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unidentified
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covers this slide as well we appreciate that and one can only hope that he's able to watch c-span on a black and white television set in his prison cell this is being carried live by c-span is being watched uh not only in this country but it's being watched around the world right now mike said before i happen to listen to him he was on c-span one that's a big upgrade right | |
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| C-span Democracy unfiltered. | ||
| this afternoon it's a discussion on the media's role in investigating the origins of the covet 19 virus from the brookings institution we'll have live coverage at 1 30 p.m on c-span c-span now our free mobile app and online at c-span.org A focus now on who is and isn't being impacted by the government shutdown. | ||
| Sean Michael Newhouse is a staff reporter for Government Executive. | ||
| He's combed through several recent reports on that topic and one of the key findings, Sean Newhouse, is that political party affiliation plays a big role in whether people perceive that they've been impacted by the shutdown or not. | ||
| Explain that absolutely so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's start with the organization who conducted the survey. | |
| The Partnership FOR Public Service is a nonpartisan, nonprofit GOOD government group and as part of their duties they conduct surveys regularly on how the public perceives government. | ||
| So shutdown is happening. | ||
| They did a survey on it and I should note this was in the second week of the shutdown. | ||
| We're now on the fourth. | ||
| But uh, what they found? | ||
| They asked the respondents if the shutdown impacted people in your community and uh, 48 total of respondents said that their community was impacted by the shutdown big partisan difference. | ||
| So we've got 69 of Democrats agree with that statement, compared with 27 of Republicans and then 38 of independents in the middle, and we could put those numbers on the screen for our visual learners out there. | ||
| You mentioned that's the second week of the shutdown. | ||
| Is Government Executive following up on that? | ||
| How do they expect when we have these kind of surveys. | ||
| It's you get a better understanding when you see them move over time. | ||
| So is there a follow-up survey coming on this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that is a very good question that I will probably have to ask the organization after this interview ends. | |
| But I did uh, when they first released this survey, you know, I saw this big partisan split and I had a couple thoughts Thoughts, on why that might be, but I asked them, you know, why do you think this happened? | ||
| And the research manager responded to me and said, basically, that personal politics impact how you perceive government. | ||
| So he pointed me to another recent report that the organization did and that I cover. | ||
| Every year they look at trusting government. | ||
| So 2024 compared to 2025, 2024, last year of Biden, 10% of Republicans said they trusted the government. | ||
| 2025, first year of Trump, that number has increased to 42%. | ||
| There's been a similar then decrease with Democrats. | ||
| This is not an exclusive one-party phenomenon. | ||
| So again, how one's politics perceives how you impact the government. | ||
| And also one zip code perceives how much you've been impacted by the shutdown. | ||
| Wallet Hub with another report on that topic. | ||
| What did Wallet Hub find? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, and I thought their methodology was really clever. | |
| So they looked at to determine which states were most impacted by the shutdown, they looked at the percentage of workers in that state who were federal workers, and they looked at federal contract dollars spend per capita in the state, which made a lot of sense to me. | ||
| But they looked at some other factors that I didn't initially consider that I thought was rather clever. | ||
| They looked at the percentage of individuals in the state who rely on SNAP food stamps. | ||
| We know that that benefit is set to expire at the end of the month. | ||
| They looked at real estate as a percentage of the state's gross economy. | ||
| The shutdown affects any housing agency. | ||
| Their operations might be completely shut down. | ||
| Or at the very least, it's probably just that their work has been slow. | ||
| So they looked at that. | ||
| And they also looked at the number of national parks in the state because whether a park is closed varies park by park. | ||
| At the very least, most of their operations have been affected by the shutdown. | ||
| And you mentioned the SNAP news, the administration announcing that there wasn't going to be additional money for that when those benefits run out. | ||
| We'll see if that holds. | ||
| But I think the number is something like 47 million Americans who make use of SNAP. | ||
| Here's from Wallet Hub the percentage of families in each state that receive SNAP benefits. | ||
| The states with the highest percentage of families receiving SNAP benefits, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Oregon, the states with the lowest percentage of families receiving SNAP benefits, Kansas, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Utah, and Wyoming. | ||
| New Mexico comes up as one of those states that if you live there, you're feeling this government shutdown more. | ||
| What are some of the other states? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so unsurprisingly, D.C. was the state that, well, not state, city that Wallet Hub determined was the most impacted because D.C. has the highest percentage of workers who work for the government, also the highest amount of federal contract dollars per capita. | |
| You mentioned New Mexico, they determined that was the third most affected. | ||
| It is the state with the highest percentage of its residents who are SNAP participants. | ||
| Also, it has one of the highest numbers, federal contract dollars per capita, New Mexico. | ||
| And then number two, you might think Maryland or Virginia would be number two, number three, but actually Hawaii was number two. | ||
| That's because they have a relatively high percentage of workers in Hawaii work for the federal government. | ||
| Fourth of its economy relies on real estate. | ||
| And then unsurprisingly, Hawaii has a lot of national parks. | ||
| What's your read on why New Hampshire, Nebraska, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota are the states with the lowest level of impact, at least according to this set of statistics? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I wouldn't say I have any particular read. | |
| I did notice looking at the states that were least impacted, they did tend to be in the Midwest, but it's just because of the factors that Wallet Hub determined to use, determine which states had the most impact. | ||
| They just had lower scores. | ||
| Federal contract dollars per capita is another one of those factors that Wallet Hub used here. | ||
| The states with the most per capita, the District of Columbia, unsurprisingly, number one, Virginia and Maryland, right around the federal government capital, New Mexico and Connecticut, the states with the lowest federal contract dollars per capita, Nebraska, Arkansas, Oregon, Minnesota, there it is, and Delaware. | ||
| Asking you, our viewers, this morning, are you being impacted by the government shutdown? | ||
| Give us a call. | ||
| Sean Newhouse joins us for this conversation. | ||
| He's been following some of these different reports on it. | ||
| Here's how you can join the conversation. | ||
| Republicans, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| As people are calling in on that, switch gears for me. | ||
| Another topic that you've been following, agencies, inspectors general. | ||
| For folks who haven't been tracking it, what's been happening to the executive branch core of inspectors general in the second Trump administration? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| So let's start with what Inspectors General are. | ||
| So several agencies have inspectors general, and they lead offices of offices of staff ranging from dozens of employees to hundreds. | ||
| And their job is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the agencies. | ||
| So they issue reports that look at the effectiveness of agency programs. | ||
| Individuals can submit whistleblower complaints. | ||
| They may investigate those. | ||
| And I covered Congress before this current job, and it was very rare that you would watch a congressional markup where a member of Congress, either side, would not bring up information referenced by an inspector general. | ||
| They were really heralded as kind of the pinnacle of nonpartisanship. | ||
| And what has been happening to your second question? | ||
| So the first Friday of Trump's second term, he fired 17 agency inspectors general. | ||
| The month after in February, he removed the inspector general for the U.S. Agency for International Development. | ||
| That's an agency that has been effectively eliminated. | ||
| It's been folded into the State Department. | ||
| That Inspector General had warned that the layoffs at that agency were going to make it harder to perform oversight of foreign aid after that memo was issued. | ||
| They were removed. | ||
| And then just two weeks ago, the inspector general for the export-import bank was fired by the president. | ||
| What is the export-import bank? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, the export-import bank. | |
| I'm actually glad you asked that question because I knew the name, but I didn't actually know what they did until I was reporting this. | ||
| They help companies with exporting. | ||
| They provide financing. | ||
| Why is Chuck Grassley the photo that went along with this latest story on the XM, as they call it, bank inspector general firing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so Senator Chuck Grassley, a longtime Republican Iowa senator, has also been a longtime defender of Inspectors General. | |
| He was the person who, for the most part, publicly announced that the Inspector General for the XM Export-Import Bank was fired. | ||
| And in his ex post, he said that the president, like the firings early this year, did not notify Congress as required. | ||
| So is he saying what the president did is illegal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's a question that I actually just covered in the Inspector General confirmation hearing last week, and the senator asked Dominees that question. | |
| So, well, let's start with what the requirement is. | ||
| So in 2008, Congress required the president, so the president can remove the inspector general. | ||
| Let's just be clear about that. | ||
| But in 2008, Congress required that the president had to give Congress 30-day notice before removing an inspector general. | ||
| And then in 2002, they expanded that requirement to say the president had to provide the substantive rationale for the removal. | ||
| So it wasn't enough to just say, hey, I'm firing this guy in a month. | ||
| I have to explain why to Congress. | ||
| So that did not happen. | ||
| And why would Congress want to know that? | ||
| What does that do for Congress? | ||
| How is this? | ||
| I imagine it's Congress sort of protecting the legislative branch powers, but how? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think it gets to controversy. | |
| So agency inspectors general are political appointees, but they're not political appointees in the classical sense. | ||
| They are, well, legally required, but also kind of traditionally expected to have some independence from the administration. | ||
| They perform oversight on the administration, so the expectation is that if something critical or bad would come out about the administration, that they would still report that information fairly and accurately. | ||
| So when it gets to if inspector general removed, then a lot of questions is, okay, why were they removed? | ||
| You know, what might the administration be trying to cover up? | ||
| Who do inspectors general report to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I guess they would probably say Congress, the president, and the American people. | |
| But not the head of the agency of which they are the inspector general. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That gets into kind of thorny legal issues, but they are, again, expected to have some degree of separation between the agency head. | |
| What has been President Trump's reaction to criticism? | ||
| Is that a fair way to describe from Chuck Grassley? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say it goes beyond Chuck Grassley. | |
| Certainly most congressional Democrats, many good government groups. | ||
| You know, every time I write on Inspectors Generals, I have to reach out to the White House for comment. | ||
| And I mentioned that Inspectors General used to be heralded as these kind of pinnacles of nonpartisanship. | ||
| The Trump administration, this term, has called them partisan, corrupt, said they lied to the public. | ||
| So certainly a rhetorical shift on the part of the Trump administration. | ||
| What do we know about the appointed or nominated inspectors general for the departments of defense, labor, and the small business administration? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so that was actually the hearing last week that I covered. | |
| I think the most notable is the nominee for the Labor Department Inspector General. | ||
| That's former Representative Diaz Bosito. | ||
| He was a New York Republican one term, lost his re-election race. | ||
| So just the fact that he is a former congressman is surprising because, again, it is extensive. | ||
| You can continue watching this online at c-span.org. | ||
| Live now to a discussion on the media's role in investigating the origin of COVID-19. | ||
| This hosted by the Brookings Institution. | ||
| You're watching live coverage. | ||
| Regulations and pandemic prevention. |