very, very grateful for that. | ||
| We've invited Brooke Rollins and myself have invited the governors of all the states to apply for SNAP waivers so we make sure that the substance that the supplemental nutrition assistance program is actually paying for nutrition and not sodas 10% is now going to soda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's no nutrition in a soda and at the same time, you have like 19 attorneys general suing you and the Trump administration. | |
| Like, what do you make of that? | ||
| Who are they have attorneys like crooked Democrats, like really crooked Democrats. | ||
| Is that who's suing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They know what, they know what they're doing and what are you? | |
| They're just. | ||
| They're just hurting our country. | ||
| These are very dishonest people. | ||
| They've lost their way. | ||
| They've lost their confidence. | ||
| They have no confidence. | ||
| They have no idea what they're doing. | ||
| They don't even know what they're suing for. | ||
| So it's uh, just one of those things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah please, mr president, on the pharmaceutical side um, have you made any determination on kind of what those tariff rates may look like and the timing of those tariffs? | |
| Announce it over the next two weeks okay, uh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well please, do you have anything to say about this morning what we just discussed? | |
| We we have had this crazy system in the United States where American pharma manufacturers in the United States are put through the ringer with inspections and the foreign sites get off easy with scheduled visits, while we have surprise visits in the United States. | ||
| Well, a scheduled visit is no inspection. | ||
| So we are, at the FDA uh, delivering on this promise in the president's executive order and switching from announced to surprise inspections overseas. | ||
| We're also not going to have our inspectors hanging out for three or four weeks. | ||
| They're going to get in and out and we're going to do more inspections with the same resources as a result. | ||
| Good Jay, I mean, I think it's very, very important that Americans have a drug supply, pharmaceutical supply, that they can count on. | ||
| Uh, it's uh. | ||
| We saw during the Covet pandemic that the the reliance on overseas production of pharmaceuticals led to the shortages of essential medicines, and that's happened over and over again. | ||
| Making the American uh, making America produce the drugs that it's long been able to produce uh is is a huge priority, and this executive order the president just signed is going to make that possible. | ||
| Prince, you're a big policy person. | ||
| You've been so great for me for so long. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you think, sir? | |
| You've always said it's. | ||
| It's vitally important that we have national self-sufficiency when it comes to critical pharmaceuticals. | ||
| We learned that in 2020. | ||
| Uh, it's a key campaign promise. | ||
| We've seen shortages in the past of critical cancer drugs, people on chemotherapy. | ||
| We have to produce those here at home, and this is an important contribution to doing that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Any questions of them? | ||
| Okay, Just two more, sir. | ||
| We have a slate of 39 Senate-confirmed senior officials of your administration. | ||
| This slate includes a significant number of new U.S. attorneys. | ||
| Those will be the top prosecutors in judicial districts around the country who will prosecute crime and help advance your agenda. | ||
| Okay, that's a lot of people, and they're very good people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hope. | |
| Who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hope so. | |
| Okay, thank you. | ||
| And then lastly, sir, we have another proclamation. | ||
| This week is National Hurricane Preparedness Week. | ||
| This is an issue that's particularly important, obviously, to your home state of Florida. | ||
| This is just a proclamation recognizing National Hurricane Preparedness Week 2025. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Okay, thank you very much. | ||
| I want to thank you. | ||
| So we're going to be having some conferences next week. | ||
| I'll also be going to Saudi Arabia and other places. | ||
| We'll be going to UAE and Qatar. | ||
| And some of you will be going with us to have an interesting time. | ||
| But I think we're going to have another conference next week, which will be very important, having to do with the world of the medical. | ||
| And I think it will be very protective. | ||
| These are really very important that we signed today. | ||
| And thank you very much for being here. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, everybody. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, guys. | |
| Thank you, everyone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country. | |
| Coming up Tuesday morning, we'll look at President Trump's 2026 budget proposal, which includes $163 billion in cuts. | ||
| CQ roll call reporter Aiden Quigley will be our guest. | ||
| And Republican Idaho Congressman Russ Fulture joins us to talk about the GOP budget, tariffs, and possible cuts to Medicaid and other government programs. | ||
| Then a look at the Education Department as it resumes collection on defaulted federal student loans with Rick Seltzer, senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education. | ||
| And Democratic California Congresswoman Nanette Barragon weighs in on the budget, current deportation policies, and Democrat strategies to counter the Trump administration. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Tuesday morning on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Live Tuesday on the C-SPAN networks at 10 a.m. Eastern, the House meets for morning speeches and noon for legislative business. | ||
| Members will begin work on a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. | ||
| Lawmakers will also consider a bill that prohibits the Department of Homeland Security from funding higher education institutions that host nonprofit cultural and educational centers funded by the Chinese government. | ||
| At 8.30 on C-SPAN 2, Republican Representatives Rick Crawford, Jim Jordan, and Ronnie Jackson hold a press conference on the FBI's investigation into the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Virginia that left several injured, including current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. | ||
| Also on C-SPAN 2 at 10, the Senate returns to vote on House pass legislation to repeal a Biden administration EPA rule on reducing hazardous emissions from rubber tire manufacturing. | ||
| And on C-SPAN 3 at 10, Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam will testify on Capitol Hill on the Trump administration's deportation policies and other priorities for her department while appearing before a House Appropriations Subcommittee. |