| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We're excited to have you back on the program. | ||
| You recently marked your first 100 days in the role. | ||
| We'll talk about some of the actions you've taken. | ||
| But first, let's talk about your goals during your time in the office. | ||
| What do you hope to accomplish? | ||
| Look, I'd like to see more cures and meaningful treatments for the American people and healthier food for children. | ||
| We're interested in this administration not just in the treatments, but also in the root causes. | ||
| Why do 40% of our nation's kids have a chronic disease? | ||
| Why do a third of children have pre-diabetes or insulin resistance? | ||
| It's not a willpower problem. | ||
| Something is going on in the food supply and the environment. | ||
| So the FNFDA stands for food. | ||
| We've taken action to remove all nine petroleum-based food dyes, and some have been implicated in ADHD. | ||
| We've had an incredible start on readdressing infant formula. | ||
| We saw titanium dioxide, another chemical of concern, removed by one of the big candy makers in the U.S. | ||
| So we're moving fast. | ||
| We're going to keep going. | ||
| And on the drug side, we've got to ask a big question. | ||
| Why does it take over 10 years for a drug to come to market? | ||
| That entire process is loaded with needless red tape, idle time, and wasted steps. | ||
| We can accelerate the delivery of cures without cutting corners on safety. | ||
| And so many of the initiatives we've done in my first 100 days are aimed at doing exactly that. | ||
| You just mentioned a couple of the issues related to the food supply, the food dyes, chemicals, baby formula. | ||
| You also have focused on dietary guidelines. | ||
| Why start there? | ||
| Well, the dietary guidelines, that is the old food pyramid, is probably one of the most damaging pieces of misinformation in the history of government and healthcare. | ||
| It was a food pyramid constructed not based on medical science or good data. | ||
| It was based on what the industry wanted you to buy. | ||
| It ignored the fact that 70% of what kids eat is an ultra-processed food diet. | ||
| It ignored many other chemicals in the food supply, and it demonized natural saturated fat. | ||
| So the 70-year war on natural saturated fat is going to end in our new dietary guidelines that we hope to have out by the end of this year. | ||
| You mentioned ultra-processed foods. | ||
| Something that you've also been looking at is defining that. | ||
| Why hasn't that been done before? | ||
| What impact will it have? | ||
| I think, you know, first of all, it came with good intentions, the idea that, hey, grains are good for you, and then there was mass production of grains to address food insecurity, that is starvation. | ||
| But what happened in the mass production and in the efforts by the food manufacturers to maximize shelf life is that we created basically these new compounds that don't appear in nature. | ||
| We've taken grains and stripped them of their fiber and chopped them up and it functions like sugar in the body. | ||
| So it's got what we call in medicine a high glycemic index. | ||
| It's stimulating the pancreas. | ||
| And take a look at the population. | ||
| We've got a quarter of adults now with diabetes or prediabetes. | ||
| It's epidemic in children. | ||
| So this is not their fault. | ||
| This is something being done to them. | ||
| And while, look, we believe in freedom. | ||
| You should be able to eat whatever you want, ding-dongs or, you know, cupcakes, donuts. | ||
| When we're using taxpayer dollars, we want it to go to healthier foods. | ||
| So you see in this Trump administration, the first ever snap waivers for the food assistance program so that it will not go to junk food and sugary drinks in some states now. | ||
| Our guest for the next 40 minutes or so is Dr. Marty McCary. | ||
| He is the Commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for him, you can start calling in now. | ||
| The lines for this segment are broken down regionally. | ||
| That means if you are in the Eastern or Central time zone, the line, 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you are in the Mountain or Pacific time zone, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| Dr. McCary, the FDA, is an agency. | ||
| It falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, which is headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary there. | ||
| He is leading the Maha movement. | ||
| What role will the FDA play in those efforts? | ||
| Look, we're following this charge because Republican, Democrat, and Independent moms showed up in high numbers to vote for President Trump over this very issue that Secretary Kennedy has championed to try to address the root problem in our health care system, and that is the health of the population. | ||
| So there's been a lot of talk about talk about how to fund our broken health care system, but not how to fix it. | ||
| And the ultimate way in which we address our skyrocketing health care costs is to address the health of the population. | ||
| We spend more on health care than any other country with the worst health outcomes of any developed country. | ||
| This president does not like to see Americans getting ripped off on drug prices. | ||
| You saw the new action on most favored nation status. | ||
| If the U.S. is the largest purchasers of drugs, we want the best prices on drugs. | ||
| We don't want to see people getting half the price or a quarter, a tenth the price for the same drug in Germany, France, or the U.K., which is exactly what's happening now. | ||
| So we can do a lot. | ||
| The FDA doesn't directly set drug prices, but we create incentives, create more competition by getting more drugs out there, and approve more generics and biosimilars. | ||
| So we have a big part in addressing food at the FDA. | ||
| We're doing an inventory of the thousand-plus chemicals that appear in the U.S. food supply that do not appear in Europe or Canada. | ||
| We got a commitment just last week from the maker of Fruit Loops that they're going to have the same Fruit Loops in the U.S. as they will in other countries where they don't have petroleum-based food dyes. | ||
| And so we have now, after our announcement to address petroleum-based food dyes, commitments from nearly half the industry already to meet this goal before our target date. | ||
| And we're going to keep going. | ||
| So we've got the inventory of all the chemicals. | ||
| We're going to keep evaluating. | ||
| We're evaluating this standard called GRASS, which means a company can recognize a chemical as generally recognized as safe or G-R-A-S grass, and then just feed it to the American people. | ||
| So we're saying, no, we want some standards. | ||
| We want some science. | ||
| I wanted to ask you about a food in particular that President Trump brought up last week. | ||
| This is his Truth Social post. | ||
| It says, I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using real cane sugar and Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. | ||
| I'd like to thank all of those in the authority at Coca-Cola. | ||
| This will be a very good move. | ||
| Buy them. | ||
| You'll see it's just better. | ||
| You are a doctor by trade. | ||
| Explain the difference between cane sugar and the high fructose corn syrup that is currently used, the impact it could have on consumers. | ||
| Well, first of all, I love it, and the president's got good instincts because cane sugar or natural sugar, it has a lower glycemic load than what you get per gram with high fructose corn syrup. | ||
| That is, you can pack in more of those simple carbohydrates with high fructose corn syrup. | ||
| Many people have concerns also about a synthetic sugar product, and they have concerns with aspartamine. | ||
| Sometimes there have been concerns about aspartamine in pregnancy. | ||
| So getting back to cane sugar is a start. | ||
| And look, this is going to be an incremental series of steps to try to get us towards a better food supply. | ||
| And we also want to talk about moderation because it's one thing to be eating something nonstop all day, every day, and it's another thing to have something in moderation. | ||
| So we can do all of the above. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Mary in Long Island. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
| Oh, we lost Mary. | ||
| We'll go to Michael and Denver. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you so much for taking my call. | ||
| And Dr. McCary, thank you so much for being here this morning and answering some of our questions. | ||
| It really means a lot. | ||
| And so I kind of wanted to turn the attention to an issue that has captured the attention of so many in this country, the autism issue. | ||
| You know, Dr. McCary, you've suggested in an interview that autism is caused by a range of environmental and dietary exposures, which has echoed some of the comments made by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| And, you know, he said that the agency is involved in a massive testing and research effort that will find some of the causes of autism by September. | ||
| I was wondering if you could just speak to any of the progress you've seen made towards kind of finding out what the root causes of autism are and what, if anything, the FDA is doing to help in that effort of, you know, discovering the causes of autism. | ||
| Well, thank you, Michael, for that question. | ||
| And one of the great parts of this job that I did not expect, to be honest with you, is the incredible teamwork that we have across the health agencies. | ||
| We talk every day. | ||
| We have a series of expertise. | ||
| I myself am a cancer surgeon, a gastrointestinal surgeon. | ||
| Mehmed Oz has an incredible history as a cardiovascular surgeon at Columbia, Jay Bhattachari at Stanford. | ||
| So we put our heads together. | ||
| And this issue of autism is a real issue. | ||
| You just didn't see autism at these rates a generation ago. | ||
| And while there, yes, have been more diagnoses, you didn't see the prevalent, the high prevalence of nonverbal children and people that would engage in repeat sort of tics. | ||
| You just didn't see that a generation or two ago. | ||
| Something is happening. | ||
| We don't know why. | ||
| We are seeing now one in 31 American kids having autism, but I certainly have a hypothesis. | ||
| I do think it is multifactorial. | ||
| It may have something to do. | ||
| I don't know if it's a cause or an effect. | ||
| The microbiome of the GI tract is different in kids with autism. | ||
| I don't know what is the insult to the microbiome that is changing that microbiome, but it's been known for a long time the stool output of a child with autism is different in its biodiversity. | ||
| So look, something is going on by September. | ||
| We're going to have reviewed all the preliminary data, hopefully have some clues as to where to direct further research efforts. | ||
| And this is a big priority for this administration. | ||
| Parents deserve to know some answers, and we've got to be able to prevent it going into the next generation. | ||
| Let's talk with Christine in Rhode Island. | ||
| Good morning, Christine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| He stole my thunder. | ||
| That's exactly my conversation I was going to have with the doctor. | ||
| It's about autism and the spectrums of a whole generation of children. | ||
| And with them cutting all these programs in school, how do they expect these kids to make it through? | ||
| But I would like the answer to this because I have grandchildren, a whole generation that has four of my grandchildren that have autism or some spectrum of it. | ||
| And they don't help these children unless they so-called pass a test of 70 and plus. | ||
| But are they really going to be honest? | ||
| They weren't honest about the food. | ||
| It's money. | ||
| I hope that they come out with the truth. | ||
| So this way we can figure it out and hope it never happens. | ||
| But I would like to thank Michael for bringing that issue up because I've been talking about that for years and years and years. | ||
| Yeah, so look, I'm sorry to hear about the children and your family. | ||
| And I do hear that story, and it's very concerning that we can't ignore this epidemic of chronic diseases that are surging in our lifetime. | ||
| These conditions were rare a generation ago. | ||
| Why is it that sperm counts are down 50% in the last 60 years? | ||
| Why is it that the age of puberty has moved up by years? | ||
| Why is it that a third of the nation's kids now have severe insulin resistance? | ||
| Why is it that PCOS is causing infertility at very high rates? | ||
| Why is it that cancer is going up in young people right now, specifically GI cancers? | ||
| Those are the cancers interfacing with what we eat in the modern diet. | ||
| We cannot ignore these issues as they have been ignored by the medical establishment. | ||
| So at the FDA, we're focused, yes, on meaningful cures and drugs and devices, but also on the food side. | ||
| And we're working with the NIH on studies around root causes. | ||
| Look, look at the Maha Commission report and look at how we now propose we study natural circadian rhythms in children and ultra-processed foods and chemical exposures. | ||
| For the first time, we're talking about these things in the mainstream of healthcare. | ||
| If you think about what we do to kids, we sort of rousle them in the middle of their night sleep when it's still dark outside in the morning. | ||
| We bring them into school after a high glycemic index, sugary breakfast, and then we ask them to sit still at a desk for seven hours with no natural light sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes a school will have less natural light exposure than a federal penitentiary. | ||
| And then we hit them with a high sugar load of food with snacks and ultra-processed foods several times. | ||
| And they can't sit still for seven hours and we tell them, you have attention deficit disorder, you have this diagnosis, and then we drug our nation's kids at scale. | ||
| We've got to stop and look around and see what's happening and re-examine these practices and look at root causes. | ||
| Elizabeth in Connecticut. | ||
| Good morning, Elizabeth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just have two quick questions. | ||
| The first is, what are you going to do to make fresh, healthy food grown all over the United States more affordable than the highly processed food and also help, you know, thereby also helping small and medium-sized farms and preserve open space, help the small farmers. | ||
| Second is the Trump administration has laid off thousands of people from the FCA. | ||
| So I'm actually really worried about my food safety. | ||
| What are you going to do to ensure that our meat, vegetables, dairy, they're actually safe for American consumers? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| You should not worry about your food safety because of any reorganization at the FDA because no food inspectors and no scientific reviewers were part of any reduction in force. | ||
| That was a reduction of redundancies in IT, communications, HR personnel. | ||
| And that was because we had a sort of fiefdom structure whereby the centers at the FDA all had duplicative services and they are now consolidated. | ||
| For example, when I came to the FDA, there had just been 12 different travel offices. | ||
| Now there's one. | ||
| So that was what you're hearing about. | ||
| And so there's been some misreporting on what actually happened. | ||
| Again, no scientific reviewers or food inspectors were laid off actually in this Trump administration. | ||
| We're increasing the number of food inspections. | ||
| And remember, 90% of routine produce inspections are done at the state level. | ||
| On the local food and farmers markets and supporting local farmers, look, no one was talking about how important that really was in the national limelight in our healthcare government agencies until RFK Jr. brought this to the forefront. | ||
| So we have programs now to try to help schools that want to off-ramp to healthier foods. | ||
| We've got a huge emphasis now. | ||
| We're taking a look at it. | ||
| We're putting our heads together. | ||
| We've got new grant programs. | ||
| And it's important. | ||
| We've got to make food affordable and healthy food affordable because otherwise you end up with food deserts where people are eating highly addictive processed food because that's all they have access to. | ||
| And of course, if we don't recognize obesity as a glycemic addiction, then we're not going to make any progress. | ||
| So we're trying to address this problem in a new way. | ||
| I want to go back to something you touched on earlier when we were looking at treatments and cures. | ||
| You talked about the launch of a pilot program that would expedite the drug review process. | ||
| How quickly could drugs get approved? | ||
| How does it compare to the current process? | ||
| We think we can get a decision to drug manufacturers in a matter of weeks instead of nearly a year in this new pilot program. | ||
| And that's because we're doing something very creative. | ||
| We're moving the manufacturing part of the application to during the clinical trial. | ||
| That is, in this pilot program, the drug makers will submit the lion's share of their application while the clinical trial is still in progress. | ||
| So the only thing we're waiting for then is the readout of the clinical trial endpoints. | ||
| Ideally, we'd like to do it in the cloud so we're watching the trial in real time. | ||
| We'd like to run more continuous trials so there's less breaks of reapplying after IND, preclinical, phase one, phase two, and then the final application. | ||
| We think there's a lot of wasted time where we can increase efficiencies without cutting corners on safety to deliver more cures and meaningful treatments. | ||
| Another big initiative is reducing animal testing. | ||
| Turns out that can take nearly a year and it's not a very good predictive test for how drugs are going to do in humans. | ||
| 90% of drugs that pass animal testing don't pass in human tests on safety and efficacy. | ||
| Computational modeling now, computer modeling that can look at a molecule can predict toxicity now as good or better sometimes. | ||
| And something we call organ on a chip technology is something we're doing more of. | ||
| That is, you grow the culture medium of liver cells or heart cells and you test the drug in the cell culture medium. | ||
| Personally, my own opinion, I don't think God created animals for us to subjugate and torture in unethical ways. | ||
| So we can do a better job at predicting toxicity, cut out nearly a year in that review process, reduce R D costs that hopefully will translate into lower drug prices once drugs are approved. | ||
| A big priority for this administration. | ||
| And I think we can do this and do it expeditiously. | ||
| We found out that the FDA was still requiring routine animal testing after a drug was approved in Europe and used in humans. | ||
| So we've got to use common sense in some of these steps. | ||
| I think we can cut a lot of these wasted steps, that is a lot of the redundancies and idle time in this 10-year review process, so we can deliver cures and meaningful treatments quickly. | ||
| I'd like to see a cure for type 1 diabetes in my time at the FDA, for neurodegenerative diseases like ALS. | ||
| I'd like to see a universal flu shot so we don't guess every year what the strain is. | ||
| You get long-term protection. | ||
| There's a couple potentially promising therapies. | ||
| You know, one of the cool things in this job is you get to see what's in the pipeline. | ||
| And look, I'd love to see a cure for some types of stage four metastatic cancer. | ||
| I think we can see cures or meaningful treatments for all these conditions in the next couple years if we use common sense and create an efficient process that cuts the waste and idle time and still holds our rigorous scientific safety standards. | ||
| When we talk about an expedited review process and pushing a drug out, that was something that there was concern over when the COVID vaccine was being developed, was that it was happening too quickly. | ||
| What do you tell people who may have concerns about a faster period that a drug is under review? | ||
| So look, we need good science to make any decision at the FDA. | ||
| That's our charge with Congress. | ||
| And in the case of the COVID vaccine, you saw the regulatory process morph into a blind rubber stamping of COVID boosters in the last couple years. | ||
| There was no updated clinical trial to support a new COVID vaccine being approved. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, in the administration prior to me coming into office, the two top vaccine experts at the FDA were pushed out because they took issue with the blind approval of COVID boosters in young healthy kids. | ||
| And the reality is 85% of healthcare workers said no to the COVID booster last fall. | ||
| People want to see evidence. | ||
| They want to see some trial to show there's benefit here and it outweighs the safety concerns. | ||
| We are now learning about vaccine injured Americans. | ||
| That may be a number higher than we anticipate because we haven't had good studies. | ||
| We're taking a look at that now. | ||
| We've already issued Dr. Prasad and I, who runs the center that oversees vaccines at the FDA. | ||
| We've taken an initiative to publish a new framework on vaccines in the New England Journal of Medicine a couple weeks ago. | ||
| And we basically said, look, it's time to check in with a clinical trial. | ||
| We're not going to blindly approve COVID vaccine boosters for every 12-year-old healthy girl in America for them to get every year in perpetuity for the rest of their life. | ||
| We want to see some data. | ||
| We're going to return to gold standard science. | ||
| Let's talk with Cynthia in Albany, New York. | ||
| Good morning, Cynthia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hi, doctors. | ||
| My name is Cynthia Holt. | ||
| I'm a nurse who's worked with the population of people with developmental disabilities for 10 years. | ||
| What I'm finding, and I'm not hearing, is that there's different severity of autism, and the older folks seem to be more acute than these younger kids coming out. | ||
| And I'm just wondering if some of that is just behavior issues, you know, labeled as them having autism, because I see a lot of that. | ||
| Also, I'm wondering if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is basing, does he have some lived experience? | ||
| He looks like he suffers from comorbidities right now as to why he doesn't want why he's not a fan of vaccines that have saved people for years and years and years and eradicated nasals moplavela, tuberculosis, and all those different things. | ||
| I'm just curious about that. | ||
| Thank you, Cindy. | ||
| First of all, thank you for your service as a nurse. | ||
| I've worked with thousands of nurses in my career, and I know that's a hard job. | ||
| So thank you for your dedication in that profession. | ||
| Yes, RFK does have some family members with autism. | ||
| And look, the questions that RFK Jr. are asking are questions the American people are asking. | ||
| And he, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, is posing questions for our health agencies to address. | ||
| And so he is great at challenging deeply held assumptions. | ||
| He poses questions. | ||
| And so one of the big questions is the exact question you are raising, and that is, what accounts for the variation in the severity of autism? | ||
| So look, I hope we get some good answers from some good data. | ||
| We'll have to see. | ||
| Mark in New York City. | ||
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning. | |
| I was just wondering how to contact that FDA because my concern is about fake food. | ||
| So specifically cheeses. | ||
| See, as a young kid, I used to go to Italian dollies a lot. | ||
| And then now what happens today in New York, almost all the pizzeriars, they have cheese that don't taste like cheese. | ||
| I mean, the texture is the texture and the look, it looks like cheese, but I hope the FDA will look into that because everybody's coming up on their sauces, but they have this tasteless stuff. | ||
| I don't even know what it is. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Okay, well, I have my charge. | ||
| I'll have to look into that. | ||
| I do agree with you that one of the, and I saw this as a surgeon at Johns Hopkins and where I did a lot of public health research. | ||
| There were a lot of food deserts there, and the retailers were using the absolute most rock bottom ingredients in the food that they sourced because it had the lowest price point, and it was a poor community. | ||
| So, look, I'm not blaming people, but we've got to stop and ask: why are we seeing epidemic rates of these diseases with expensive downstream health consequences? | ||
| It turns out that a lot of bread now is not wholesome, Whole Foods type of bread. | ||
| It is, and I say that sort of in a generic sense, not with the brand Whole Foods. | ||
| These are not whole foods that were eaten by our ancestors. | ||
| These are sometimes foods that are stripped of their fiber, chopped up, and they are basically functioning like sugar. | ||
| Let's talk with Alan, who's up either very early or very late in Hawaii. | ||
| Good morning, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I hope you can hear me. | ||
| Yeah, this is a topic that I've been discussing this with a few people who are physicians. | ||
| And I used to work in research in Hawaii on things which are similar for developmental issues with infants. | ||
| But this has to do with the big issues about autism. | ||
| A physician who is a pathologist, retired, has been bringing me a lot of stuff. | ||
| And there's studies both sides about ultrasound and the impact on prenatal exposure to different energy levels of ultrasound and how that connectivity. | ||
| Now, of course, most of the ultrasound industry has been able to prove that there isn't a super, super connected relationship, but there are some questions. | ||
| And it would really be useful, I think, to get more understanding of the linkages. | ||
| And it's going to be difficult because I'm a fan of ultrasound, but I think there potentially is risk. | ||
| The human brain at that point in development is extraordinarily sensitive to the energy that ultrasound produces. | ||
| Could you comment on that? | ||
| Yeah, so I'm not familiar with the data on ultrasounds in pregnancy, but I am aware that some have raised concerns and that some are saying, look, we have whales that are dying now near windmills, and we don't know if it is the ultrasound waves or if it changes the navigation patterns or communication of the whales. | ||
| There are some unknowns, and I do think that when it comes to humans, I think these are reasonable questions to study. | ||
| I think that there are no sort of topics in science where you should not be allowed to ask questions and challenge assumptions that may be in the field. | ||
| Now, I don't know if there are assumptions in the field of ultrasound science that have been used to make conclusions about safety. | ||
| My wife and I just had a baby, and we had ultrasounds done during the course of that pregnancy. | ||
| You know, so I think we should be able to be intellectually curious and ask any question. | ||
| And that's what we're doing at the FDA. | ||
| We're convening roundtables to challenge deeply held assumptions, the blind spots of modern medicine, if you will. | ||
| We just had a roundtable on Thursday about hormone replacement therapy and perimenopausal women. | ||
| This administration believes that women's health issues have for too long not received the attention that they deserve. | ||
| And at the top of that list, in my mind, is the massive misunderstanding and dogma around hormone replacement therapy, that is estrogen or estrogen plus progesterone in women that start menopause. | ||
| And if it started within 10 years of the onset of menopause, there are tremendous long-term health benefits, reducing the rates of fatal heart attacks, osteoporosis, long-term bone fractures later in life, and reducing cognitive decline. | ||
| One study even found a reduction in Alzheimer's risk. | ||
| That's on top of the short-term benefits. | ||
| So this is something where 50 million women have been denied the benefits of hormone replacement therapy because of a dogma that it increases breast cancer mortality when no clinical trial has ever found that hormone replacement therapy increases breast cancer mortality. | ||
| So look, we're willing to challenge deeply held assumptions in the field just because all the experts believe something or the majority opinion is one way doesn't mean in science that you're not allowed to ask questions. | ||
| So we're asking questions. | ||
| You mentioned blind spots. | ||
| That is the title of your book that was out last year. | ||
| And you mentioned that hormone replacement therapy, that is one of the topics that was in there and something you're addressing. | ||
| Now, is it possible that once something is so deeply rooted in what we think we know that you can convince the American public that it is safe? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| Look, the very purpose of science is to ask big questions and study them systematically and properly. | ||
| If we simply leave all scientific questions to a popularity vote, we're going to continue to make giant mistakes like getting the addictive nature of opioids wrong for 20 years, which we did as a medical establishment at the expense of nearly a million Americans who died. | ||
| We got peanut allergies wrong for nearly 20 years. | ||
| We got the saturated fat part of our diet wrong in the food pyramid for 50 years. | ||
| Some say 70 years. | ||
| We demonized a natural component of the food supply, and we moved the entire food supply to a high glycemic, processed, high-carbohydrate, usually simple carbohydrates, which function as sugar in the body. | ||
| And so we promoted the shifting of the American food supply based on dogma. | ||
| There was never good science to support it. | ||
| So we have to do proper science. | ||
| That means asking big questions and being willing to challenge deeply held assumptions in the field. | ||
| Let's hear from Tina and Marilyn. | ||
| Good morning, Tina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I'm a physician assistant and actually a menopause certified clinician. | ||
| And I really enjoyed the expert panel that the FDA held last week on menopause and agree with so many of the things that you just mentioned regarding menopause hormone therapy. | ||
| One of the big impediments for that, especially for clinicians and patients, has been that really problematic and false black box warning, especially on topical estrogen. | ||
| What is the next step here? | ||
| Do you plan to convene a scientific advisory committee to remove that inaccurate labeling? | ||
| Yeah, so just by way of background for the viewers, hormone replacement therapy, vaginal estrogen and systematic estrogen, both have had a black box warning from the FDA. | ||
| And what happens is when the fear machine dangles something like breast cancer, such a sensitive topic for so many women, in a way that suggests that if you take this product, it'll increase your risk of dying of breast cancer. | ||
| When no clinical trial has ever found that hormone replacement therapy increases the risk of breast cancer mortality, you have a situation where doctors believed the headlines and it's sort of this bandwagon thinking and you have 50 million women who have been denied not only the short-term benefits but the long-term benefits. | ||
| So we are looking closely at that. | ||
| That's why just after around the 100-day mark of my being in office, we had convened that expert roundtable. | ||
| It was a powerful set of testimonies by experts in this field of perimenopause and hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| I encourage everyone to go to our X page or other social media to listen to the experts in that expert roundtable. | ||
| And so we are, to answer your question, taking a hard look at whether or not to remove that warning label. | ||
| It's a process, but we've begun the process. | ||
| Samantha, or I'm sorry, Susan in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Susan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I'm leading back to COVID since Mr. Macawe mentioned that earlier. | ||
| I was wondering if there will be a new vaccine developed, hopefully soon. | ||
| I mean, I've been taking right now every six months a booster shot just because I had it once. | ||
| And with all the dangers of long COVID, and that there are people who really suffer from that, and that your immune system gets so run down, the more you get it, the worse it can get. | ||
| Like your body basically, I read some scientific papers, and from what I can understand, so there are chances that you have an increased risk of cancer, blood clots, all kinds of diseases. | ||
| So I'm just wondering how this will be from now on, or if there's anything in research right now, if anything is going on, that we can expect a cure or a better vaccine that helps prevent spreading the virus, anything like that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, first of all, nice to talk to somebody from Pennsylvania. | ||
| I'm from Danville, Pennsylvania, northeastern central coal mine country in Pennsylvania. | ||
| I grew up in a small town. | ||
| So good to connect. | ||
| But COVID, unfortunately, has become a very polarized topic, and we haven't had good data on vaccine injury. | ||
| We just found out that the FDA was sitting on data on myocarditis from the COVID vaccine in young healthy males. | ||
| And we responded by issuing a strong warning, a safety label change, just several weeks ago using good, solid data that we were able to get at the FDA. | ||
| The entire subject of COVID, I think, has become an issue where some people look to the government for every single health recommendation as to whether or not to get a booster or not get a booster. | ||
| And what we're doing is we're upholding a pledge that is we're not going to take away vaccines, but we're going to get away from the idea that the government is your doctor. | ||
| The health emergency is over with COVID, and we are letting companies know that to, in our new framework, that if they want to get vaccines, a new vaccine that creates a new protein to vaccinate against COVID, we want to see a clinical trial first if it's going to be a vaccine for young healthy subjects. | ||
| And for high-risk individuals, we'll continue to make those available as long as the companies pledge to study the vaccine after it's approved so we can get data to know whether or not to keep going down that path. | ||
| Let's hear from Samantha in Long Island. | ||
| Good morning, Samantha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, Dr. Marquette. | |
| I have a couple of questions, please. | ||
| How do you feel about the termalite in talcum powder, as well as the E55EB in baby formula? | ||
| Who's accountable and responsible for allowing all this to happen for over the past 50 years? | ||
| I'm very, very proud of my administration. | ||
| I think we can take this all home and start putting some transparency to this and bringing some medical modeling to what's going to be appropriate going forward. | ||
| I'd like to know who's responsible for mesothelioma. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Well, great question. | ||
| Thank you for asking it. | ||
| So baby formula has been a huge priority for this administration. | ||
| And so within my first 100 days as FDA commissioner, we convened experts from around the world to come and help us understand how do we modernize baby formula. | ||
| Moms want baby formula without corn syrup or added sugar, without seed oils, without the heavy metals that exist in some types of baby formula today. | ||
| And we haven't changed the baby formula recipe list that the FDA insists upon in nearly 30 years, with the exception of adding selenium, which was a minor change. | ||
| Well, the field of nutrition science in infants has matured a lot over the last 30 years. | ||
| And the lack of any innovation in the baby formula space is not a private sector failure. | ||
| It's a government failure. | ||
| And so we have to modernize The process. | ||
| We've got to get away from the idea that we're going to use a list of ingredients from over 30 years ago and tell baby formula makers all you have to do is include every single thing here, including a seed oil, in order for us to approve your baby formula. | ||
| So we are, this is a huge priority. | ||
| It's called Operation Stork Speed. | ||
| We have our experts working as we speak on modernizing this space. | ||
| And we've also, final point, we have to address the supply chain issues. | ||
| We can't have another infant formula shortage like we did in the past. | ||
| And so we're looking at everything we can look at to try to ensure good health for infants because most of the microbiome is formed in the first two years of life. | ||
| And what you feed a child in part constitutes the billion different bacteria that populate the GI tract. | ||
| Not a billion total, a billion different bacteria constitute the GI tract. | ||
| And those bacteria we're just starting to understand are a central organ in human health. | ||
| They're involved in mood. | ||
| They're involved in digestion. | ||
| They regulate estrogen and produce most of your body's serotonin involved in mood. | ||
| And we have seen situations, I've seen them as a physician where somebody's overweight and they do everything, they exercise like crazy, they eat right, they can't lose the weight. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Perhaps the microbiome has been permanently or significantly altered. | ||
| This is a big area of research and a priority at the NIH and something we are very much looking at at FDA as well. | ||
| A word Samantha used during her call was transparency. | ||
| You want to increase transparency at the FDA. | ||
| How do you achieve that and what impact will it have? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| So we've done a couple things. | ||
| We have said that our decision letters from the FDA, if we reject a drug, we're going to make them public. | ||
| Now, in the world of pharma, that was a big deal when we made that announcement. | ||
| Some people didn't want it. | ||
| But the FDA should not be a black box. | ||
| People, the public, shareholders, and scientists should be able to see exactly what our rationale is if we don't accept a drug. | ||
| Was it because we felt this study wasn't powered appropriately, that the control group wasn't the right control group, that there was a manufacturing failure? | ||
| So we think that'll help inventors and scientists develop new cures. | ||
| And we think it'll just increase the transparency significantly. | ||
| So we made that announcement. | ||
| We're starting now to redact these rejection letters so we can make them all public in real time. | ||
| Turns out that pharma companies often spin FDA decisions to their shareholders. | ||
| We've seen data that 85% of company announcements don't tell the full story of our rejection letter. | ||
| And 40% of the time when we say, hey, you need a new clinical trial, you didn't do the clinical trial as we specified, they don't even disclose that to their shareholders. | ||
| They might say, oh, we got good news from the FDA, even though we rejected a drug. | ||
| All they want is a few small tweaks, even though we asked for major changes. | ||
| And so we're going to stop that spin machine by just having radical transparency. | ||
| A couple more calls for you. | ||
| Let's hear from Ed in Massachusetts. | ||
| Good morning, Ed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| I come from the farmer-driven regenerative agriculture movement. | ||
| And what we've realized is that we've lost a lot of the nutrient density and spectrum in our food. | ||
| And it's because how we've produced it for years, we realized when you mentioned the biome, we've really damaged the soil biome, which brings the nutrient density to our food. | ||
| And when we do the lab work on what we produce, we find that that can be two, three, four, five times difference. | ||
| So in other words, you might have to eat four carrots to get the nutrition that you should be able to get out of one carrot. | ||
| And this is a huge factor when we measure all these metabolites in our food that are important for our health. | ||
| And so we're making great advances on that. | ||
| We need more attention to our food. | ||
| We know that when we eat a tomato, often from the supermarket in the off-season or in a burger, it doesn't taste like anything. | ||
| It doesn't taste like a tomato should. | ||
| And we know that now that's connected to the nutrient density. | ||
| And if we're not getting all the nutrients we need beyond the chemicals and the ultra-processing of our base ingredients, it's a serious problem. | ||
| And we think we can really help that issue and bring health back to people. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Well, nutrient-poor food is a massive issue. | ||
| And it may be a bigger issue than is recognized and appreciated by the medical establishment. | ||
| And so soil is a topic, I'm glad you raised it, that is a topic on the forefront of this administration. | ||
| Not only is Secretary Kennedy talking about this, and he was just attending a conference on soil hosted by Roger Marshall from Kansas. | ||
| So we've got to start talking about these root issues in health and nutrition, not just propagate a broken food pyramid of misinformation. | ||
| We've got to talk about nutrients and fiber and healthy whole foods that come from the ground or come from animals that are raised in a healthy and humane way. | ||
| And so that's how we get America healthy again. | ||
| We address the contaminants and chemicals in the food supply, and we get back to ancient principles of eating healthy foods. | ||
| So thank you for that question. | ||
| It's an important issue, and we're working on it. | ||
| One last call. | ||
| It's Rachel in Maryland. | ||
| Good morning, Rachel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I heard you talking about the rise in cancer among young people. | ||
| And last year I was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer at age 29 with no prior history or family history and no genetic predisposition for a breast cancer. | ||
| So I know you, I was wondering about your thoughts on having on screening younger people for these kinds of cancers earlier and like getting a mammogram and having insurance cover it because one of the biggest things that insurance will often not cover it unless you have unless you're a certain age or you have a genetic predisposition. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you, Rachel. | ||
| And sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. | ||
| I think we have to stop just saying, oh, well, you know, that's too bad. | ||
| Did you hear this individual develop cancer in their 20s or 30s? | ||
| We've got to actually have a organized, powerful force to ask why are these cancers going up in young people. | ||
| So yes, we have to reexamine the age of screening for all different types of cancer that are increasing now in people under age 50. | ||
| But we also have to get to the root issue. | ||
| And that is why are we seeing these cancers go up? | ||
| There are chemical and environmental exposures that may be implicated. | ||
| There's a rise of things that we don't really understand. | ||
| A study recently found that almost half of 1% of the brain weight is microplastics. | ||
| Well, we know microplastics can have estrogen-binding-like properties. | ||
| We know other chemicals can have estrogen-like binding properties. | ||
| And so, we've got to start doing good studies. | ||
| And that is a charge at the NIH. | ||
| They're doing some good root cause analysis type research. | ||
| I hope we can get some answers, and I hope we can educate the public because I don't think we should see every increase in cancer in people under age 50 as sort of a one-off. | ||
| We have to look at the epidemiology and address this issue. | ||
| So, hopefully, we can do all of that, increase screening in a meaningful way that improves health outcomes and study root causes at the same time while we advance new promising treatments that could deliver cures for breast cancer and other cancers. | ||
| Dr. Marty McCary, author of the book Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health, and also now FDA Commissioner, you can find the work of the FDA and more about what they're doing moving forward at FDA.gov. | ||
| Dr. McCary, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
| Great to be with you, Tammy. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Later this morning on Washington Journal, Forward Party CEO Lindsay Draft will join us to talk about her organization's efforts to expand the U.S.'s two-party political system. | ||
| But next, it's open form. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Here are the lines. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Dave Barry's memoir is called Class Clown. | ||
| It is at least his 46th book. | ||
| On the front of his book, he makes an important declaration: quote, How I went 77 years without growing up, unquote. | ||
| For 30 years, Dave Berry wrote a weekly humor column published in newspapers, mostly on the weekends. | ||
| He retired that column in 2005, but has kept writing. | ||
| On the back flat of his memoir, the bio says he has more bestsellers than you can count on two hands. | ||
| Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. | ||
| He lives in Miami. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Dave Berry with his book Class Clown: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| As Mike said before, I happened to listen to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was on C-SPAN One. | |
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
| But I've read about it in the history books. | ||
| I've seen the C-SPAN footage. | ||
| If it's a really good idea, present it in public view on C-SPAN. | ||
| Every single time I tuned in on TikTok or C-SPAN or YouTube or anything, there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went home after the speech and I turned on C-SPAN. | |
| I was on C-SPAN just this week. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
| They had something $2.50 a gallon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw on television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN is televising this right now live. | ||
| So we are not just speaking to Los Angeles. | ||
| speaking to the country. | ||
| Looking to contact your members of Congress? | ||
| Well, C-SPAN is making it easy for you with our 2025 Congressional Directory. | ||
| Get essential contact information for government officials all in one place. | ||
| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
| Contact information on congressional committees, the president's cabinet, federal agencies, and state governors. | ||
| The congressional directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling, and every purchase helps support C-SPAN's non-profit operations. | ||
| Scan the code on the right or go to c-spanshop.org to order your copy today. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back for the next 20 minutes or so. | ||
| We are in open form. | ||
| If there's a public policy issue you'd like to talk about, you can give us a call. | ||
| We'll start with Larry in Kentucky, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the gentleman you had on there about what you can, cannot eat. | |
| Look, George Orwell, read George Orwell's 1984. | ||
| He wrote it in 48. | ||
| This is Big Brother. | ||
| He is part of Big Brother. | ||
| He does not have the right to tell me what I can and cannot eat. | ||
| That's my choice. | ||
| Also, there was a picture of the Antichrist. | ||
| We all know him as Trump. | ||
| He had a big bowl of fried chicken. | ||
| Now, what kind of example? | ||
| That is pure hypocrisy. | ||
| And the thought police does not dictate to me what I can and cannot eat. | ||
| And that's just part of Big Brother that's in his administration, him being the Antichrist. | ||
| And I want to say in the final shot, I used to be a Southern Baptist. | ||
| I divorced myself from them because of their scandals. | ||
| They're the biggest hypocrites in America. | ||
| And I tell the Southern Baptists, the man behind the pulpit is a sinner, too. | ||
| Romans chapter 3, verse 23. | ||
| We're all a sinner conform to the glory of God. | ||
| That includes the man behind the pulpit, the deacons, and the body of Christ, which makes up the church membership, are sinners. | ||
| That was Larry in Kentucky. | ||
| Dennis in Mississippi, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Dennis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning to you. | |
| I cannot even believe that I'm following the gentleman that's just speaking. | ||
| I just want to say to those people that are very ultra-liberal. | ||
| And I want to say, please quit complaining and understand that we're all living under the leadership of God. | ||
| He's in control. | ||
| I do want to say that you need to be looking at Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. | ||
| Jesus Christ is coming to get us. | ||
| And those people need to pay attention to that in God's word. | ||
| That was Dennis in Mississippi. | ||
| Samantha in Columbus, Ohio, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Samantha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you so much for taking my call. | |
| I just had a short general statement about the people that are in control of our lives that make decisions, life or death decisions about all of our lives. | ||
| And it seems that if they can put that weird stuff on the dollar bill And have all this power over our lives, we should have some sort of social governing body that does not have members of these secret societies that control everything to kind of watch what they do. | ||
| Because I don't really think it's fair that there's all these rich and powerful weirdos, basically, that have all this dominance over our lives. | ||
| So I think we should at least have a say. | ||
| I know we can't join their little organizations, but can we at least know what they're up to, especially when they're making decisions about our lives? | ||
| So, hi, Ruth. | ||
| That was Samantha in Ohio. | ||
| Rita in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Rita. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want to say, like, one day last week when Donald Trump said he didn't know why the Epstein case was so important, that's because he's been dead for years, but John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King have been dead a lot longer, but yet the Republicans wanted to open up those files. | ||
| And the only reason why Donald Trump doesn't want these files open is because he knows that some kind of way he's involved, and his disgraceful Justice Department is trying to make sure that his involvement with Epstein is not exposed. | ||
| And I bet so far they probably already hidden most of the main important information that could implicate Trump. | ||
| But what I want to know is what is the mega base going to do if they find out that Trump was involved in some of these illegal activities with these young girls? | ||
| Are they going to seek prosecution or are they going to give him a free pass like they did all the other crimes he's committed? | ||
| And but you know, we shouldn't forget about the access Hollywood tapes and how he bragged about what he could do to females. | ||
| You know, the old saying, birds with feathers fly together. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Rita in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Arthur in Washington, D.C., line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Arthur. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just had a question about section 453. | ||
| The appropriations committee, I think, is considering a liability shield. | ||
| Do you have any info on that this week? | ||
| I do not, Arthur. | ||
| Where did you see it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's actually on the .gov site. | |
| It's section 453. | ||
| And the way that the languaging is, it's very covert. | ||
| But yeah, section 453. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| That was Arthur in Washington, D.C. We'll get back to your calls and comments in just a few moments. | ||
| But first, we want to talk with Iri Sentner. | ||
| He is a White House reporter for Politico about the week ahead there at the White House, where he is right now. | ||
| Irie, thank you so much for joining us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| We'll start. | ||
| We just heard from a caller. | ||
| They mentioned the Epstein files. | ||
| President Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to ask a court to make public some records about Epstein. | ||
| What and when could we see something released? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this is not a satisfying answer, but the answer is we don't know. | |
| We don't know what is in those sealed files. | ||
| We know that basically the Trump administration has put it in the hands of a federal judge, likely in New York, to choose whether or not to release them. | ||
| That process could take months. | ||
| And we also know that once they are released, the DOJ is prepared to black out a lot of it if necessary. | ||
| And so it's unlikely that even if the files are released, they'll be satisfying to the people who want to see them. | ||
| However, this is a move by the Trump administration to basically put it in the hands of a judge. | ||
| And President Trump has essentially said that same thing that it may not satisfy people even once it's released. | ||
| How is the rest of the Trump administration responding to the backlash? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, if you ask the White House anything about the Epstein files, their stock answer is basically: why do you care about this? | |
| Why is the media covering this more than any of the president's other Actions more than all of what they're framing as the president's wins, right? | ||
| And so they basically say nobody cares about this other than the media and the people in Washington. | ||
| Now, that's not necessarily true. | ||
| Polling shows that a majority of Americans do want the Epstein files to be released. | ||
| But if you ask the White House, they say no one cares. | ||
| This is not a story. | ||
| And on other issues happening this week at the White House, they are expected to announce an executive order targeting, quote, woke IA models. | ||
| What do we know about that and who will be impacted by a potential executive order? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, we don't know much about it other than it's targeting woke AI models. | |
| We do know that President Trump and also the people in the White House who have been driving a lot of his AI policy have long spoken about the fact that AI models are woke, specifically Google Gemini, for example. | ||
| There was this whole scandal last year when it was making images that were not historically accurate, which the White House basically said this is another example of DEI. | ||
| We do know that on Wednesday, the president is expected to speak at an AI summit in Washington, where he's expected to lay out further actions for combating China in the AI race. | ||
| So we can expect to learn more then. | ||
| Also, this week, President Trump will be traveling to Scotland. | ||
| What is he going to be doing there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep, so he'll be visiting two of his golf clubs there, but also he's expected to visit the Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, where they'll talk about trade. | |
| The White House says that it has come to a trade agreement with the UK. | ||
| We consider that more of a framework. | ||
| It's pretty sparse in details, so we'll be watching that meeting over the weekend for more details to come out of the U.S.-UK trade agreement ahead of the August 1st deadline. | ||
| It's never a slow day at the White House. | ||
| Yesterday, President Trump posting on Truth Social calling for the Washington commanders, the NFL team here in Washington, D.C., to change their name back to the Redskins. | ||
| What is potentially at stake here, if anything? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, listen, we know that the president is embracing these culture war issues. | |
| In the past, he's renamed army bases, he's renamed mountains, he renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. | ||
| You know, these are things that are pretty not consequential, but they work well with his face, or at least he believes so. | ||
| The difference here, of course, is that these are sports teams, they're privately owned, so he can't just do it by executive order. | ||
| If you were to ask me, you know, that Truth Social post, which he wrote while he was golfing, generated a lot of headlines. | ||
| And any headline about the commanders or changing a sports team is a headline that's not about Epstein. | ||
| And so, again, when you talk about the White House strategy when it comes to Epstein, they say this is not a story, but this is. | ||
| And Iri, what else are you going to be watching as the week goes on there at the White House? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep, so tomorrow, the leader of the Philippines is expected to visit the White House. | |
| He is speaking with Secretary Pete Hegstat, the Defense Secretary, today, and we will be watching out for if a trade deal is reached there. | ||
| There's already been a trade deal with Vietnam, but this is the first Southeast Asian leader who has visited the White House during Trump's second term. | ||
| Iri Sintner is a White House reporter for Politico as well as co-author of Politico's West Wing playbook. | ||
| Irie, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| Back to your calls in this open form. | ||
| We'll hear from Eva next. | ||
| Good morning, Eva. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was listening to your previous guest from the FDA regarding vaccines, and I understood him to say that the administration is moving away from the policy of government being your doctor. | ||
| And I'd like to know if he also is talking about reproductive health. | ||
| If not, I presume listeners can understand the hypocrisy in that statement. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Eva in Virginia. | ||
| The House is expected to gavel in at noon today. | ||
| The Senate will be in at 3 p.m. | ||
| This is a headline in today's Washington Times Senate's next appropriation vote, likely to be Bellwether. | ||
| It says partisan tension over Trump administration efforts to cut spending is rising. | ||
| The prospect of a shutdown fight come September when government funding will run out. | ||
| The Senate this week will hold a test vote on appropriations that may preview how nasty that battle may become. | ||
| Democrats whose votes will be needed to overcome a Senate filibuster and avert a shutdown in September are sending warning signs that their cooperation won't come easy. | ||
| It says the minority party is frustrated that Republicans unilaterally upended previous bipartisan spending agreements by passing a $9 billion rescissions package cutting funding on foreign aid and public broadcasting that Congress appropriated. | ||
| It goes on to say that the process for advancing the 12 annual appropriations bills is behind schedule, as it is most years, and at least a temporary stopgap measure will certainly be needed come September to give lawmakers more time to negotiate a bipartisan, bicameral spending deal. | ||
| It says for now the House and Senate are focused on moving their own separate appropriation measures through committee and on the floor. | ||
| The House bills, two of which have passed, are mostly partisan since Republicans don't need Democratic votes if they remain unified. | ||
| The Senate bills are largely bipartisan. | ||
| The Appropriations Committee has approved four of 12 bills funding the legislative branch and the Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, and Veterans Affairs Department. | ||
| Back to your calls, Homer in Florence, Massachusetts, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Homer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, yes. | |
| I just can't believe the gloom and doom from the Democrats that thought everything was going so well under Biden and compared us to the rest of the world. | ||
| Are we doing better than the rest of the world now with inflation? | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| I'm sure we are. | ||
| Are these the same Democrats that told us that all these things weren't happening, like inflation, the open border, or all the destabilization around the world, and then expect us now to believe that all these things are going to happen? | ||
| Inflation's going to happen. | ||
| I watched it go up 7% a year to 22% in four years under Joe Biden. | ||
| And I was told it wasn't happening. | ||
| So don't try to gaslight us anymore with any of that stuff. | ||
| And if you want to know why illegal aliens are getting arrested and stop calling them immigrants, yeah, we love immigrants. | ||
| Everybody loves legal immigrants. | ||
| And yeah, legal immigrants do great work for us. | ||
| But illegal aliens hurt the economy. | ||
| They hurt minorities. | ||
| They hurt wage, the minimum wage. | ||
| They hurt pay. | ||
| It's just absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| So you know why they're searching for them in sanctuary cities and they have to use more law enforcement? | ||
| Because they're not cooperating. | ||
| In my state of Massachusetts, they let rapists, murderers, and molesters not even be taken in for retainers by ICE. | ||
| It's absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| And they want to fight with the police whenever anything doesn't go their way and then tell us that January 6th was the worst day ever and then that's the only day that they ever gave a darn about police or any of the law enforcement around the country. | ||
| This is absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| My politicians in my state do nothing for Americans. | ||
| They do nothing for Massachusetts residents or veterans. | ||
| So it's an absolute joke to hear these Democrats now with their gloom and doom when before they could never see any bad in Joe Biden. | ||
| But now something bad is going to happen. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| That was Homer in Massachusetts. | ||
| Robert and Webster, New York, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Americans, Democrat, Independent, Republican, I think we need to keep our eye on the ball. | ||
| In the Wall Street Journal last week, they interviewed Jamie Dimon about private equity going into 401ks, being able to be allowed to go into 401ks. | ||
| With this administration and former administrations, we haven't had enough regulation on the banking and finance. | ||
| And if you think 2008, 2009 was a problem, boys and girls, wait until this backell comes to rest. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| That was Robert in New York. | ||
| Juan in Miami, Florida, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Juan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi, America. | |
| Basically, I want to inform America, if they haven't noticed, that the reason for the inflation is because the Oreo cartel decided, as they always do, to raise the prices. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It was gouging the public, period, which they've done over the decades. | ||
| And then we're fed all this propaganda that it's just, you know, they feed propaganda to confuse the public. | ||
| And the Orio Cartel goes on with their business. | ||
| The eggs with the food, that's because of the consolidation of the food corporations. | ||
| They're so consolidated that they do as they wish. | ||
| And again, the egg people decided they needed to goug the public. | ||
| There might have been some particular factors in their particular market, also, you know, that factored in. | ||
| If you want to learn more about why the inflation and why the high prices, Mark Cuban. | ||
| Just talk to Mark Cuban. | ||
| He'll explain it or anybody involved in business. | ||
| I'm a business guy. | ||
| I'm a business person. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Investment, entrepreneurship, and walls, the whole bit, Forex. | ||
| And we all know that it's a scam. | ||
| Talk to Mark Cuban. | ||
| Talk to any other, you know, people. | ||
| Got your point, Juan. | ||
| We are in open forum for just a few more minutes. | ||
| Want to give you a programming note for later this morning. | ||
| America 250 Chair Rosie Rios will join state and local leaders to outline plans for the 250th anniversary of the nation's founded event hosted by Union League of Philadelphia. | ||
| You can watch that live at 11:30 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| That'll be on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| You can also find it on C-SPAN Now. | ||
| That is our free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Let's hear from Velma in Richmond, Virginia, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Velma. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| My name is Stalma Reed, and I'm looking at the President Heard Us or Help Us. | ||
| And I've been out trying to find furniture for my home, and now a sofa is $4,000 where I live or $2,000. | ||
| So the prices on everything have gone up since he started playing with these tariffs. | ||
| And also, That the people Trump hangs around, like Epstein and P. Diddy and Gates from Florida, shows who he is. | ||
| And I don't, I just went to Atlanta to go shopping, and gas prices were higher. | ||
| And I don't like the way that they are treating people in California. | ||
| I shouldn't be able to go pick up people with no identification and is making everything in this country worse. | ||
| That was Vilma in Virginia. | ||
| Zach in Newport, Oregon, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Zach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I kind of want to echo what the last caller just said as far as I've been in construction for almost 20 years, and I've never seen it this bad as far as everybody I know is just barely working enough to pay the bills and projects coming to a screeching halt just because of people running out of money or whatever. | ||
| And I've worked with immigrants, Mexicans, my whole career, and I've got along with some and not with others, but I've definitely had more respect than not for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, a lot of the guys I've worked with over the years that would call themselves MAGA, a lot of that is just all talk and looking for someone to blame for what's going on. | |
| So that's just the way I see it and the way I've lived it. | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| That was Zach in Oregon. | ||
| Our last call for open forum next on Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll talk with Ford Party CEO Lindsay Draft about her organization's efforts to expand the U.S.'s two-party political system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll be right back in a nation divided a rare moment of unity. | |
| This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| In a town where partisan fighting prevails, one table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, Ceasefire, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
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| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss efforts to expand the U.S.'s two-party political system is Lindsay Durath. | ||
| She is the CEO of Forward Party. | ||
| Lindsay, thank you so much for being with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me, Tammy. | |
| We'll start with just an overview of your organization. | ||
| Tell us about Forward Party, your mission, and founding principles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wonderful. | |
| We are an ideologically inclusive new political party in the United States of America. | ||
| We are working to create a more representative and responsive government by introducing competition to reduce toxic polarization and extremism. | ||
| We are a values-based organization, and I think we'll probably spend some time this morning and we'll have some time with the callers to talk about what it means for a political party to scale as a values-based organization as opposed to one that is ideologically specific on one issue. | ||
| We also are building from the ground up. | ||
| This is not a party of any one individual. | ||
| We are not starting at the top of the ticket. | ||
| We're starting at the bottom, which is really, really important to who Forward is. | ||
| We are about to celebrate our third birthday on the 27th of this month. | ||
| That birthday actually marks the merger of three organizations that all shared a similar vision, a similar why, which is that functional and representative government. | ||
| Their hows were a little bit different, the three organizations that merged. | ||
| Andrew Yang had launched the Forward Party in the summer of 2021. | ||
| There was another organization called the Serve America Movement that was another political party. | ||
| Also, their vision for change to achieve that representative and functional government was disrupting the duopoly, what we call this two-party duopoly, right? | ||
| And the Serve America movement had run candidates in New York and in Connecticut for governor, had achieved ballot access in those states. | ||
| And we'll talk about the barriers for entry this morning and why the two parties have made it so difficult. | ||
| Sam learned that firsthand. | ||
| Those two organizations merged with a group called the Renew America Movement that was a group of Republicans that didn't see a home in the MAGA direction of the Republican Party. | ||
| Governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey, came to Forward from that organization. | ||
| So I think the idea that those three organizations merged is very central to our ethos at Forward and what we're looking to do across the country, which is bringing people together, finding opportunities for coalition, which if we look at historical precedent of the creation of third parties, has been a sticky wicket. | ||
| So we're working in our DNA to create those coalitions and opportunities for alignment. | ||
| And you mentioned a couple governors in there, but when it comes to the types of races that Forward Party is focused on, at what level is that? | ||
| Is it presidential, congressional, state, and local? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we very specifically did not get involved in the presidential race at all in 2024. | |
| As I said, we're right now in our third year, and so our focus has been building this from the ground up, which is difficult. | ||
| It's really hard, Tammy. | ||
| But, you know, we believe strongly that if a third party is going to prevail and introduce this competition, it does need to be done from the ground up. | ||
| And so while a political party is our vehicle and our tool for change, it is the movement of the people that is going to be transformative. | ||
| So forward is a movement that is being deployed through the vehicle of a political party because that's how candidates run in America. | ||
| So I think one of the most powerful opportunities we have for party building, coalition building, and deployment of a movement is coalescing around local elections and local candidates. | ||
| So what does it mean to build locally through city council races, school board races, mayoral races? | ||
| And then those individuals in that movement will then level up to higher positions for office. | ||
| Now, we are also looking at congressional races because this country needs it desperately right now. | ||
| We have a completely gridlocked Congress, and that gridlock has led to, I think, an over ceding too much power to the executive branch because of that gridlock. | ||
| And so we want to have, we want to inspire and incentivize three functioning branches of government. | ||
| And so the Forward Party will be getting involved in U.S. House races and hopefully some Senate races in 2026 as well. | ||
| And now almost three years in, you were talking about some of the issues of starting from the ground up. | ||
| What does your organization currently look like when it comes to staffing infrastructure funding? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So oftentimes I will talk to different stakeholders about the fact that people might not think that infrastructure is sexy. | ||
| At the Forward Party, we think infrastructure is very sexy. | ||
| It is all about that opportunity to build from the ground up. | ||
| And so we have about 250,000 members across the country who are active in our movement. | ||
| We have functioning state parties in, and state parties I mean executive committees that have been stood up. | ||
| The same way the GOP and the DNC has state party infrastructure across the country. | ||
| We talk about kind of that AMWAY model of building volunteer infrastructure across the country. | ||
| So in 27 states we have functioning executive organizations. | ||
| We have ballot access in five states. | ||
| So that means that in five states around the country you can get on the ballot as a forward party candidate. | ||
| You can register as a forward party candidate. | ||
| So we encourage voters, go out, register as a voter in the Forward Party. | ||
| You can do it in Utah and Colorado and Florida and South Carolina and certain communities in Connecticut. | ||
| Connecticut's very tricky from an election law perspective. | ||
| We have 15 members of the full-time Forward Party staff at our DC headquarters. | ||
| Maintaining a headquarters is actually one of the requirements for going to the FEC for federal party recognition. | ||
| And want to ask you about a Gallup poll that was done last year. | ||
| It was done just about a little over a month before the election. | ||
| It found that 58% of U.S. adults agree that a third major party is needed in the U.S. because the Republicans and Democratic parties, quote, do such a poor job of representing the American people. | ||
| But again, about a month later during the 2024 presidential election, third party independent candidates received a total of 2.8 million votes out of 155 million cast, which is just under 2%. | ||
| How do you change that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, again, it's the long game, Tammy. | |
| So the Forward Party, if you look historically, whether it's at the Bull Moose or at Ross Perot's run and his affiliation with the Reform Party, those were all attempts to introduce competition from the top of the ticket. | ||
| This is the long game, and we are deploying a movement from the ground up. | ||
| Our guest for the next 35 minutes or so is Lindsay Drath. | ||
| She is CEO of the Forward Party. | ||
| Our discussion is on her organization's efforts to expand the U.S.'s two-party political system. | ||
| If you have a question or comment, you can start calling. | ||
| And now the lines, Democrats, 202-748-8,000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Lindsay, I wanted to ask you, because you mentioned a couple candidates in there from previous third-party attempts. | ||
| Your message to voters who may be afraid to support what have been come to call spoiler candidates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think spoiler, the notion of a spoiler is a little bit of a lazy, easy way out for folks who don't want to engage in the hard work. | |
| The reality is, is 87% of congressional districts around the country are decidedly red or blue. | ||
| So those decisions are actually made in the primaries. | ||
| By the time all of the amazing people that come out to vote in November show up to the polls, and 87% of those congressional districts, it was already decided earlier in the year. | ||
| So there is the accusation of a spoiler doesn't even apply there. | ||
| Now, 520,000 positions for elected office exist all across the country. | ||
| 70% of them go uncontested, which means if you show up on Election Day, there's actually no one who has even run against that particular candidate for state legislature or state senate or for your local city council seat. | ||
| So in those 70% of seats, it's not a third-party spoiler. | ||
| It's actually a second party introducing competition. | ||
| And if you look at states where Ford has gained extraordinary traction, like Utah and Massachusetts, those are one-party states. | ||
| The Democratic Party is not a competitive party in the state of Utah in the same way the Republican Party is no longer a competitive party in the state of Massachusetts, which means a really bipartisan elected official like a Charlie Baker in Massachusetts, there's no one building a bench to recruit the Charlie Bakers any longer. | ||
| So the Forward Party can introduce that great competition into a place like Massachusetts. | ||
| We have callers already waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Mark in Keene, New Hampshire on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
| Mark, are you there? | ||
| Mark in Keene, New Hampshire. | ||
| Are you there? | ||
| All right, Mark, if we lost you, give us a call back. | ||
| We'll go to Beth in Birmingham, Alabama, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Beth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I want to let everybody know that our two-party system is crashed and burned. | ||
| Once you get, there's no Republican Party anymore. | ||
| I don't even think they know what they stand for. | ||
| They are just all in a bad place. | ||
| So we need to start from scratch and remember the Constitution and live by the law instead of letting powerful people ignore the law. | ||
| We need to get it all fixed. | ||
| So I don't know what to do about spoiler candidates. | ||
| I just know that if they were able to do silent ballots, private ballots in Washington, things would be different. | ||
| But that's part of the out-of-control party problem. | ||
| So that's all my opinion. | ||
| It's crashed and burned, and we need to start over. | ||
| Beth, you sound like a Fordist. | ||
| I think you should go to forwardparty.com and find out how you can get involved. | ||
| Alabama, where Beth is, is a great example of another one-party state where you have a decidedly Republican-led legislature there with very little competition from the Democratic Party in Alabama. | ||
| Beth, we'd love to work with you to build it there. | ||
| We'll hear from John in North Carolina, line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I'd like to know what your organization feels about term limits. | ||
| And I'm going to hang up and take your answer off the air. | ||
| Thank you for dialing in. | ||
| There are a number of reforms that we advocate for at the Forward Party. | ||
| Anything that is able to introduce new competition. | ||
| So structural democracy reforms, like opening up party primaries, exploring things like ranked choice voting. | ||
| Term limits is certainly one of them. | ||
| I think that when we're looking at candidates that are running, we have an incredible gentleman by the name of Todd Achilles in Idaho who just left announced that he's leaving the Democratic Party in Idaho and his seat in the state legislature. | ||
| He's going to be running for the United States Senate as an independent, and we're really excited about Todd's candidacy. | ||
| His opponent is going to be almost 80 years old. | ||
| So I think that we can do better than that. | ||
| Wanted to ask you, you mentioned centrist party. | ||
| Where is Forward Party when it comes to major issues? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you just used a word, Tammy, that is really interesting, which is centrist. | |
| And we keep trying to change this on our Wikipedia site. | ||
| The idea of centrism or the word moderate is kind of the catch-all glossary of terms that we have right now as Americans to describe people in politics who are solutions oriented. | ||
| So Larry Hogan, for example, would be described, the former governor of Maryland, who was a leader at an organization called No Labels. | ||
| Larry would be considered described in the media as moderate or centrist. | ||
| If you look at Larry Hogan's policies, he's anything but. | ||
| He's quite conservative. | ||
| But what we haven't been able to do, and we have a huge opportunity to do, is figure out how do we break out of this notion that anyone who wants to introduce innovation or as our caller in Alabama was saying, time to just blow it all up and start from the beginning, that that isn't a moderate idea. | ||
| It's actually an idea with a tremendous amount of conviction and vision for the future. | ||
| So we need to get out of the idea that all of our policy solutions are either conservative in nature or progressive in nature, and anything new and solutions-oriented must be somewhere in the middle. | ||
| In fact, there are all sorts of wonderful innovative policies that we could be investing in. | ||
| It's 2025. | ||
| So instead of just taking off the old books off the shelf and dusting them off, let's write new ones. | ||
| And that is what the Forward Party is committed to doing. | ||
| And we're going to do it in the same way we do everything, which is from the ground up. | ||
| So there are wonderful opportunities for us to bring people together and look at what are some innovations and policies that can help particular communities. | ||
| There are innovations like citizens' assemblies happening around the country where citizens are coming together, meeting with experts, learning about the best way to address policy, and then coming to that solution together as opposed to a top-down prescriptive one. | ||
| That's what we're committed to at Forward. | ||
| Richard in Oceanside, California, line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Lindsay. | |
| You are so right on. | ||
| I am very happy to see you this morning. | ||
| I'm happy to hear from you, Richard. | ||
| Yes, it's fun. | ||
| Now, I always call in once a month, and I just have to say two things: an opinion and a question. | ||
| My question is, is there any hope at all to somehow get the educational system for the younger people to be aware of the possibility of more parties in our democracy instead of just basically two or maybe three? | ||
| As in Europe and other countries, England and so on, there are many, many political parties involved in most, if not all, of their elections. | ||
| I know people from the other side of the lake, as we like to call it. | ||
| And, you know, they do things differently over there. | ||
| It's a much more peaceful place. | ||
| They do things right much more than we do here now. | ||
| This place, our political system is totally bankrupt. | ||
| We have the bankruptcor-in-chief for a leader, and this is a mess. | ||
| I never imagined anything like this could happen. | ||
| When I was a kid in high school, we spent our senior year, much of it, in classes called civics. | ||
| And I don't even know if they teach civics everywhere anymore. | ||
| I know they certainly don't in some places. | ||
| They just teach, put the 10 rules from the Bible on the wall and follow the rules, man, and that's all you get. | ||
| So, you know, things are not working right. | ||
| It's a mess everywhere. | ||
| I hear it from everybody. | ||
| I'm just kind of frightened by the mess we have. | ||
| Are we going to, as Benjamin Franklin said back in 1778, be unable to keep our democracy because now it's bankrupt by the bankruptor-in-chief, and he's an evil sucker, man? | ||
| We are in real trouble. | ||
| So what do you think about all that? | ||
| Richard, I think you would be so inspired to see the activity of our young Fordists across the country. | ||
| We are on our way to be on 28 campuses around the country this fall. | ||
| It's an incredibly active movement of young voters, and we're so thrilled to continue to work to build a home for them. | ||
| So I encourage you to take a look at that. | ||
| I'm going to give a shout out to our North Carolina chair, Pat Newton, today, because we've had two North Carolina callers. | ||
| I'd encourage you all to get involved in the Forward Party in North Carolina. | ||
| Richard, I think you'd find a good home there. | ||
| This question coming in on X for you, it says the ability to change electoral systems that make third parties viable is greatest in states where initiatives are allowed. | ||
| Is the Ford Party working on such initiatives? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely, Tammy. | ||
| We are very closely aligned with a lot of different partner organizations that are working to advance nonpartisan structural democracy reforms. | ||
| I mentioned the 70% of races around the country that go uncontested. | ||
| But in a state with a closed party primary, we are disenchanting. | ||
| We are disenfranchising so many voters. | ||
| In Maryland, just north of us here with closed party primaries, they have 14% of voters in Maryland that can't even vote in a primary. | ||
| And so in order for us to introduce more competition, we really believe that those democracy reforms are really critical. | ||
| And if you see some of the brave behavior last week on the floor of Congress with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voting against the rescission bill, Lisa Murkowski hailing from Alaska, where they have nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting in the general election. | ||
| Susan Collins from Maine with ranked choice voting. | ||
| So those democracy reforms and those changes in the way our voters participate in the system is really able to empower those elected officials to serve in a much more authentic way. | ||
| Forward Party isn't the first to try to expand the two-party system. | ||
| Talk about some of the other challenges your organization and previous organizations have faced. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So previous organizations, we talked about Teddy Roosevelt and the Bullmoose Party or Ross Perot's run in the Reform Party. | ||
| More recently, Mike Bloomberg. | ||
| I don't know if people remember Howard Schultz had an exploratory committee. | ||
| All from the top. | ||
| So those were all from the top down. | ||
| One of the things that made the Republican Party such a galvanizing force in the 1800s is that they were predominantly galvanized around the issue of anti-slavery. | ||
| Last year, independents that voted, so right now the kind of pew high watermark is 43% of Americans registered as independents. | ||
| 28% are registered as Republicans, 28% as Democrats. | ||
| So the market opportunity is quite evident. | ||
| We all can see the market opportunity. | ||
| How we create something and build something to create that space is the opportunity and the challenge as well. | ||
| Because right now, most of the independent voters out there that voted for Kamala Harris last fall, the number one issue that they voted for was democracy. | ||
| Independent voters that voted for Donald Trump voted on issues of immigration and the economy. | ||
| So right now, we haven't seen that individual galvanizing force like the anti-slavery movement in the 1800s that would bring together such a disparate part of our electorate that are our independent voters. | ||
| People are leaving the two-party system for a whole host of reasons. | ||
| Building a container to bring all those people together is both a challenge but an opportunity for us. | ||
| And we think our commitment to doing this in a way that's specific to communities is the way to get around that. | ||
| Let's talk with Jim in Pottsboro, Texas, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| No, while I support any effort to create a third party, I think the problem really, unless we have term limits, the horse is already out of the barn. | ||
| People serve long enough, they have a donor base that they develop. | ||
| And so until we have term limits, and we're not going to get term limits by expecting our Congress to vote on term limits. | ||
| We're going to have to have a convention of the states to force term limits because really money and politics, all these things that people have a right to be concerned about, and they're very valid. | ||
| Like I say, the horse is already out of the barn. | ||
| By the time people are in there long enough, they have consolidated the power of money. | ||
| And so I would just proffer that in addition to what you're doing, I'm not seeing any really organized effort to invoke what is in the Constitution. | ||
| If you want change, there is other methods that we haven't used in generations. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, thanks so much for calling, Jim. | ||
| And none of this is locked into the Constitution. | ||
| As you said, there's so much opportunity for rebuilding things as Americans. | ||
| Our founding fathers gave us that ability. | ||
| But you said something that I really thought was interesting, which is the donor base of these individuals and the challenge of term limits. | ||
| And Tammy and I were talking about infrastructure earlier. | ||
| One of the really important reasons why we are building this as a political party and not just as a movement of individuals is to build that infrastructure that the DNC and the RNC provide their candidates. | ||
| If you are an independent candidate and you want to run in the state of Texas outside of the two-party system, you have to build your entire campaign from the ground up. | ||
| How are you going to find a campaign manager who's not a Republican or a Democrat? | ||
| How are you going to build your website, raise money, find doors to knock on? | ||
| That's the infrastructure that a party function provides. | ||
| And that's why we're building forward as a political party to create that support system for independents running outside of the two-party system. | ||
| Another question that's coming in on text from Tony in the Redlands, California, says, Forward Party sounds nice. | ||
| Who are the stakeholders who want to build from the ground up? | ||
| How can they compete with big money, dark money lobbyists that pay Republicans and Democrats to buy influence in government? | ||
| Is Andrew Yang financing the party? | ||
| And is he just another rich guy trying to insert himself into politics so he can benefit himself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for that question. | |
| We have an incredible team in California. | ||
| I'd urge you to reach out to them. | ||
| Sarah Check is one of our party chairs out there. | ||
| She's former military, and she's really extraordinary. | ||
| Andrew is a funder of Forward. | ||
| And because right now, and this has been interesting, Tammy, the last couple of weeks. | ||
| I don't know if your viewers have noticed. | ||
| There's been a lot of attention around third parties the last couple of weeks. | ||
| And one of the questions that I think a lot of the pundits have been playing with is, well, did Elon Musk go to the FEC and file as a political party? | ||
| It doesn't work that way. | ||
| You actually have to build all of these structures. | ||
| You have to get ballot access in a critical number of states. | ||
| You have to run candidates for federal office in a critical number of states. | ||
| And then you apply with the FEC for them to review it. | ||
| So it's not just that you kind of show up. | ||
| What you can do in order to fund and create the structures to support that pathway is you go to the FEC and you file as a PAC that a lot of interest groups do. | ||
| And so Forward Party is a super PAC, and our donors are filed publicly with the FEC. | ||
| You can see that we are scrappy. | ||
| Andrew is a funder of ours, but he's getting out of this what so many of our members are, which is an opportunity for change. | ||
| And in addition to Andrew's leadership, I mentioned former New Jersey governor and head of the EPA, Christine Todd Whitman, and former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, Carrie Healy, who served with Mitt Romney. | ||
| They make up three of our co-chairs. | ||
| I wanted to follow up on something you just mentioned, and that is ballot access. | ||
| Your organization has a goal of having ballot access in all 50 states by this year and federal recognition by 2028. | ||
| Where does that goal currently stand? | ||
| How do you get there? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, so every single state is different, Tammy. | |
| And we have had to invest in the legal research to understand what are the barriers for entry, what are the thresholds for ballot access in every single state. | ||
| And I wish I could rattle them all off, all 50 of them. | ||
| There's a really brilliant leader on this out of San Francisco that we rely on heavily. | ||
| But right now we do have ballot access in five states. | ||
| So you can run as a foritist. | ||
| You can register as a forrest in Utah, Colorado, Florida, South Carolina. | ||
| And the real vision for change, and I'll talk about kind of our short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. | ||
| Our long-term goal is a functional and representative and responsive government that reduces toxic polarization and extremism. | ||
| That is our ultimate vision. | ||
| So again, the pathway to doing that means going to the Federal Election Commission and applying for party status so we can run more candidates. | ||
| But in order to achieve that functional and representative government, we have to be a national political force. | ||
| And so that 2028 goal is, yes, going to the FEC, but it's really a goal to be a national political force. | ||
| And that means running a critical number of candidates around the country. | ||
| We had 500 Americans come to us last year and say, we want to run as Florida's. | ||
| Will you support us? | ||
| We built a candidate onboarding pipeline from scratch. | ||
| We went through those 500 applications, interviewed those individuals, researched their districts, and came up with 125 candidates that ran last year. | ||
| We currently have 53 individuals serving in positions of elected office around the country as Fordists, and they are tremendous individuals. | ||
| So, how we scale that is going to be really critical. | ||
| So, yes, ballot access is one measure, but ballot access without a movement of people underneath it, stewarding that ballot, taking care of it. | ||
| There is a really kind of historic court ruling coming out of Arizona the week before last. | ||
| No labels had achieved ballot access last year as part of their unity ticket strategy, and the court has ruled that no labels cannot pick and choose who they want to be on that ballot. | ||
| So, if you don't have a big grassroots movement of people taking care and stewarding that ballot access, other people could just take it. | ||
| So, it's not, you can't just have ballot access without a movement of people taking care of it. | ||
| You need to do both at the same time. | ||
| Let's hear from Timothy in Vermont, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Timothy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, ladies. | |
| Yeah, getting back to Texas, I would just like to know what your opinion is regarding the fact that they want to force feed, the Republican majority wants to force feed gerrymandering down the throats of voters here at this particular moment. | ||
| It's my understanding that from a cyclical point of view, for lack of a better, that it happens every year or, you know, when the majority has the election cycle, but now they want to cut it in half by like six months because they're too darn afraid to let people vote on their own because they know they're going to lose the popular vote. | ||
| So, that's my question, and thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you for calling in. | ||
| Gerrymandering has been weaponized by both parties. | ||
| One of the innovations that Ford is excited to advance is the introduction of independent redistricting commissions state by state. | ||
| And not unlike ballot access, how you implement a reform like that is state by state. | ||
| So, in some states, it has to be adopted by the state constitution. | ||
| In some states, it can be done as a ballot measure where it's taken directly to the voters. | ||
| But in 2020, the introduction of an independent redistricting commission was up for votes in Virginia, and it passed. | ||
| And it's been really transformative in Virginia politics. | ||
| In fact, last year, you saw more turnover than we had in years in terms of incumbents being taken out by challengers in Virginia. | ||
| And that was largely in part to the independent redistricting commissions that had redrawn those lines. | ||
| So, I would encourage all of you all out there in Vermont and otherwise to look at opportunities to introduce independent redistricting commissions in your states. | ||
| I know our discussion is moving away, trying to move away from the Democrat and Republican party, but this is a question that Steve posted on X for you. | ||
| If your party ever got into Congress, with whom would you caucus? | ||
|
unidentified
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I love that question, Steve. | |
| Everybody. | ||
| Everybody who's willing to sign our candidate pledge and uphold, commit to upholding our values and principles. | ||
| And what I think is really exciting about what Ford is building is that we're less committed to the comma letter after your name. | ||
| What is very much possible in the next Congress in 2026 would be a fulcrum of individuals that were elected as Fordists, as independents, as Republicans and Democrats, who all committed to caucusing together based on a shared belief system. | ||
| They would, as our Executive Chair, Kerry Healy always says, wag the dog. | ||
| If you had a fulcrum of eight to 12 House members in such a divided Congress right now, that would be transformative. | ||
| Our short-term vision for change in Congress isn't that we elect eight to twelve Fordists. | ||
| It's that we elect a couple of independents, a couple of Fordists, and that those individuals commit to caucusing with some of the amazing independent minds like Jared Golden and Marie Glusenkamp-Perez and Brian Fitzpatrick. | ||
| Those are the sorts of individuals together that could create a really transformative fulcrum. | ||
| And then there's all sorts of fun parliamentary rulemaking that we would be able to engage in from there. | ||
| Let's hear from Tom in Chicago line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have not voted for a Democrat or Republican since 1992 when Ross Perrow was on the stage, debate stage, opposing both parties and signing the so-called free trade agreements. | ||
| He told you what was going to happen. | ||
| He showed you what was going to happen with all of his charts, and the mainstream media made fun of him. | ||
| It's become reality. | ||
| It's worse than even he imagined. | ||
| Both parties, they not only offshored your industry and jobs, they offshore profits because they pay lower taxes offshore. | ||
| So in effect, they offshored industry, jobs, profits, and all those taxes, those good jobs and corporate profits used to pay here. | ||
| We're $37 trillion in debt, and it's getting worse. | ||
| Both parties have been captured by the donor class. | ||
| They serve them. | ||
| They do not serve us. | ||
| If you can read, you know this. | ||
| I revolt at the ballot box. | ||
| If enough people revolted at the ballot box, we might get some attention. | ||
| What is your position on that Citizens United? | ||
| They should repeal that. | ||
| And if they have to stack the Supreme Court to do so, that should be your number one priority. | ||
| Get Citizens United repealed. | ||
| What say you? | ||
| Well, Citizens United and the general question of money and politics is one that we grapple with every single day. | ||
| I go back to kind of the building blocks of the incentives that our elected officials are given in service to their country right now. | ||
| I mean, you have someone like Roger Wicker stood on the floor of the Senate last week and said he's very concerned about the precedent that last week's vote set. | ||
| He's very, very concerned about it. | ||
| And yet, is he incentivized in the state of Tennessee to vote no against that? | ||
| And they need to be incentivized, all of our elected officials and legislators in Congress as it relates to Citizens United to vote no against their interests. | ||
| And right now, their interests are aligned with unlimited funding through super PACs. | ||
| So if we are able to elect more individuals into Congress who have backbone and are willing to vote no on things against their interests and vote on things that might lose them their seat and lose them re-election, then we can start to address some of these real issues. | ||
| But right now, each and every one of those members of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate benefit from Citizens United. | ||
| So we need to elect people in there who, this goes back to term limits. | ||
| I look back at a guy like Bill Frist, for example, who said definitively, I'm not going to run for re-election again. | ||
| I'm going to serve this many terms and that's it. | ||
| And that way I can take the hard votes. | ||
| And the behaviors right now of folks like Mitch McConnell or we saw in outgoing people like Kirsten Sinema and Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin, they all took hard votes because they knew they weren't running for re-election. | ||
| Jerry in New Jersey, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jerry. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, good morning, everybody. | |
| I have a question for this group. | ||
| What is this group going to do about race relations, specifically police brutality? | ||
| Just because the issue has died down over the past five years doesn't mean it's not over. | ||
| It's not gone. | ||
| I mean, the police relationship between white police and minorities is really bad in this country. | ||
| What is the plan to fix it once and for all? | ||
| So if Forward does win in 2028 or beyond, this police brutality issue could be a thing of the past because it's a really serious, serious issue right now. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| It's an extraordinarily serious issue. | ||
| I mentioned earlier that we are a values-based party right now. | ||
| And if you look at our website and you look at our values and principles, dignity is at the top of that list. | ||
| Humanity is at the top of that list. | ||
| Mutual respect is at the top of that list. | ||
| We are very excited to work with different sort of deliberative programs to bring communities together to solve these issues in the best way for their backyards. | ||
| Not everyone is going to need the same solution in Sacramento and San Diego and San Antonio. | ||
| We want to make sure that the people of those communities can address these issues in the way that's best for them in their backyards. | ||
| There are things like citizens' assemblies that I referenced earlier that bring communities together to address these issues in the way that's best for them. | ||
| I don't think whether it's police brutality or homelessness or any other difficult issue in this nation, any one solution for one community is going to be the best for everybody. | ||
| And what we need to do is to create those structures to suss out these new, really innovative solutions to get to the crux of these problems. | ||
| You mentioned earlier that you've attracted, I believe it was 500 candidates, people who have been coming to the Forward Party wanting to be involved. | ||
| What kind of candidate do you want representing forward party? | ||
| And if somebody listening wants to get involved, tell them how they can do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you so much for that. | |
| Go to forwardparty.com. | ||
| If you're interested in running for office, you can actually apply right there on our website. | ||
| If you're interested in getting involved in your state as a member of the state leadership, you can find them there as well. | ||
| You can put your contact information and someone will call you. | ||
| In your state, a volunteer will call you. | ||
| We also have wonderful committees. | ||
| If you're a young person and interested in standing up a chapter on your school, you can find our young Fordists. | ||
| If you are a former member of our military or have a family member who was deployed and you're looking at getting involved as a veteran, we have a veteran and veterans family committee that's very, very active and other affinity groups as well. | ||
| remind me the first part of your question when it comes to who you want on uh on tickets when it comes on tickets yeah So we are a values-based party. | ||
|
unidentified
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We have a candidate pledge. | |
| And the top two things we're going to ask people to commit to is respect for the rule of law and upholding the Constitution. | ||
| We're also going to look for candidates who are willing to advance structural democracy reforms, many of which might result in them only serving one term, as I said. | ||
| We also ask for transparency in our candidates. | ||
| So we want to make sure that these are folks who are committed to things like holding town halls, keeping their calendar public, also just general commitment to collegiality, more listening, also legislating and rulemaking based on data are the sorts of things that we ask our candidates to commit to. | ||
| We have time for a couple more calls. | ||
| Matt in Northport, Washington, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Matt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just kind of passed by your program here, and I noticed talk of a third party. | ||
| And I'm past Chairman of the seventh legislative district of Eastern Washington, and I've now left the Democratic Party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I look to the north, and I see in Canada, they have basically a three-party system that runs their government. | |
| And I think this is the ultimate solution to what we have. | ||
| The malaise of our government now. | ||
| We have two parties, and they're both going in the wrong direction. | ||
| And the third party is the third rail that pulls the other two parties back to a system where you need to compromise in order to affect the change that we need. | ||
| And that's basically what I have to say. | ||
| Yes, and that is, that's, I completely agree. | ||
| And that is kind of the vision that we were talking about earlier with the Fulcrum strategy in Congress, which is what can it look like for that to be the forcing function for people to come together and work towards solutions. | ||
| I will say we need your expertise in Washington State. | ||
| I hope you'll go to the website and sign up so we can learn about all of the work that you did when you were a leader in the Democratic Party. | ||
| Ava and College Station, Texas, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Ava. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I'm curious, how do you think Elon Musk's American First Party is going to impact the Republican Party in the midterm election and alter the agenda of the Republican Party going forward? | ||
| Thank you for that question. | ||
| We've been really excited about all of the interest in third parties as a result of Elon's announcements. | ||
| He's been pretty quiet the last few days. | ||
| I haven't heard anything about it recently. | ||
| But I think similar to what the previous caller suggested, the introduction of competition here I think will help both the Republican and the Democratic parties be more solutions-minded and be a little bit more open. | ||
| They have focused on really courting the extremes within their parties. | ||
| More conversation of competition at scale, I think, will remind them they need to be focused on independent voters as well. | ||
| There are midterms coming up in about a year and a half, maybe less, and a presidential election not long after that. | ||
| What is your organization going to be focused on? | ||
| What are its biggest priorities in the short-term future and then long-term? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so for 2026, we are focused on a key number of congressional districts where we can work to run candidates for the United States House of Representatives as Fordists or in a couple of instances as independents. |