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Irma Neal is the former Deputy Mayor of the city of Indianapolis, Indiana and Director of Human Services with more than 30 years of experience in government and corporate sectors. She has dedicated her career to transforming human services and financial literacy and has spent over 15 years as a business owner and consultant, working with government agencies, schools, and private organizations. Growing up in a family facing financial hardship, Irma learned early the importance of money management, which fueled her lifelong passion for economic education. As the best-selling author of Leading in Chaos, Irma is passionate about making a positive impact in the lives of others. In this episode, Irma talks about some life and work lessons she learned from growing up poor. Host: Marie-Line Germain, Ph.D. Mixing: Kelly Minnis
The Florida citrus industry has seen some promising investments in this year's Legislative Session, and the Department of Health and Human Services reports the first human case of New World Screwworm in the U.S.
On the eve of harvest, the USDA released an unexpectedly high California almond crop forecast of 3 billion pounds, and the Department of Health and Human Services reports the first human case of New World Screwworm in the U.S.
It's Friday, August 29th, A.D. 2025. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com. I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Adam McManus California school district prohibits prayer before board meeting A California school district is fighting a legal battle to defend opening prayer, arguing it's perfectly permissible to open meetings by invoking God, reports Faithwire.com. Joel Oster, an attorney for Advocates For Faith & Freedom, told CBN News that Chino Valley Unified School District has taken decisive legal action to challenge what it believes to be an outdated injunction from the Ninth Circuit Court preventing the school board from opening with prayer. The Christian legal rights attorney explained himself. OSTER: “It's not a violation of the First Amendment. It's not an unconstitutional establishment of religion to just simply allow a deliberative body to open up its sessions with prayer.” Remember the truth of Ephesians 6:12. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser flips: Grateful Trump lowered crime After previously criticizing President Donald Trump's federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has since changed her stance, praising the federal operation for the reduction in homicides, carjackings, and gun crimes, reports One America News. On Wednesday, Bowser gave an update on the result of the federal takeover, revealing that violent crime is down by 45% since the operation began in comparison to crime statistics within the same period last year. The nation's capital has seen a 38% decrease in homicides, an 87% decrease in carjackings, and a 62% decrease in robberies. Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed on Thursday that there have been 1,283 arrests and the seizure of 135 illegal guns as a result of the operation. In order to help drop the homicide rate even further, President Trump made this announcement. TRUMP: “If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, DC, we're going to be seeking the death penalty. And that's a very strong preventative we have no choice in DC and Washington. States are going to have to make their own decision. But if somebody kills somebody, it's the death penalty.” Genesis 9:6 says, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image." Trump fired CDC Director On Thursday, the White House said President Donald Trump has fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez after she refused to resign, reports CNBC. Hours later, NBC News reported the White House had tapped Jim O'Neill, deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services department, to serve as acting director of the CDC. O'Neill was sworn in as deputy secretary in June, and is a key aide to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The temporary appointment suggests that Kennedy could have a clearer path to make changes to U.S. immunization policy, particularly after Monarez had refused some of his requests. The permanent replacement for Monarez will have to be confirmed, though, by the Senate. Homosexual CDC official, who called pregnant women pregnant “people,” resigned Plus, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, a homosexual man married to his alleged husband, Michael Macneal, resigned at the CDC in part because he had been upset by Kennedy's decision to remove COVID-19 vaccines from immunization schedules for healthy children and pregnant women, reports The Epoch Times. And, like many on the left, Daskalakis insisted on calling pregnant women “pregnant people.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made this comment. LEAVITT: “I understand there were a few other individuals who resigned after the firing of Ms. Monarez. One of those individuals wrote in his departure statement that he identifies pregnant women as ‘pregnant people.' So, that's not someone who we want in this administration anyway. So, if people are not aligned with the President's vision and the Secretary's vision to make our country healthy again, then we will gladly show them the door.” Kirk Cameron warns America about Taylor Swift Christian actor Kirk Cameron recently sounded the alarm over Taylor Swift's cultural influence, reports The Christian Post. CAMERON: “This billionaire pop star in heels is crowned ‘the voice of a generation.' What do you get when a billionaire pop star releases an album with provocative artwork, lyrics that mock God, glorify rebellion and celebrate explicit sin? “You get the most powerful sermon that America's youth will hear this year. Her songs are not just music. This is discipleship!” Cracker Barrel has funded sexually perverse lifestyles for a decade Despite the fact that Cracker Barrel has been shamed into keeping its own nostalgic logo, the controversy extends beyond the logo and remodels. According to Fox Business, the rebranding saga began on May 16, 2024, when Julie Masino, the new president as of 2023, unveiled a “strategic transformation plan” to investors, emphasizing “refining” and “evolving the brand across all touchpoints.” Investor Sardar Biglari, a prominent shareholder, issued four warnings, including a 120-page slide deck and a seven-page letter to shareholders, labeling the rebrand “obvious folly” and warning of “shareholder value destruction.” He argued, “Cracker Barrel is not in dire need of a transformation; it's in dire need of a turnaround,” and criticized the board as “flawed” and “responsible for the current malaise.” Despite these warnings, Masino and the board pressed forward with a $700 million remodel at Cracker Barrel, ignoring Biglari's concerns and dismissing him as an “activist investor” with an “ultimate agenda.” However, from a Christian standpoint, the most objectionable aspect of Cracker Barrel is its apparent longstanding push of sexual perversion. Listen to what conservative activist Robby Starbuck said at the beginning of a 15-minute statement. STARBUCK: “We investigated Cracker Barrel, and what I'm about to show you is a company infested with left-wing activists who are more interested in safe spaces, pronouns, and virtue signaling than they are in their customers. “I think the best way to start is by telling you what you've been funding if you've gone to Cracker Barrel in recent years. So, let's start with Nashville [homosexual] Pride. Yes, Cracker Barrel is a proud sponsor of Nashville Pride, and had been part of it for over a decade, along with participating for multiple years in Evansville, Indiana's third River City Pride event. “They even made LGBTQ+ rocking chairs for these pride events. The same pride rocking chair that they put front and center in their Tennessee corporate office and at their 2019 managers conference for the Cracker Barrel managers. “And for a food service company, you might be thinking their focus should be good food and good service, but their own website says, ‘This year, Cracker Barrel's focus was to be a part of the [Homosexual/Transgender] Pride experience.' And they're very proud of their pro-trans rocking chairs. Let me tell you, they call it, ‘Bringing the front porch to Pride.' And if you think that's out of alignment with their customers, well, you're right!” Cracker Barrel leadership is recognizing the truth of Galatians 6:8. It says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” Close And that's The Worldview on this Friday, August 29th, in the year of our Lord 2025. Follow us on X or subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.
The newly confirmed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is out of her role amid reported disagreements with leaders at Health and Human Services over COVID-19 vaccine guidance. Walgreens has officially transitioned to a privately held company. And, a new survey reveals a growing shortage of qualified physicians available for hire. Those stories on today's episode of the Gist Healthcare Podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this Freedom Friday, we wrapped up our weekly theme, “Back to School,” with a few professors and staff members from Moody Bible Institute (MBI). First, we were joined by Dr. John Mabus to discuss healthy spiritual formation. Dr. Mabus is an Associate Professor of Applied Theology and Church Ministries at MBI. For the past 14 years, Dr. Mabus served as a Navy Chaplain, sharing the gospel and caring for people in the context of military life. He also has professional interests in spiritual formation and discipleship, reformation practices in pastoral care and discipleship, suicide prevention and intervention, and leadership advisement and coaching. Then, we were joined by Kelli Worrall to discuss the significance of communication in the Bible. Kelli is a Professor of Communications at MBI and the Field Chair for the Music and Media Arts Division. She is also the author of “20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomethings Selves.”Then we had Dr. Mikel Del Rosario join us to discuss the legitimacy of the New Testament Bible manuscripts, despite the differences in their wording. Dr. Del Rosario currently teaches apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and Bible as a Professor of Bible and Theology at MBI. Before coming to Moody, he taught Apologetics classes at Jessup University in California. He has a passion for helping Christians find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity and explaining their faith with courage and compassion. Then we had Dr. Mary Hendrickson join us to discuss how our personalities can affect the way we read the Bible. Dr. Hendrickson is an Assistant Professor of Human Services and Pre-Counseling at MBI. She serves in the Counseling Psychology and Educational Ministries department. We then discussed the importance of “girding up the loins” of our minds, meaning having a sober mind and being alert for whatever comes. This is affirmed in Scripture in Exodus 12:11 and 1 Peter 1:13. You can hear the highlights of today's program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following time stamps: Dr. John Mabus Interview (3 Ingredients to Healthy Spirtual Formation) [03:51] Dr. Mike Del Rosariol Interview ( Difference in Biblical Translation Wording) [16:47 ] Dr. Mary Hendrickson (How Our Personality Affects the Way We Read The Bible) [ 35:19] Gird Your Loins Devotion [56:08] Kelli Worrall Interview (Communication in the Bible) [01:05:44 ] The Gospel [ 01:18:04 ] Karl and Crew airs live weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. Central Time. Click this link for ways to listen in your area! https://www.moodyradio.org/ways-to-listen/Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Host Jeremy C. Park talks with David Jordan, President and CEO of Agape Child & Family Services, who highlights the organization's 54-year mission to fight poverty through a two-generational model and faith-based support for families in Memphis. David details Agape's evidence-based approach and success in helping families improve their economic situations and educational outcomes, while also discussing their implementation of the "Science of Hope" initiative which has shown positive results in increasing hope levels among both adults and youth. The interview concludes with information about an effort to rebrand Memphis as a "City of Hope," including plans for a Hope Summit on November 13, 2025, that has gained support from many organizations across the city.Agape's Faith-Based Poverty Alleviation - David Jordan, President and CEO of Agape Child & Family Services, highlights the Memphis, Tennessee-based, faith-based nonprofit celebrating its 54th year. David explains that Agape's mission is to fight poverty through God for families to flourish, with a two-generational model serving both parents and children in communities like Fraser, Whitehaven, and Hickory Hill. He shares that their evidence-based approach has helped nearly a third of families increase their income and enabled 95% of high school students to graduate, with many pursuing further education or employment.Agape's Comprehensive Family Support Model - David discusses Agape Child & Family Services' mission to support families in need, focusing on addressing root causes of issues rather than just providing Band-Aid solutions. He explains that the organization has evolved from its initial focus on foster care and adoption to a more comprehensive approach that includes poverty fighting work, education support, job placement, transitional housing, and mental health services. David emphasizes the importance of listening to families and communities to determine their needs, and highlights the organization's use of a "no wrong door" approach to provide holistic support. He also describes Agape's network of staff, volunteers, and partners, as well as their plans to expand their reach to help 10,000 in the future.Hope Initiative Shows Positive Results - David discusses the implementation of the "Science of Hope" initiative, which is based on 2,500 research studies showing that higher levels of hope lead to better outcomes in various areas of life. He explains that Agape has been using this approach with families for two years, focusing on goal-setting and building hope through collaborative support. The program has shown success, with over half of adults and 65% of youth experiencing increased hope levels and achieving their goals. David also mentions that the State of Oklahoma has adopted this approach, with Governor Stitt implementing it in various state departments, including the Tennessee Department of Human Services and the Oklahoma Department of Children's Services, which saw cost savings from reduced staff turnover.Memphis Hope Initiative Launch - David discusses the initiative to rebrand Memphis as a "City of Hope," which he presented to Mayor Young and Mayor Harris in March and April. The project has gained support from over 30 organizations, including faith, corporate, and philanthropic groups. A Hope Summit is planned for November 13th at the University of Memphis, where leaders will discuss implementing collective hope on the ground through hope navigators. The event will be free to attend, and more information can be found on agapemeanslove.org or by calling (901) 323-3600.Visit https://agapemeanslove.org to learn more about Agape Child & Family Services and the upcoming Hope Summit on November 13, 2025.
On this Freedom Friday, we wrapped up our weekly theme, “Back to School,” with a few professors and staff members from Moody Bible Institute (MBI). First, we were joined by Dr. John Mabus to discuss healthy spiritual formation. Dr. Mabus is an Associate Professor of Applied Theology and Church Ministries at MBI. For the past 14 years, Dr. Mabus served as a Navy Chaplain, sharing the gospel and caring for people in the context of military life. He also has professional interests in spiritual formation and discipleship, reformation practices in pastoral care and discipleship, suicide prevention and intervention, and leadership advisement and coaching. Then, we were joined by Kelli Worrall to discuss the significance of communication in the Bible. Kelli is a Professor of Communications at MBI and the Field Chair for the Music and Media Arts Division. She is also the author of “20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomethings Selves.”Then we had Dr. Mikel Del Rosario join us to discuss the legitimacy of the New Testament Bible manuscripts, despite the differences in their wording. Dr. Del Rosario currently teaches apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and Bible as a Professor of Bible and Theology at MBI. Before coming to Moody, he taught Apologetics classes at Jessup University in California. He has a passion for helping Christians find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity and explaining their faith with courage and compassion. Then we had Dr. Mary Hendrickson join us to discuss how our personalities can affect the way we read the Bible. Dr. Hendrickson is an Assistant Professor of Human Services and Pre-Counseling at MBI. She serves in the Counseling Psychology and Educational Ministries department. We then discussed the importance of “girding up the loins” of our minds, meaning having a sober mind and being alert for whatever comes. This is affirmed in Scripture in Exodus 12:11 and 1 Peter 1:13. You can hear the highlights of today's program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following time stamps: Dr. John Mabus Interview (3 Ingredients to Healthy Spirtual Formation) [03:51] Dr. Mike Del Rosariol Interview ( Difference in Biblical Translation Wording) [16:47 ] Dr. Mary Hendrickson (How Our Personality Affects the Way We Read The Bible) [ 35:19] Gird Your Loins Devotion [56:08] Kelli Worrall Interview (Communication in the Bible) [01:05:44 ] The Gospel [ 01:18:04 ] Karl and Crew airs live weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. Central Time. Click this link for ways to listen in your area! https://www.moodyradio.org/ways-to-listen/Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this Freedom Friday, we wrapped up our weekly theme, “Back to School,” with a few professors and staff members from Moody Bible Institute (MBI). First, we were joined by Dr. John Mabus to discuss healthy spiritual formation. Dr. Mabus is an Associate Professor of Applied Theology and Church Ministries at MBI. For the past 14 years, Dr. Mabus served as a Navy Chaplain, sharing the gospel and caring for people in the context of military life. He also has professional interests in spiritual formation and discipleship, reformation practices in pastoral care and discipleship, suicide prevention and intervention, and leadership advisement and coaching. Then, we were joined by Kelli Worrall to discuss the significance of communication in the Bible. Kelli is a Professor of Communications at MBI and the Field Chair for the Music and Media Arts Division. She is also the author of “20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomethings Selves.”Then we had Dr. Mikel Del Rosario join us to discuss the legitimacy of the New Testament Bible manuscripts, despite the differences in their wording. Dr. Del Rosario currently teaches apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and Bible as a Professor of Bible and Theology at MBI. Before coming to Moody, he taught Apologetics classes at Jessup University in California. He has a passion for helping Christians find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity and explaining their faith with courage and compassion. Then we had Dr. Mary Hendrickson join us to discuss how our personalities can affect the way we read the Bible. Dr. Hendrickson is an Assistant Professor of Human Services and Pre-Counseling at MBI. She serves in the Counseling Psychology and Educational Ministries department. We then discussed the importance of “girding up the loins” of our minds, meaning having a sober mind and being alert for whatever comes. This is affirmed in Scripture in Exodus 12:11 and 1 Peter 1:13. You can hear the highlights of today's program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following time stamps: Dr. John Mabus Interview (3 Ingredients to Healthy Spirtual Formation) [03:51] Dr. Mike Del Rosariol Interview ( Difference in Biblical Translation Wording) [16:47 ] Dr. Mary Hendrickson (How Our Personality Affects the Way We Read The Bible) [ 35:19] Gird Your Loins Devotion [56:08] Kelli Worrall Interview (Communication in the Bible) [01:05:44 ] The Gospel [ 01:18:04 ] Karl and Crew airs live weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. Central Time. Click this link for ways to listen in your area! https://www.moodyradio.org/ways-to-listen/Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this Freedom Friday, we wrapped up our weekly theme, “Back to School,” with a few professors and staff members from Moody Bible Institute (MBI). First, we were joined by Dr. John Mabus to discuss healthy spiritual formation. Dr. Mabus is an Associate Professor of Applied Theology and Church Ministries at MBI. For the past 14 years, Dr. Mabus served as a Navy Chaplain, sharing the gospel and caring for people in the context of military life. He also has professional interests in spiritual formation and discipleship, reformation practices in pastoral care and discipleship, suicide prevention and intervention, and leadership advisement and coaching. Then, we were joined by Kelli Worrall to discuss the significance of communication in the Bible. Kelli is a Professor of Communications at MBI and the Field Chair for the Music and Media Arts Division. She is also the author of “20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomethings Selves.”Then we had Dr. Mikel Del Rosario join us to discuss the legitimacy of the New Testament Bible manuscripts, despite the differences in their wording. Dr. Del Rosario currently teaches apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and Bible as a Professor of Bible and Theology at MBI. Before coming to Moody, he taught Apologetics classes at Jessup University in California. He has a passion for helping Christians find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity and explaining their faith with courage and compassion. Then we had Dr. Mary Hendrickson join us to discuss how our personalities can affect the way we read the Bible. Dr. Hendrickson is an Assistant Professor of Human Services and Pre-Counseling at MBI. She serves in the Counseling Psychology and Educational Ministries department. We then discussed the importance of “girding up the loins” of our minds, meaning having a sober mind and being alert for whatever comes. This is affirmed in Scripture in Exodus 12:11 and 1 Peter 1:13. You can hear the highlights of today's program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following time stamps: Dr. John Mabus Interview (3 Ingredients to Healthy Spirtual Formation) [03:51] Dr. Mike Del Rosariol Interview ( Difference in Biblical Translation Wording) [16:47 ] Dr. Mary Hendrickson (How Our Personality Affects the Way We Read The Bible) [ 35:19] Gird Your Loins Devotion [56:08] Kelli Worrall Interview (Communication in the Bible) [01:05:44 ] The Gospel [ 01:18:04 ] Karl and Crew airs live weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. Central Time. Click this link for ways to listen in your area! https://www.moodyradio.org/ways-to-listen/Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this Freedom Friday, we wrapped up our weekly theme, “Back to School,” with a few professors and staff members from Moody Bible Institute (MBI). First, we were joined by Dr. John Mabus to discuss healthy spiritual formation. Dr. Mabus is an Associate Professor of Applied Theology and Church Ministries at MBI. For the past 14 years, Dr. Mabus served as a Navy Chaplain, sharing the gospel and caring for people in the context of military life. He also has professional interests in spiritual formation and discipleship, reformation practices in pastoral care and discipleship, suicide prevention and intervention, and leadership advisement and coaching. Then, we were joined by Kelli Worrall to discuss the significance of communication in the Bible. Kelli is a Professor of Communications at MBI and the Field Chair for the Music and Media Arts Division. She is also the author of “20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomethings Selves.”Then we had Dr. Mikel Del Rosario join us to discuss the legitimacy of the New Testament Bible manuscripts, despite the differences in their wording. Dr. Del Rosario currently teaches apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and Bible as a Professor of Bible and Theology at MBI. Before coming to Moody, he taught Apologetics classes at Jessup University in California. He has a passion for helping Christians find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity and explaining their faith with courage and compassion. Then we had Dr. Mary Hendrickson join us to discuss how our personalities can affect the way we read the Bible. Dr. Hendrickson is an Assistant Professor of Human Services and Pre-Counseling at MBI. She serves in the Counseling Psychology and Educational Ministries department. We then discussed the importance of “girding up the loins” of our minds, meaning having a sober mind and being alert for whatever comes. This is affirmed in Scripture in Exodus 12:11 and 1 Peter 1:13. You can hear the highlights of today's program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following time stamps: Dr. John Mabus Interview (3 Ingredients to Healthy Spirtual Formation) [03:51] Dr. Mike Del Rosariol Interview ( Difference in Biblical Translation Wording) [16:47 ] Dr. Mary Hendrickson (How Our Personality Affects the Way We Read The Bible) [ 35:19] Gird Your Loins Devotion [56:08] Kelli Worrall Interview (Communication in the Bible) [01:05:44 ] The Gospel [ 01:18:04 ] Karl and Crew airs live weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. Central Time. Click this link for ways to listen in your area! https://www.moodyradio.org/ways-to-listen/Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this Freedom Friday, we wrapped up our weekly theme, “Back to School,” with a few professors and staff members from Moody Bible Institute (MBI). First, we were joined by Dr. John Mabus to discuss healthy spiritual formation. Dr. Mabus is an Associate Professor of Applied Theology and Church Ministries at MBI. For the past 14 years, Dr. Mabus served as a Navy Chaplain, sharing the gospel and caring for people in the context of military life. He also has professional interests in spiritual formation and discipleship, reformation practices in pastoral care and discipleship, suicide prevention and intervention, and leadership advisement and coaching. Then, we were joined by Kelli Worrall to discuss the significance of communication in the Bible. Kelli is a Professor of Communications at MBI and the Field Chair for the Music and Media Arts Division. She is also the author of “20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomethings Selves.”Then we had Dr. Mikel Del Rosario join us to discuss the legitimacy of the New Testament Bible manuscripts, despite the differences in their wording. Dr. Del Rosario currently teaches apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and Bible as a Professor of Bible and Theology at MBI. Before coming to Moody, he taught Apologetics classes at Jessup University in California. He has a passion for helping Christians find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity and explaining their faith with courage and compassion. Then we had Dr. Mary Hendrickson join us to discuss how our personalities can affect the way we read the Bible. Dr. Hendrickson is an Assistant Professor of Human Services and Pre-Counseling at MBI. She serves in the Counseling Psychology and Educational Ministries department. We then discussed the importance of “girding up the loins” of our minds, meaning having a sober mind and being alert for whatever comes. This is affirmed in Scripture in Exodus 12:11 and 1 Peter 1:13. You can hear the highlights of today's program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following time stamps: Dr. John Mabus Interview (3 Ingredients to Healthy Spirtual Formation) [03:51] Dr. Mike Del Rosariol Interview ( Difference in Biblical Translation Wording) [16:47 ] Dr. Mary Hendrickson (How Our Personality Affects the Way We Read The Bible) [ 35:19] Gird Your Loins Devotion [56:08] Kelli Worrall Interview (Communication in the Bible) [01:05:44 ] The Gospel [ 01:18:04 ] Karl and Crew airs live weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. Central Time. Click this link for ways to listen in your area! https://www.moodyradio.org/ways-to-listen/Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this Freedom Friday, we wrapped up our weekly theme, “Back to School,” with a few professors and staff members from Moody Bible Institute (MBI). First, we were joined by Dr. John Mabus to discuss healthy spiritual formation. Dr. Mabus is an Associate Professor of Applied Theology and Church Ministries at MBI. For the past 14 years, Dr. Mabus served as a Navy Chaplain, sharing the gospel and caring for people in the context of military life. He also has professional interests in spiritual formation and discipleship, reformation practices in pastoral care and discipleship, suicide prevention and intervention, and leadership advisement and coaching. Then, we were joined by Kelli Worrall to discuss the significance of communication in the Bible. Kelli is a Professor of Communications at MBI and the Field Chair for the Music and Media Arts Division. She is also the author of “20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomethings Selves.”Then we had Dr. Mikel Del Rosario join us to discuss the legitimacy of the New Testament Bible manuscripts, despite the differences in their wording. Dr. Del Rosario currently teaches apologetics, philosophy, ethics, and Bible as a Professor of Bible and Theology at MBI. Before coming to Moody, he taught Apologetics classes at Jessup University in California. He has a passion for helping Christians find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity and explaining their faith with courage and compassion. Then we had Dr. Mary Hendrickson join us to discuss how our personalities can affect the way we read the Bible. Dr. Hendrickson is an Assistant Professor of Human Services and Pre-Counseling at MBI. She serves in the Counseling Psychology and Educational Ministries department. We then discussed the importance of “girding up the loins” of our minds, meaning having a sober mind and being alert for whatever comes. This is affirmed in Scripture in Exodus 12:11 and 1 Peter 1:13. You can hear the highlights of today's program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following time stamps: Dr. John Mabus Interview (3 Ingredients to Healthy Spirtual Formation) [03:51] Dr. Mike Del Rosariol Interview ( Difference in Biblical Translation Wording) [16:47 ] Dr. Mary Hendrickson (How Our Personality Affects the Way We Read The Bible) [ 35:19] Gird Your Loins Devotion [56:08] Kelli Worrall Interview (Communication in the Bible) [01:05:44 ] The Gospel [ 01:18:04 ] Karl and Crew airs live weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. Central Time. Click this link for ways to listen in your area! https://www.moodyradio.org/ways-to-listen/Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mike Pesca examines the political spin after a Minnesota school shooting and the debate over trans identity and mass shootings. He then speaks with designer and futurist Nick Foster (Apple, Google, Dyson) about his new book Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About the Future and why tech culture misunderstands futurism. Plus, a spiel on how RFK Jr.'s administration is hollowing out Health and Human Services and why missing mice reveal a bigger problem. Produced by Corey Wara Production Coordinator Ashley Khan Email us at thegist@mikepesca.com To advertise on the show, contact ad-sales@libsyn.com or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/TheGist Subscribe to The Gist: https://subscribe.mikepesca.com/ Subscribe to The Gist Youtube Page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4_bh0wHgk2YfpKf4rg40_g Subscribe to The Gist Instagram Page: GIST INSTAGRAM Follow The Gist List at: Pesca Profundities | Mike Pesca | Substack
RFK Jr., the brain-wormed anti-vaxxer inexplicably running America's Department of Health and Human Services, is proof that irony is alive and well. Charged with protecting public health, he's busy undoing lifesaving mRNA vaccine programs and replacing science with YouTube-level quackery. It's like hiring a flat-earther to run NASA—except this time the stakes are your health, your kids, and the future of medicine. Follow Lincoln Square on X at @lincolnsquareHQ, Bluesky at @lincolnsquare.media, and Substack at @lincolnquare. Be sure to subscribe to Lincoln Square Media on Substack and follow us on all your favorite (or tolerated) social media platforms. Substack: https://www.lincolnsquare.media/ Instagram: / lincolnsquarehq Facebook: / lincolnsquarehq TikTok: tiktok.com/@resolutesquare Sez Us: https://sez.us/user/lincolnsquarehq?1... BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/lincolnsquar... YouTube: @lincolnsquaremedia Xitter: https://x.com/LincolnSquareHQ About The Enemies List: American democracy is being threatened, and Rick Wilson knows exactly who is responsible. In each episode, Rick calls out those who are the enemies of democracy and exposes their treachery- because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christy Roby, Local Public Health Performance Section Supervisor with Iowa Health and Human Services, explains how her agency developed a new technical assistance infrastructure referral system; Chelsea Cipriano, Managing Director of the Common Health Coalition, celebrates National Community Health Worker Awareness Week by sharing how her organization is working to build partnerships between public health and healthcare programs; ASTHO has a web page dedicated to CHW's; and ASTHO's evidence-based technical packages can provide health agencies with accessible strategies to enhance community health interventions. ASTHO Blog: Iowa Promotes Public Health Infrastructure by Supporting Local Health Departments ASTHO Resource: Tools That Support Community Health Worker Programs in Island Jurisdictions ASTHO Web Page: Community Health Workers ASTHO Web Page: Evidence-Based Public Health
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told 40 states, including Washington, to strip references to gender identity from sex education materials or lose federal PREP funding. The Trump administration framed the move as eliminating “gender ideology,” while advocacy groups called it an effort to erase recognition of transgender and nonbinary people. https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/us-health-and-human-services-agency-orders-states-to-strip-gender-from-sex-ed/ #HHS #TrumpAdministration #SexEducation #Transgender #Nonbinary #PREP #FederalFunding #WashingtonState #LGBTQ #GenderAffirmingCare
A Nebraska service provider for adults with developmental disabilities is suing the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. Integrated Life Choices is alleging DHHS violated due process and separation of powers and is seeking injunctive relief in Lancaster County District Court.
Pat O'Donnell of YoungWilliams and Brandi Gallebo of Franklin County Child Support Enforcement Services continue to highlight the NCSEA awardees, Antolette Vinson.Antolette Vinson, Child Support Specialist Supervisor, Division of Child Support Services, Georgia Department of Human Services, is the NCSEA 2025 Emerging Leader Awardee. Having assumed supervisory responsibilities 2 years ago, Antolette describes her leadership style, what she has learned, what has surprised her and how her work and that of her team positively impact Georgia families every day. Her initiatives with the Chatham County Jail and other community outreach activities help deliver services to parents “where they are”. Her energy and enthusiasm are infectious. Listen to learn more.
On today's program, Pat O'Donnell of YoungWilliams and Brandi Gallebo of Franklin County Child Support Enforcement Services are pleased to highlight another NCSEA awardee, Emerging Leader Awardee, Shannon Longino. ShannonLongino, Outreach Manager for the Division of Child SupportServices, Georgia Department of Human Services, is the NCSEA 2025 Program Awareness Awardee. Listen as Shannon describes the Georgia Fatherhood Program, how she and her team connect with both non-custodial and custodial parents to raise awareness, through a well-orchestrated communications strategy, of the services available to them as well as other stakeholders who contribute to the operation and impact of this program. Shannon's passion for her work is evident as she describes the more than 11,000 children that have benefitted from this program.
Employees at the Department of Health and Human Services have lost official recognition of their right to union representation. The cancelation of collective bargaining at HHS makes it the latest agency in a growing line of union contract terminations across government. The move comes in response to an executive order from President Trump earlier this year. Here with more details on this is Federal News Network's Drew Friedman.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
One year ago, during the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched the Make America Healthy Again movement. Now as the head of Health and Human Services, Kennedy is trying to push through changes to policies around vaccines and food safety, and end the chronic disease epidemic. STAT reporter Isabella Cueto explains how much progress the movement has made.And, when 19-year-old Viraj Dhanda starts his first year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he'll be the first student with non-speaking autism. Viraj Dhanda and his father, Sumit Dhanda, join us to detail his journey to MIT.Then, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are studying in the U.S., but only 1,200 U.S. students are studying in China. Linguistics professor and author David Moser explains why.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Dr. Kayla Anderson, Senior Advisor for Mental Health and Adverse Childhood Experiences in the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, shares how the CDC's new mental health data channel streamlines access to essential data and resources that often become siloed by different sources; Dr. Scott Rivkees, Dean of Education at the School of Public Health at Brown University, talks about his goals for public health students, current challenges in the field, and the importance of communities like ASTHO; ASTHO will hold a webinar with PHIG National Partners today, Tuesday, August 26th, about Wave 2 of the Public Health Data Modernization Implementation Center Program; and ASTHO welcomes new ASTHO member Ashley Newmyer, Interim Director for the Division of Public Health at the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. CDC: Mental Health Data Channel ASTHO Webinar: Public Health Data Modernization Implementation Center Program Ashley Newmyer Bio
On this episode of 'The Pediatric Lounge,' hosts George and Herb are joined by Dr. Paul Offit, a renowned vaccinologist from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, to discuss the interplay of politics, policy, and science in vaccine administration. The conversation covers topics like the necessity of yearly boosters for older adults, the FDA and CDC approval processes, and the impact of political decisions on public health recommendations. Dr. Offit also discusses the historical and scientific context surrounding the removal of thimerosal from vaccines, the importance of aluminum as an adjuvant, and the contentious moves made by current Health and Human Services leadership. The dialogue explores recent developments in monoclonal antibody treatments for RSV, new influenza treatments, and the ongoing challenges faced by regulatory bodies in the era of COVID-19. The episode wraps up with Dr. Offit stressing the crucial need for scientifically backed decisions in public health and immunization practices.00:00 Introduction to The Pediatric Lounge00:31 Welcoming Dr. Paul Offit00:53 Discussing Vaccine Policies and Politics01:25 Family and Personal Updates01:58 The New Book Project03:01 Booster Shots for the Elderly08:15 Vaccine Advisory Committees Explained13:13 Mercury in Vaccines: A Historical Perspective23:58 Aluminum Adjuvants in Vaccines27:30 Concerns About Vaccine Injury Compensation33:37 Kennedy Family Rumors and Comparisons34:53 RFK Jr. and Vaccine Controversies35:53 Innovations in Pediatric Vaccines39:32 Challenges with Vaccine Market and Approvals41:56 HIV and Flu Vaccine Developments47:23 COVID-19 Vaccine Politics and Data Issues57:11 Maternal Vaccines and Future Directions59:35 Closing Remarks and Sign-OffSupport the show
Dr. Pamela Roshell's Plan for a Healthier Fulton County: Solving Health Deserts & Boosting Community Wellness Dr. Pamela Roshell is leading a comprehensive effort to transform public health in Fulton County, Georgia. Her strategy is a tailored, holistic approach that addresses the unique needs of communities from North to South Fulton. Roshell's mission focuses on tackling "health deserts"—areas with limited healthcare access. Through strategic partnerships, like the one with Morehouse School of Medicine, she is establishing new community clinics. These hubs offer essential services, including primary care and preventative screenings, to create a more equitable healthcare system for underserved residents. Leveraging her background as a former Obama Administration official and Regional Director for HHS, Roshell brings a deep understanding of securing federal funding for innovative, community-based solutions. A top priority is mental and behavioral health. Roshell is fighting the stigma and lack of access to care through new programs and expanded access points. Her work also directly benefits Fulton County's senior population, with initiatives that improve access to care and promote social engagement to combat isolation. Roshell believes in a holistic approach to community well-being, recognizing that public safety and the arts are interconnected with health. This 360-degree view helps her create policies that improve the overall wellness of the county's residents. Follow @fultoninfo Web: https://www.FultonCounty.gov Call: (404) 612-4000 About: Dr. Roshell, one of the highest regarded experts on health services in the south (and an Obama Administration Presidential Appointee!) – she'd love to talk about how Fulton County is improving quality of life for its residents through developing new clinics in “health deserts,” and working to solve critical health issues for individuals and families in the county's 15 municipalities (Fulton County extends from cities like Milton, Alpharetta, Johns Creek at the top to Fairburn, Chatahoochee Hills and more at the base of the long county!). This includes behavioral health and mental health, some very important topics these days! She is a delight! Please let me know the coordinates I should share with her, and I should have at least one other person to send you for the following day too... Dr. Pamela Roshell serves as Chief Operating Officer for Fulton County Government, where she provides executive leadership and operational oversight across key service areas including Health and Human Services, Economic Development, Public Safety, and Arts and Libraries. In this role, she manages a broad portfolio of countywide initiatives, directs a large and diverse workforce, and stewards a multi-million dollar operating budget that supports critical programs and services for Fulton County residents. She also ensures alignment with essential community partners, including the Fulton County Board of Health and the Department of Family and Children Services. Since joining Fulton County in 2017, Dr. Roshell has held several senior leadership roles, including Deputy Chief Operating Officer and Director of Senior Services. Her work has focused on advancing innovative strategies to improve service delivery, expand access to care, and strengthen outcomes for vulnerable populations. Prior to her service in county government, Dr. Roshell was appointed Regional Director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she oversaw federal health programs across the Southeast. She also held executive roles at the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), including serving as State Director for AARP Georgia, where she led advocacy, outreach, and program development for more than one million members. Dr. Roshell holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia College, a Master of Social Work with a concentration in administration from the University of South Carolina, and a Ph.D. in social policy, planning, and administration from Clark Atlanta University. Ash Brown: Your Ultimate Guide to Inspiration, Empowerment, and Action Are you searching for a dynamic motivational speaker, an authentic podcaster, or an influential media personality who can ignite your passion for personal growth? Look no further than Ash Brown. This American multi-talented powerhouse is a captivating event host, an insightful blogger, and a dedicated advocate for helping people unlock their full potential. With her infectious optimism and genuine desire to empower others, Ash Brown has become a leading voice in the personal development and motivation space. Discover the World of Ash Brown: AshSaidit.com & The Ash Said It Show AshSaidit.com: A vibrant lifestyle blog and event platform, AshSaidit.com is your gateway to Ash's world. Here you'll find exclusive event invitations, honest product reviews, and a wealth of engaging content designed to inform and inspire. It's the perfect online destination to stay connected and get your daily dose of Ash's unique personality and insights. The Ash Said It Show: With over 2,100 episodes and over half a million global listens, "The Ash Said It Show" is a powerful and popular podcast. Ash engages in meaningful conversations with inspiring guests, diving into topics that truly matter. Listeners gain valuable life lessons, encouragement, and practical advice to help them navigate their own journeys. Why Ash Brown is a Leading Voice in Personal Development What truly distinguishes Ash Brown is her authentic and relatable approach to personal growth. She builds a genuine connection with her audience, offering practical advice and encouragement that feels like a conversation with a trusted friend. Ash doesn't shy away from life's challenges; instead, she provides the tools to tackle them head-on with confidence. Authentic Optimism: Ash's positive energy is contagious, empowering her audience to embrace new challenges with a more capable and hopeful mindset. Relatable Advice: Ash offers unfiltered, real-world guidance that resonates with people from all backgrounds. Her understanding that life can be tough makes her advice both honest and deeply encouraging. Actionable Strategies: Beyond just feeling good, Ash provides practical tips and strategies designed to help you turn your aspirations into tangible results. For a consistent source of inspiration, genuine encouragement, and actionable advice, Ash Brown is your ultimate resource. Her incredible positivity and unwavering dedication to helping others make her the ideal guide for maximizing your life's potential. Connect with Ash Brown: Goli Gummy Discounts: https://go.goli.com/1loveash5 Luxury Handbag Discounts: https://www.theofficialathena.... Review Us: https://itunes.apple.com/us/po... Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/AshSa... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/1lov... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ashsa... Blog: http://www.ashsaidit.com/blog #atlanta #ashsaidit #theashsaiditshow #ashblogsit #ashsaidit®Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ash-said-it-show--1213325/support.
The Department of Health and Human Services announces plans to start an advisory committee to help reimagine federal health insurance programs. A federal court ruling strikes down a Medicare Advantage marketing rule introduced during the Biden administration. And, Johnson & Johnson commits to a major investment aimed at strengthening domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing. Those stories—and more—on today's episode of the Gist Healthcare Podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Key James, Reproductive Health Unit Manager with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, shares her takeaways as a recent graduate of ASTHO's Developing Executive Leadership in Public Health program; Suleima Salgado, CEO of the Global Partnership for Telehealth and Principal Investigator for the Southeastern Telehealth Resource Center, discusses emerging trends in telehealth and its important role in expanding access to care; a new study published in the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice explores AI's potential in expediting the content analysis of public health documents to facilitate continuous program improvement; and Dr. John Langefeld, Commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Public Health, will provide a keynote at the 10th Annual Kentucky Rural Telehealth Summit on September 25th in Frankfort, Kentucky. ASTHO Web Page: Developing Executive Leaders in Public Health Global Partnership for TeleHealth Journal of Public Health Management & Practice: Content Analysis of Social Determinants of Health Accelerator Plans Using Artificial Intelligence: A Use Case for Public Health Practitioners University of Kentucky: Registration open for the 10th annual Kentucky Rural Telehealth Summit
On the Monday, Aug. 25 edition of Georgia Today: An executive order targets unions at the Department of Health and Human Services; Georgia aerospace and defense companies form an organization to advance their industries; and two Georgia residents will serve on a new advisory group for Alzheimer's disease.
The Food and Drug Administration or FDA regulates roughly 78% of the US food supply. This includes packaged products, food additives, infant formula, ultra-processed foods, and lots more. However, an analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that 99% of new food ingredients enter our food supply through a legal loophole that skirts FDA oversight and seems, to me at least, to be incredibly risky. Today we're speaking with two authors of a recent legal and policy analysis published in the Journal Health Affairs. They explain what this loophole is and its risks and suggest a new user fee program to both strengthen the FDA's ability to regulate food ingredients and address growing concerns about food safety. Our guests are Jennifer Pomeranz Associate Professor of Public Health Policy and Management at New York University School of Global Public Health and Emily Broad, director of Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. Interview Summary So Jennifer, let's start with you, help our listeners understand the current situation with food ingredient oversight. And what is this legal loophole that allows food companies to add new ingredients without safety reviews. Sure. So, Congress passed the Food Additives Amendment in 1958, and the idea was to divide food additives and generally recognized as safe ingredients into two different categories. That's where the GRAS term comes from generally recognized as safe? ‘Generally Recognized As Safe' is GRAS. But it circularly defines food additives as something that's not GRAS. So, there's not actually a definition of these two different types of substances. But the idea was that the food industry would be required to submit a pre-market, that means before it puts the ingredient into the marketplace, a pre-market petition to the FDA to review the safety. And then the FDA promulgates a regulation for safe use of a food additive. GRAS ingredients on the other hand, initially thought of as salt, pepper, vinegar, are things like that would just be allowed to enter the food supply without that pre-market petition. The problem is the food industry is the entity that decides which category to place each ingredient. There's no FDA guidance on which category they're supposed to ascribe to these ingredients. What has happened is that the food industry has now entered into the food supply an enormous amount of ingredients under what we call the GRAS loophole, which is allowing it to just bring it to the market without any FDA oversight or even knowledge of the ingredient. So, in essence, what we're having now is that the food industry polices itself on whether to submit this pre-market petition for a food additive or just include it in its products without any FDA knowledge. When you said ‘enormous number of such things,' are we talking dozens, hundreds, thousands? Nobody knows, but the environmental working group did find that 99% of new ingredients are added through this loophole. And that's the concerning part. Well, you can look at some ultra-processed foods and they can have 30 or 40 ingredients on them. That's just one food. You can imagine that at across the food supply, how many things there are. And there are these chemicals that nobody can pronounce. You don't know what's going on, what they are, what they're all about. So, what you're saying is that the food industry decides to put these things in foods. There's some processing reason for putting them in. It's important that the public be protected against harmful ingredients. But the food industry decides what's okay to put in and what's not. Are they required to do any testing? Are there criteria for that kind of testing? Is there any sense that letting the industry police itself amounts to anything that protects the public good? Well, the criteria are supposed to be the same for GRAS or food additives. They're supposed to be meeting certain scientific criteria. But the problem with this is that for GRAS ingredients, they don't have to use published data and they can hold that scientific data to themselves. And you mentioned food labels, the ingredient list, right? That doesn't necessarily capture these ingredients. They use generic terms, corn oil, color additive, food additive whatever. And so, the actual ingredient itself is not necessarily listed on the ingredient list. There is no way to identify them and it's unknown whether they're actually doing the studies. They can engage in these, what are called GRAS panels, which are supposed to be experts that evaluate the science. But the problem is other studies have found that 100% of the people on these GRAS panels have financial conflicts of interest. Okay, so let me see if I have this right. I'm a food company. I develop a new additive to provide color or flavor or fragrance, or it's an emulsifier or something like that. I develop a chemical concoction that hasn't really been tested for human safety. I declare it safe. And the criteria I use for declaring it set safe is putting together a panel of people that I pay, who then in a hundred percent of cases say things are. That's how it works? I can't say that in a hundred percent of cases they say it's safe, but a hundred percent of the people have financial conflicts of interest. That's one of the major concerns there. Well, one can't imagine they would continue to be paid... Exactly. This sounds like a pretty shaky system to be sure. Emily: I wanted to add a couple other really quick things on the last discussion. You were saying, Kelly, like they're using a panel of experts, which indeed are paid by them. That would be best case in some cases. They're just having their own staff say, we think this is generally recognized as safe. And I think there's some examples we can give where there isn't even evidence that they went to even any outside people, even within industry. I think that the takeaway from all of that is that there's really the ability for companies to call all the shots. Make all the rules. Not tell FDA what they're doing. And then as we talked about, not even have anything on the label because it's not a required ingredient if it's, used as part of a processing agent that's not a substance on there. So I was feeling pretty bad when Jennifer is talking about these panels and the heavy conflict... Even worse. Of interest, now I feel worse because that's the best case. Totally. And one other thing too is just you kind of warmed this up by talking about this loophole. When we put an earlier article out that we wrote that was about just this generally recognized as safe, the feedback we got from FDA was this isn't a loophole. Why are you calling this a loophole? And it's pretty clear that it's a loophole, you know? It's big enough to drive thousands of ingredients through. Yes, totally. Emily, you've written about things like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, trans fats, and red dye number three in particular. Both of which FDA has now prohibited in food. Can you walk us through those cases? You asked about partially hydrogenated oils or trans-fat, and then red dye three, which are two examples that we talk about a little bit in our piece. Actually, one of those, the partially hydrogenated oils was allowed in food through the generally recognized as safe definition. And the other was not. But they are both really good examples of another real issue that FDA has, which is that not only are they not doing a good job of policing substances going into food on the front end, but they do an even worse job of getting things out of food on the backend, post-market once they know that those substances are really raising red flags. And you raised two of the prime examples we've been talking about. With partially hydrogenated oils these are now banned in foods, but it took an extremely long time. Like the first evidence of harm was in the mid-nineties. By 2005, the Institute of Medicine, which is now the National Academies, said that intake of trans fat, of partially hydrogenated oils, should be as low as possible. And there was data from right around that time that found that 72,000 to 228,000 heart attacks in the US each year were caused by these partially hydrogenated oils. And on FDA's end, they started in early 2000s to require labeling. But it wasn't until 2015 that they passed a final rule saying that these substances were not generally recognized as safe. And then they kept delaying implementation until 2023. It was basically more than 20 years from when there was really clear evidence of harm including from respected national agencies to when FDA actually fully removed them from food. And red dye number three is another good example where there were studies from the 1980s that raised concerns about this red dye. And it was banned from cosmetics in 1990. But they still allowed it to be added to food. And didn't ban it from food until early this year. So early 2025. In large part because one of the other things happening is states are now taking action on some of these substances where they feel like we really need to protect consumers in our states. And FDA has been doing a really poor job. California banned red dye about 18 months before that and really spurred FDA to action. So that 20-year delay with between 72,000 and 228,000 heart attack deaths attributable to the trans fats is the cost of delay and inaction and I don't know, conflicts of interest, and all kinds of other stuff that happened in FDA. So we're not talking about something trivial by any means. These are life and death things are occurring. Yes. Give us another example, if you would, about something that entered the food supply and caused harm but made it through that GRAS loophole. The example that I've talked about both in some of the work we've done together and also in a perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine that really focused on why this is an issue. There was this substance added to food called tara flour. It came on the scene in 2022. It was in food prepared by Daily Harvest as like a protein alternative. And they were using it from a manufacturer in South America who said we have deemed this generally recognized as safe. Everything about that is completely legal. They deemed it generally recognized as safe. A company put it into food, and they sold that. Up until that point, that's all legal. What happened was very quickly people started getting really sick from this. And so there were, I think, about 400 people across 39 states got sick. Nearly 200 people ended up in the hospital, some of them with liver failure because of this toxicity of tara flour. And so FDA followed the thread they did help work with the company to do a voluntary recall, but it then took them two years, until May, 2024, to declare tara flour not generally recognized as safe. So I think, in some ways, this is a great example because it shows how it's so immediate, the impact of this substance that, again, was legally added to food with no oversight. In some ways it's a misleading example because I think so many of the substances in food, it's not going to be so clear and so immediate. It's going to be year over year, decade over decade as part of a full diet that these are causing cardiovascular risk, thyroid disease, cancer risk, those kinds of things. I'd love to hear from either of you about this. Why is FDA falling down on the job so badly? Is it that they don't have the money to do the necessary testing? Do they not have the authority? Is there not the political will to do this? Is there complete caving into the food industry? Just let them do what they want and we're going let it go? Jennifer: All of the above? Everything you just said? It's all of the above. Emily: Jen, do you wanna talk about the money side? Because that sort of gets to the genesis of the article we worked on, which was like maybe there's a creative solution to that piece. Yes, I'd love to hear about that because I thought that was a very creative thing that you guys wrote about in your paper. That there would be an industry user fee to help produce this oversight. Tell us what you had in mind with that. And then then convince me that FDA would appropriately use this oversight and do its job. So, the idea in the paper was proposing a comprehensive user fee program for the food branch of the FDA. The FDA currently collects user fees for all of human drugs, animal drugs, medical devices, etc. With Tobacco, it's a hundred percent funded by user fees. But food, it only gets 1% of its funding through user fees. And it's important to note user fees fund processes. They don't fund outcomes. It's not like a bribe. And the idea behind user fees and why industry sometimes supports them is actually to bring predictability to the regulatory state. It brings efficiency to reviews. And then this all allows the industry to anticipate timelines so they can bring products to market and know when they're going be able to do it. In the food context, for example, the FDA is required to respond to those food additives petitions that we talked about within 180 days. But they can't respond in time. And they have a lot of timelines that are required of them in the food context that they can't meet. They can't meet their timelines because they're so underfunded. So, we proposed a comprehensive user fee. But one of the main reasons that we think a user fee is important is to address the pre-market issues that I talked about and the post-market issues that Emily talked about. In order to close that GRAS loophole, first of all, FDA needs to either reevaluate its authorities or Congress needs to change its authorities. But it would need resources to be able to do something pre-market. Some of the ideas we had was that the user fee would fund some type of either pre-market review, pre-market notification, or even just a pre-market system where the FDA determines whether a proposed ingredient should go through the GRAS avenue, or through food additive petition. So at least that there will be some type of pre-market oversight over all the ingredients in the food supply. And then also the FDA is so severely lacking in any type of comprehensive post-market into play, they would have the resources to engage in a more comprehensive post-market review for all the ingredients. Could you see a time, and I bring this up because of lawsuits against the food industry for some of these additives that are going on now. The state attorney's generals are starting to get involved, and as you said, Emily, the some states are taking legislative action to ban certain things in the food supply. Do you think there could come a time when the industry will come to government pleading to have a user fee like this? To provide some standardization across jurisdictions, let's say? So, there's two things. The first is Congress has to pass the user fee, and historically, actually, industry has done exactly what you said. They have gone to Congress and said, you know what? We want user fees because we want a streamlined system, and we want to be able to know when we're bringing products to market. The problem in the context of food for the issues we're talking about is that right now they can use the GRAS loophole. So, they have very little incentive to ask for user fees if they can bring all their ingredients into the market through the GRAS loophole. There are other areas where a user fee is very relevant, such as the infant formula 90 day pre-market notification, or for different claims like health claims. They might want user fees to speed those things up, but in terms of the ingredients, unless we close the GRAS loophole, they'd have little incentive to actually come to the table. But wouldn't legal liability change that? Let's say that some of these lawsuits are successful and they start having to pay large settlements or have the State Attorneys General, for example, come down on them for these kinds of things. If they're legally liable for harm, they're causing, they need cover. And wouldn't this be worth the user fee to provide them cover for what they put in the food supply? Yes, it's great to have the flexibility to have all these things get through the loophole, but it'd be great as well to have some cover so you wouldn't have so much legal exposure. But you guys are the lawyers, so I'm not sure it makes sense. I think you're right that there are forces combining out in the world that are pushing for change here. And I think it's hard to disentangle how much is it that industry's pushing for user fees versus right now I think more willing to consider federal regulatory changes by either FDA or by Congress. At the state level this is huge. There's now becoming a patchwork across states, and I think that is really difficult for industry. We were tracking this year 93 bills in 35 states that either banned an additive in the general public, banned it in schools. Banned ultra-processed foods, which most of the states, interestingly, have all defined differently. But where they have had a definition, it's been tied to various different combinations of additives. So that's going on. And then I think you're right, that the legal cases moving along will push industry to really want clear and better standards. I think there's a good question right now around like how successful will some of these efforts be? But what we are seeing is real movement, both in FDA and in Congress, in taking action on this. So interestingly, the Health Affairs piece that we worked on was out this spring. But we had this other piece that came out last fall and felt like we were screaming into the void about this is a problem generally recognized as safe as a really big issue. And suddenly that has really changed. And so, you know, in March FDA said they were directed by RFK (Robert F. Kennedy), by HHS (Health and Human Services) to really look into changing their rule on generally recognized as safe. So, I know that's underway. And then in Congress, multiple bills have been introduced. And I know there are several in the works that would address additives and specifically, generally recognized as safe. There's this one piece going on, which is there's forces coalescing around some better method of regulation. I think the question's really going to also be like, will Congress give adequate resources? Because there is also another scenario that I'm worried about that even if FDA said we're going now require at least notification for every substance that's generally recognized as safe. It's a flood of substances. And they just, without more resources, without more staff devoted to this, there's no way that they're going to be able to wade through that. So, I think that either the resources need to come from user fees, or at least partially from user fees, from more appropriations and I think, In my opinion, they are able to do that on their own. Even given where current administrative law stands. Because I think it's very clear that the gist of the statute is that FDA should be overseeing additives. And I think a court would say this is allowing everything to instead go through this alternative pathway. But I really think FDA's going to need resources to manage this. And perhaps more of a push from Congress to make sure that they really do it to the best of their ability. I was going to say there's also an alternative world where we don't end up spending any of these resources, and they require the industry just to disclose all the ingredients they've added to food and put it on a database. This is like low hanging fruit, not very expensive, doesn't require funding. And then the NGOs, I hope, would go to work and say, look at this. There is no safety data for these ingredients. You know, because right now we just can't rely on FDA to do anything unless they get more funding to do something. So, if FDA doesn't get funding, then maybe this database where houses every ingredient that's in the food supply as a requirement could be a low resource solution. Jennifer, I'll come back to you in a minute because I'd like to ask how worried should we be about all this stuff that's going into food. But Emily, let me ask you first, does FDA have the authority to do what it needs to do? Let's say all of a sudden that your wish was granted and there were user fees would it then be able to do what needs to be done? I think certainly to be able to charge these user fees in almost all areas, it right now doesn't have that authority, and Congress would need to act. There's one small area which is within the Food Safety Modernization Act for certain types of like repeat inspections or recalls or there's a couple other. FDA isn't charging fees right now because they haven't taken this one step that they need to take. But they do have the authority if they just take those steps. But for everything else, Congress has to act. I think the real question to me is because we now know so many of these substances are going through this GRAS pathway, the question is really can they do everything they need to do on their own to close that loophole? And again, my opinion is Congress could make it clear and if Congress were to act, it would be better. Like they could redefine it in a way that was much more clear that we are drawing a real line. And most things actually should be on the additive side of the line rather than the generally recognized as safe side of the line. But even with their current authority, with the current definition, I think FDA could at least require notification because they're still drawing a line between what's required for additives, which is a very lengthy pre-market process with, you know, a notice and comment procedure and all of these things. My take is FDA do what you can do now. Let's get the show on the road. Let's take steps here to close up the loophole. And then Congress takes time. But they definitely can even strengthen this and give a little more, I think, directives to FDA as to how to make sure that this loophole doesn't recur down the line. In talks that I've given recently, I've shown an ingredient list from a food that people will recognize. And I ask people to try to guess what that food is from its ingredient list. This particular food has 35 ingredients. You know, a bunch of them that are very hard to pronounce. Very few people would even have any idea at all what those ingredients do. There's no sense at all about how ingredient number 17 would interact with ingredient 31, etc. And it just seems like it's complete chaos. And I don't want to take you guys outside your comfort zone because your backgrounds are law. But Jennifer, let me ask you this. You have a background in public health as well. There are all kinds of reasons to be worried about this, aren't there? There are the concerns about the safety of these things, but then there's a concern about what these ultra-processed ingredients do to your metabolism, your ability to control your weight, to regulate your hunger and things like that. It sounds this is a really important thing. And it's affecting almost everybody in the country. The percentage of calories that are now coming from ultra-processed foods is over 50% in both children and adults. So it sounds like there's really reason to worry. Would you agree? Yes. And also, the FDA is supposed to be overseeing the cumulative effects of the ingredients and it doesn't actually enforce that regulation. Its own regulation that it's supposed to evaluate the cumulative effects. It doesn't actually enforce this. So by cumulative effects do you mean the chronic effects of long term use? And, having these ingredients across multiple products within one person's consumption. Also, the FDA doesn't look at things like the effect on the gut microbiome, neurotoxicity, even cancer risk, even though they're supposed to, they say that if something is GRAS, they don't need to look at it because cancer risk is relegated only to food additives. So here we're at a real issue, right? Because if everything's entering through the GRAS loophole, then they're not looking at carcinogen effects. So, I think there is a big risk and as Emily had said earlier, that these are sometimes long-term risks versus that acute example of tara flour that we don't know. And we do know from the science, both older and emerging science, that ultra-processed food has definite impact on not only consumption, increased consumption, but also on diet related diseases and other health effects. And by definition what we're talking about here are ultra-processed foods. These ingredients are only found in ultra-processed foods. So, we do know that there is cause for concern. It's interesting that you mentioned the microbiome because we've recorded a cluster of podcasts on the microbiome and another cluster of podcasts on artificial sweeteners. Those two universes overlap a good bit because the impact of the artificial sweeteners on some of them, at least on the microbiome, is really pretty negative. And that's just one thing that goes into these foods. It really is pretty important. By the way, that food with 35 ingredients that I mentioned is a strawberry poptart. Jennifer: I know that answer! Emily: How do you know that? Jennifer: Because I've seen Kelly give a million talks. Yes, she has. Emily: I was wondering, I was like, are we never going to find out? So the suspense is lifted. Let me end with this. This has been highly instructive, and I really appreciate you both weighing in on this. So let me ask each of you, is there reason to be optimistic that things could improve. Emily, I'll start with you. So, I've been giving this talk the past few months that's called basically like Chronic Disease, Food Additives and MAHA, like What Could Go Right and What Could Go Wrong. And so, I'm going give you a very lawyerly answer, which is, I feel optimistic because there's attention on the issue. I think states are taking action and there's more attention to this across the political spectrum, which both means things are happening and means that the narrative changing, like people are getting more aware and calling for change in a way that we weren't seeing. On the flip side, I think there's a lot that could go wrong. You know, I think some of the state bills are great and some of them are maybe not so great. And then I think this administration, you have an HHS and FDA saying, they're going to take action on this in the midst of an administration that's otherwise very deregulatory. In particular, they're not supposed to put out new regulations if they can get rid of 10 existing ones. There are some things you can do through guidance and signaling, but I don't think you can really fix these issues without like real durable legislative change. So, I'm sorry to be one of the lawyers here. I think the signals are going in the right direction, but jury is out a little bit on how well we'll actually do. And I hope we can do well given the momentum. What do you think, Jennifer? I agree that the national attention is very promising to these issues. The states are passing laws that are shocking to me. That Texas passing a warning label law, I would never have thought in the history of the world, that Texas would be the one to pass a warning label law. They're doing great things and I actually have hope that something can come of this. But I am concerned at the federal level of the focus on deregulation may make it impossible. User fees is an example of where they won't have to regulate, but they could provide funding to the FDA to actually act in areas that it has the authority to act. That is one solution that could actually work under this administration if they were amenable to it. But I also think in some ways the states could save us. I worry, you know, Emily brought up the patchwork, which is the key term the industry uses to try to get preemption. I do worry about federal preemption of state actions. But the states right now are the ones saving us. California is the first to save the whole nation. The food industry isn't going to create new food supply for California and then the rest of the country. And then it's the same with other states. So, the states might be the ones that actually can make some real meaningful changes and get some of the most unsafe ingredients out of the food supply, which some of the states have now successfully done. Bios Emily Broad Leib is a Clinical Professor of Law, Director of Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, and Founding Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the nation's first law school clinic devoted to providing legal and policy solutions to the health, economic, and environmental challenges facing our food system. Working directly with clients and communities, Broad Leib champions community-led food system change, reduction in food waste, food access and food is medicine interventions, and equity and sustainability in food production. Her scholarly work has been published in the California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Harvard Law & Policy Review, Food & Drug Law Journal, and Journal of Food Law & Policy, among others. Professor Jennifer Pomeranz is a public health lawyer who researches policy and legal options to address the food environment, obesity, products that cause public harm, and social injustice that lead to health disparities. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Professor Pomeranz was an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Health at Temple University and in the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple. She was previously the Director of Legal Initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed and law review journal articles and a book, Food Law for Public Health, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Professor Pomeranz leads the Public Health Policy Research Lab and regularly teaches Public Health Law and Food Policy for Public Health.
This month, the Department of Health and Human Services terminated almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine development grants and contracts. While HHS has said that these cuts won't affect mRNA cancer research, some researchers have expressed concern about the impact on their ongoing work. In light of these developments, we're revisiting a conversation from February.A team at Memorial Sloan Kettering is developing an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer, which is notoriously difficult to treat. A few years ago, the team embarked on a small trial to test the vaccine's safety. Sixteen patients with pancreatic cancer received it, and half of them had a strong immune response. A follow-up study found that in six of those patients, the cancer hadn't relapsed after three years.Host Flora Lichtman spoke to study author Vinod Balachandran about the work, which has not yet been affected by the cuts, according to Memorial Sloan Kettering.Guest: Dr. Vinod Balachandran is an associate attending surgeon and Director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, New York.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
What kind of future do we want for our children? Dr. Laurie Todd-Smith, with the federal Office of Early Childhood Development, has spent her career answering that question. In this week's episode of The Narrative, CCV Communications Executive Director Mike Andrews and Ohio Christian Education Network (OCEN) Executive Director Troy McIntosh speak with Laurie as she shares real-time trends and statistics in American classrooms, what downsizing the Department of Education entails, and why school choice is essential to protecting parental rights and student success. Before the guys sit down with Laurie, Troy shares exciting OCEN updates, including: Seven new Christian schools opened this year through the partnership of OCEN, CCV, and churches that felt called to serve the children in their communities. The launch of the nationwide Christian Education Network brought in leaders to Ohio from three states to learn how they can build a network of their own. The recent Sidney Daily News article Troy wrote in response to school choice critics. MORE ABOUT LAURIE TODD-SMITH Dr. Laurie Todd-Smith is the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Office of Early Childhood Development at the Administration for Children and Families at the US Department of Health and Human Services. She most recently served as the America First Policy Institute as Director of the Center for Education Opportunity and the Center for the American Child where she focused on assisting states to advance evidence-based education policy reforms including the expansion of school choice, early literacy, foster care reform, online safety of children, as well as model policy for fentanyl curriculum in public schools. Dr. Todd-Smith served as Senior Education and Workforce Policy Advisor to Governor Phil Bryant as well as Executive Director of the State Early Childhood Council. Her work led to remarkable growth in reading and math achievement outcomes for Mississippi's students, earning the state the title of the "Mississippi Miracle." President Trump appointed Dr. Todd-Smith as the Director of the Women’s Bureau at the United States Department of Labor in 2018. During her tenure at the Women’s Bureau, she focused the agency on childcare quality and access, paid family leave, and grants to support women in apprenticeships. Dr. Todd-Smith holds a doctorate in education from Mississippi State University, a master’s degree from Western New Mexico University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona. TALK TO US We want to hear from you! As a valued listener, your feedback is critical for us to keep The Narrative insightful, relevant, and helpful. If you have a particular guest, topic, or question you'd like us to cover, let us know! We’ll answer your questions on an “Ask Us Anything” episode later, so send in your questions now.
The Friday Five for August 22, 2025: Field Notes on OBBBA, Spotify, and TikTok D. Power Medicare Advantage Member Satisfaction Survey Sonder Health Plans Inc. Termination Short-Term Medical Plan Regulation Update Judge Vacates HHS MA Commissions Lawsuit Get Connected:
In this episode, we unveil shocking new revelations from recently declassified documents regarding the FBI's handling of classified leaks during the Russiagate investigation. Join us as we discuss the implications of these findings, including accusations against former FBI Director James Comey and his team, and the lack of accountability in Washington. We also explore the ongoing issues of drug shortages in America and the government's response, along with insights into the potential risks of central bank digital currencies. Interviews include conversations with Congressman and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant general Jack Bergman, John Knox, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Shannon Davis from American Alternative Assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Amy and Neil join Bill to talk about the latest news stories. The Texas House passes Trump's gerrymandered election map. Obama supports California's redistricting efforts in response to Texas' gerrymandering. Israel has begun the first stages of clearing Palestinians out of Gaza. California resident catches the plague in Tahoe. Health and Human Services begs RFK Jr. to stop spreading inaccurate health info.
Dr. Dan Edney, State Health Officer with the Mississippi Department of Health, explains what the state is doing to meet the public health needs of rural communities across the state; Shirley Orr, Executive Director for the Association of Public Health Nurses and lead speaker of ASTHO's new Public Health Nursing Workforce Learning Lab series, discusses what may motivate nurses to choose the public health field; on Thursday, September 11th, ASTHO will hold the first session of the Activate series, the third installment of its Ignite, Accelerate, and Activate workshop, on building emotional intelligence skills; and ASTHO welcomes new member Dr. Lawrence Greenblatt, State Health Director and Chief Medical Officer for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Mississippi State Department of Health: Rural Health and Population Studies ASTHO Webinar: Public Health Nursing Workforce Learning Lab ASTHO Webinar: Ignite, Accelerate, and Activate: Series 3, Session 1: Building Emotional Intelligence Skills Lawrence Greenblatt Bio
By Adam Turteltaub There's a lot new going on in healthcare enforcement, and, at the same, there's a lot that hasn't changed, reports Greg Demske (LinkedIn), partner at Goodwin Proctor and, formerly, Chief Counsel to the Inspector General at HHS. While the US Department of Justice has changed its priorities in areas such as anticorruption, if you look at what they and the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at Health and Human Services have been doing, he observes, the long-time bipartisan effort to stop fraud in healthcare is continuing. Yet, there are some significant changes. At CMS a major shift has occurred when it comes to Medicare Advantage. In the past there were audits of fifty plans a year, but now the goal is to audit all six hundred or so annually. Backing that up is an expansion in the number of coders from 40 to 2000. This has huge implications both for the plans and providers. Meantime the Department of Justice and HHS have created a False Claims Act Working group to further their efforts. Then, of course, there are qui tam claims, which hit a record high in 2024, and we have dispositions in the courts as well. So what should compliance teams do? He recommends keeping a close eye on what the government is saying to ensure your program is staying ahead of the curve. And, of course, you should listen to this podcast to gain more of his insights from private practice and over 16 years at HHS.
Today I'm talking to economic historian Judge Glock, Director of Research at the Manhattan Institute. Judge works on a lot of topics: if you enjoy this episode, I'd encourage you to read some of his work on housing markets and the Environmental Protection Agency. But I cornered him today to talk about civil service reform.Since the 1990s, over 20 red and blue states have made radical changes to how they hire and fire government employees — changes that would be completely outside the Overton window at the federal level. A paper by Judge and Renu Mukherjee lists four reforms made by states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia: * At-will employment for state workers* The elimination of collective bargaining agreements* Giving managers much more discretion to hire* Giving managers much more discretion in how they pay employeesJudge finds decent evidence that the reforms have improved the effectiveness of state governments, and little evidence of the politicization that federal reformers fear. Meanwhile, in Washington, managers can't see applicants' resumes, keyword searches determine who gets hired, and firing a bad performer can take years. But almost none of these ideas are on the table in Washington.Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits and fact-checking, and to Katerina Barton for audio edits.Judge, you have a paper out about lessons for civil service reform from the states. Since the ‘90s, red and blue states have made big changes to how they hire and fire people. Walk through those changes for me.I was born and grew up in Washington DC, heard a lot about civil service throughout my childhood, and began to research it as an adult. But I knew almost nothing about the state civil service systems. When I began working in the states — mainly across the Sunbelt, including in Texas, Kansas, Arizona — I was surprised to learn that their civil service systems were reformed to an absolutely radical extent relative to anything proposed at the federal level, let alone implemented.Starting in the 1990s, several states went to complete at-will employment. That means there were no official civil service protections for any state employees. Some managers were authorized to hire people off the street, just like you could in the private sector. A manager meets someone in a coffee shop, they say, "I'm looking for exactly your role. Why don't you come on board?" At the federal level, with its stultified hiring process, it seemed absurd to even suggest something like that.You had states that got rid of any collective bargaining agreements with their public employee unions. You also had states that did a lot more broadbanding [creating wider pay bands] for employee pay: a lot more discretion for managers to reward or penalize their employees depending on their performance.These major reforms in these states were, from the perspective of DC, incredibly radical. Literally nobody at the federal level proposes anything approximating what has been in place for decades in the states. That should be more commonly known, and should infiltrate the debate on civil service reform in DC.Even though the evidence is not absolutely airtight, on the whole these reforms have been positive. A lot of the evidence is surveys asking managers and operators in these states how they think it works. They've generally been positive. We know these states operate pretty well: Places like Texas, Florida, and Arizona rank well on state capacity metrics in terms of cost of government, time for permitting, and other issues.Finally, to me the most surprising thing is the dog that didn't bark. The argument in the federal government against civil service reform is, “If you do this, we will open up the gates of hell and return to the 19th-century patronage system, where spoilsmen come and go depending on elected officials, and the government is overrun with political appointees who don't care about the civil service.” That has simply not happened. We have very few reports of any concrete examples of politicization at the state level. In surveys, state employees and managers can almost never remember any example of political preferences influencing hiring or firing.One of the surveys you cited asked, “Can you think of a time someone said that they thought that the political preferences were a factor in civil service hiring?” and it was something like 5%.It was in that 5-10% range. I don't think you'd find a dissimilar number of people who would say that even in an official civil service system. Politics is not completely excluded even from a formal civil service system.A few weeks ago, you and I talked to our mutual friend, Don Moynihan, who's a scholar of public administration. He's more skeptical about the evidence that civil service reform would be positive at the federal level.One of your points is, “We don't have strong negative evidence from the states. Productivity didn't crater in states that moved to an at-will employment system.” We do have strong evidence that collective bargaining in the public sector is bad for productivity.What I think you and Don would agree on is that we could use more evidence on the hiring and firing side than the surveys that we have. Is that a fair assessment?Yes, I think that's correct. As you mentioned, the evidence on collective bargaining is pretty close to universal: it raises costs, reduces the efficiency of government, and has few to no positive upsides.On hiring and firing, I mentioned a few studies. There's a 2013 study that looks at HR managers in six states and finds very little evidence of politicization, and managers generally prefer the new system. There was a dissertation that surveyed several employees and managers in civil service reform and non-reform states. Across the board, the at-will employment states said they had better hiring retention, productivity, and so forth. And there's a 2002 study that looked specifically at Texas, Florida, and Georgia after their reforms, and found almost universal approbation inside the civil service itself for these reforms.These are not randomized control trials. But I think that generally positive evidence should point us directionally where we should go on civil service reform. If we loosen restrictions on discipline and firing, decentralize hiring and so forth — we probably get some productivity benefits from it. We can also know, with some amount of confidence, that the sky is not going to fall, which I think is a very important baseline assumption. The civil service system will continue on and probably be fairly close to what it is today, in terms of its political influence, if you have decentralized hiring and at-will employment.As you point out, a lot of these reforms that have happened in 20-odd states since the ‘90s would be totally outside the Overton window at the federal level. Why is it so easy for Georgia to make a bipartisan move in the ‘90s to at-will employment, when you couldn't raise the topic at the federal level?It's a good question. I think in the 1990s, a lot of people thought a combination of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act — which was the Carter-era act that somewhat attempted to do what these states hoped to do in the 1990s — and the Clinton-era Reinventing Government Initiative, would accomplish the same ends. That didn't happen.That was an era when civil service reform was much more bipartisan. In Georgia, it was a Democratic governor, Zell Miller, who pushed it. In a lot of these other states, they got buy-in from both sides. The recent era of state reform took place after the 2010 Republican wave in the states. Since that wave, the reform impetus for civil service has been much more Republican. That has meant it's been a lot harder to get buy-in from both sides at the federal level, which will be necessary to overcome a filibuster.I think people know it has to be very bipartisan. We're just past the point, at least at the moment, where it can be bipartisan at the federal level. But there are areas where there's a fair amount of overlap between the two sides on what needs to happen, at least in the upper reaches of the civil service.It was interesting to me just how bipartisan civil service reform has been at various times. You talked about the Civil Service Reform Act, which passed Congress in 1978. President Carter tells Congress that the civil service system:“Has become a bureaucratic maze which neglects merit, tolerates poor performance, permits abuse of legitimate employee rights, and mires every personnel action in red tape, delay, and confusion.”That's a Democratic president saying that. It's striking to me that the civil service was not the polarized topic that it is today.Absolutely. Carter was a big civil service reformer in Georgia before those even larger 1990s reforms. He campaigned on civil service reform and thought it was essential to the success of his presidency. But I think you are seeing little sprouts of potential bipartisanship today, like the Chance to Compete Act at the end of 2024, and some of the reforms Obama did to the hiring process. There's options for bipartisanship at the federal level, even if it can't approach what the states have done.I want to walk through the federal hiring process. Let's say you're looking to hire in some federal agency — you pick the agency — and I graduated college recently, and I want to go into the civil service. Tell me about trying to hire somebody like me. What's your first step?It's interesting you bring up the college graduate, because that is one recent reform: President Trump put out an executive order trying to counsel agencies to remove the college degree requirement for job postings. This happened in a lot of states first, like Maryland, and that's also been bipartisan. This requirement for a college degree — which was used as a very unfortunate proxy for ability at a lot of these jobs — is now being removed. It's not across the whole federal government. There's still job postings that require higher education degrees, but that's something that's changed.To your question, let's say the Department of Transportation. That's one of the more bipartisan ones, when you look at surveys of federal civil servants. Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, they tend to be a little more Republican. Health and Human Services and some other agencies tend to be pretty Democrat. Transportation is somewhere in the middle.As a manager, you try to craft a job description and posting to go up on the USA Jobs website, which is where all federal job postings go. When they created it back in 1996, that was supposedly a massive reform to federal hiring: this website where people could submit their resumes. Then, people submit their resumes and answer questions about their qualifications for the job.One of the slightly different aspects from the private sector is that those applications usually go to an HR specialist first. The specialist reviews everything and starts to rank people into different categories, based on a lot of weird things. It's supposed to be “knowledge, skills, and abilities” — your KSAs, or competencies. To some extent, this is a big step up from historical practice. You had, frankly, an absurd civil service exam, where people had to fill out questions about, say, General Grant or about US Code Title 42, or whatever it was, and then submit it. Someone rated the civil service exam, and then the top three test-takers were eligible for the job.We have this newer, better system, where we rank on knowledge, skills, and abilities, and HR puts put people into different categories. One of the awkward ways they do this is by merely scanning the resumes and applications for keywords. If it's a computer job, make sure you say the word “computer” somewhere in your resume. Make sure you say “manager” if it's a managerial job.Just to be clear, this is entirely literal. There's a keyword search, and folks who don't pass that search are dinged.Yes. I've always wondered, how common is this? It's sometimes hard to know what happens in the black box in these federal HR departments. I saw an HR official recently say, "If I'm not allowed to do keyword searches, I'm going to take 15 years to overlook all the applications, so I've got to do keyword searches." If they don't have the keywords, into the circular file it goes, as they used to say: into the garbage can.Then they start ranking people on their abilities into, often, three different categories. That is also very literal. If you put in the little word bubble, "I am an exceptional manager," you get pushed on into the next level of the competition. If you say, "I'm pretty good, but I'm not the best," into the circular file you go.I've gotten jaded about this, but it really is shocking. We ask candidates for a self-assessment, and if they just rank themselves 10/10 on everything, no matter how ludicrous, that improves their odds of being hired.That's going to immensely improve your odds. Similar to the keyword search, there's been pushback on this in recent years, and I'm definitely not going to say it's universal anymore. It's rarer than it used to be. But it's still a very common process.The historical civil service system used to operate on a rule of three. In places like New York, it still operates like that. The top three candidates on the evaluation system get presented to the manager, and the manager has to approve one of them for the position.Thanks partially to reforms by the Obama administration in 2010, they have this category rating system where the best qualified or the very qualified get put into a big bucket together [instead of only including the top three]. Those are the people that the person doing the hiring gets to see, evaluate, and decide who he wants to hire.There are some restrictions on that. If a veteran outranks everybody else, you've got to pick the veteran [typically known as Veterans' Preference]. That was an issue in some of the state civil service reforms, too. The states said, “We're just going to encourage a veterans' preference. We don't need a formalized system to say they get X number of points and have to be in Y category. We're just going to say, ‘Try to hire veterans.'” That's possible without the formal system, despite what some opponents of reform may claim.One of the particular problems here is just the nature of the people doing the hiring. Sometimes you just need good managers to encourage HR departments to look at a broader set of qualifications. But one of the bigger problems is that they keep the HR evaluation system divorced from the manager who is doing the hiring. David Shulkin, who was the head of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), wrote a great book, It Shouldn't Be This Hard to Serve Your Country. He was a healthcare exec, and the VA is mainly a healthcare agency. He would tell people, "You should work for me," they would send their applications into the HR void, and he'd never see them again. They would get blocked at some point in this HR evaluation process, and he'd be sent people with no healthcare experience, because for whatever reason they did well in the ranking.One of the very base-level reforms should be, “How can we more clearly integrate the hiring manager with the evaluation process?” To some extent, the bipartisan Chance to Compete Act tries to do this. They said, “You should have subject matter experts who are part of crafting the description of the job, are part of evaluating, and so forth.” But there's still a long road to go.Does that firewall — where the person who wants to hire doesn't get to look at the process until the end — exist originally because of concerns about cronyism?One of the interesting things about the civil service is its raison d'être — its reason for being — was supposedly a single, clear purpose: to prevent politicized hiring and patronage. That goes back to the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883. But it's always been a little strange that you have all of these very complex rules about every step of the process — from hiring to firing to promotion, and everything in between — to prevent political influence. We could just focus on preventing political influence, and not regulate every step of the process on the off-chance that without a clear regulation, political influence could creep in. This division [between hiring manager and applicants] is part of that general concern. There are areas where I've heard HR specialists say, "We declare that a manager is a subject matter expert, and we bring them into the process early on, we can do that." But still the division is pretty stark, and it's based on this excessive concern about patronage.One point you flag is that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is the body that thinks about personnel in the federal government, has a 300-page regulatory document for agencies on how you have to hire. There's a remarkable amount of process.Yes, but even that is a big change from the Federal Personnel Manual, which was the 10,000-page document that we shredded in the 1990s. In the ‘90s, OPM gave the agencies what's called “delegated examining authorities.” This says, “You, agency, have power to decide who to hire, we're not going to do the central supervision anymore. But, but, but: here's the 300-page document that dictates exactly how you have to carry out that hiring.”So we have some decentralization, allowing managers more authority to control their own departments. But this two-level oversight — a local HR department that's ultimately being overseen by the OPM — also leads to a lot of slip ‘twixt cup and lip, in terms of how something gets implemented. If you're in the agency and you're concerned about the OPM overseeing your process, you're likely to be much more careful than you would like to be. “Yes, it's delegated to me, but ultimately, I know I have to answer to OPM about this process. I'm just going to color within the lines.”I often cite Texas, which has no central HR office. Each agency decides how it wants to hire. In a lot of these reform states, if there is a central personnel office, it's an information clearinghouse or reservoir of models. “You can use us, the central HR office, as a resource if you want us to help you post the job, evaluate it, or help manage your processes, but you don't have to.” That's the goal we should be striving for in a lot of the federal reforms. Just make OPM a resource for the managers in the individual departments to do their thing or go independent.Let's say I somehow get through the hiring process. You offer me a job at the Department of Transportation. What are you paying me?This is one of the more stultified aspects of the federal civil service system. OPM has another multi-hundred-page handbook called the Handbook of Occupational Groups and Families. Inside that, you've got 49 different “groups and families,” like “Clerical occupations.” Inside those 49 groups are a series of jobs, sometimes dozens, like “Computer Operator.” Inside those, they have independent documents — often themselves dozens of pages long — detailing classes of positions. Then you as a manager have to evaluate these nine factors, which can each give points to each position, which decides how you get slotted into this weird Government Schedule (GS) system [the federal payscale].Again, this is actually an improvement. Before, you used to have the Civil Service Commission, which went around staring very closely at someone over their typewriter and saying, "No, I think you should be a GS-12, not a GS-11, because someone over in the Department of Defense who does your same job is a GS-12." Now this is delegated to agencies, but again, the agencies have to listen to the OPM on how to classify and set their jobs into this 15-stage GS-classification system, each stage of which has 10 steps which determine your pay, and those steps are determined mainly by your seniority. It's a formalized step-by-step system, overwhelmingly based on just how long you've sat at your desk.Let's be optimistic about my performance as a civil servant. Say that over my first three years, I'm just hitting it out of the park. Can you give me a raise? What can you do to keep me in my role?Not too much. For most people, the within-step increases — those 10 steps inside each GS-level — is just set by seniority. Now there are all these quality step increases you can get, but they're very rare and they have to be documented. So you could hypothetically pay someone more, but it's going to be tough. In general, the managers just prefer to stick to seniority, because not sticking to it garners a lot of complaints. Like so much else, the goal is, "We don't want someone rewarding an official because they happen to share their political preferences." The result of that concern is basically nobody can get rewarded at all, which is very unfortunate.We do have examples in state and federal government of what's known as broadbanding, where you have very broad pay scales, and the manager can decide where to slot someone. Say you're a computer operator, which can mean someone who knows what an Excel spreadsheet is, or someone who's programming the most advanced AI systems. As a manager in South Carolina or Florida, you have a lot of discretion to say, "I can set you 50% above the market rate of what this job technically would go for, if I think you're doing a great job."That's very rare at the federal level. They've done broadbanding at the Government Accountability Office, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The China Lake Experiment out in California gave managers a lot more discretion to reward scientists. But that's definitely the exception. In general, it's a step-wise, seniority-based system.What if you want to bring me into the Senior Executive Service (SES)? Theoretically, that sits at the top of the General Service scale. Can't you bump me up in there and pay me what you owe me?I could hypothetically bring you in as a senior executive servant. The SES was created in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. The idea was, “We're going to have this elite cadre of about 8,000 individuals at the top of the federal government, whose employment will be higher-risk and higher-reward. They might be fired, and we're going to give them higher pay to compensate for that.”Almost immediately, that did not work out. Congress was outraged at the higher pay given to the top officials and capped it. Ever since, how much the SES can get paid has been tightly controlled. As in most of the rest of the federal government, where they establish these performance pay incentives or bonuses — which do exist — they spread them like peanut butter over the whole service. To forestall complaints, everyone gets a little bit every two or three years.That's basically what happened to the SES. Their annual pay is capped at the vice president's salary, which is a cap for a lot of people in the federal government. For most of your GS and other executive scales, the cap is Congress's salary. [NB: This is no longer exactly true, since Congress froze its own salaries in 2009. The cap for GS (currently about $195k) is now above congressional salaries ($174k).]One of the big problems with pay in the federal government is pay compression. Across civil service systems, the highest-skilled people tend to be paid much less than the private sector, and the lowest-skilled people tend to get paid much more. The political science reason for that is pretty simple: the median voter in America still decides what seems reasonable. To the median voter, the average salary of a janitor looks low, and the average salary of a scientist looks way too high. Hence this tendency to pay compression. Your average federal employee is probably overpaid relative to the private sector, because the lowest-skilled employees are paid up to 40% higher than the private sector equivalent. The highest-paid employees, the post-graduate skilled professionals, are paid less. That makes it hard to recruit the top performers, but it also swells the wage budget in a way that makes it difficult to talk about reform.There's a lot of interest in this administration in making it easier to recruit talent and get rid of under-performers. There have been aggressive pushes to limit collective bargaining in the public sector. That should theoretically make it easier to recruit, but it also increases the precariousness of civil service roles. We've seen huge firings in the civil service over the last six months.Classically, the explicit trade-off of working in the federal government was, “Your pay is going to be capped, but you have this job for life. It's impossible to get rid of you.” You trade some lifetime earnings for stability. In a world where the stability is gone, but pay is still capped, isn't the net effect to drive talent away from the civil service?I think it's a concern now. On one level it should be ameliorated, because those who are most concerned with stability of employment do tend to be lower performers. If you have people who are leaving the federal service because all they want is stability, and they're not getting that anymore, that may not be a net loss. As someone who came out of academia and knows the wonder of effective lifetime annuities, there can be very high performers who like that stability who therefore take a lower salary. Without the ability to bump that pay up more, it's going to be an issue.I do know that, internally, the Trump administration has made some signs they're open to reforms in the top tiers of the SES and other parts of the federal government. They would be willing to have people get paid more at that level to compensate for the increased risks since the Trump administration came in. But when you look at the reductions in force (RIFs) that have happened under Trump, they are overwhelmingly among probationary employees, the lower-level employees.With some exceptions. If you've been promoted recently, you can get reclassified as probationary, so some high-performers got lumped in.Absolutely. The issue has been exacerbated precisely because the RIF regulations that are in place have made the firings particularly damaging. If you had a more streamlined RIF system — which they do have in many states, where seniority is not the main determinant of who gets laid off — these RIFs could be removing the lower-performing civil servants and keeping the higher-performing ones, and giving them some amount of confidence in their tenure.Unfortunately, the combination of large-scale removals with the existing RIF regs, which are very stringent, has demoralized some of the upper levels of the federal government. I share that concern. But I might add, it is interesting, if you look at the federal government's own figures on the total civil service workforce, they have gone down significantly since Trump came in office, but I think less than 100,000 still, in the most recent numbers that I've seen. I'm not sure how much to trust those, versus some of these other numbers where people have said 150,000, 200,000.Whether the Trump administration or a future administration can remove large numbers of people from the civil service should be somewhat divorced from the general conversation on civil service reform. The main debate about whether or not Trump can do this centers around how much power the appropriators in Congress have to determine the total amount of spending in particular agencies on their workforce. It does not depend necessarily on, "If we're going to remove people — whether for general layoffs, or reductions in force, or because of particular performance issues — how can we go about doing that?" My last-ditch hope to maintain a bipartisan possibility of civil service reform is to bracket, “How much power does the president have to remove or limit the workforce in general?” from “How can he go about hiring and firing, et cetera?”I think making it easier for the president to identify and remove poor performers is a tool that any future administration would like to have.We had this conversation sparked again with the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner. But that was a position Congress set up to be appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and removable by the President. It's a separate issue from civil service at large. Everyone said, “We want the president to be able to hire and fire the commissioner.” Maybe firing the commissioner was a bad decision, but that's the situation today.Attentive listeners to Statecraft know I'm pretty critical, like you are, of the regulations that say you have to go in order of seniority. In mass layoffs, you're required to fire a lot of the young, talented people.But let's talk about individual firings. I've been a terrible civil servant, a nightmarish employee from day one. You want to discipline, remove, suspend, or fire me. What are your options?Anybody who has worked in the civil service knows it's hard to fire bad performers. Whatever their political valence, whatever they feel about the civil service system, they have horror stories about a person who just couldn't be removed.In the early 2010s, a spate of stories came out about air traffic controllers sleeping on the job. Then-transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, made a big public announcement: "I'm going to fire these three guys." After these big announcements, it turned out he was only able to remove one of them. One retired, and another had their firing reduced to a suspension.You had another horrific story where a man was joking on the phone with friends when a plane crashed into a helicopter and killed nine people over the Hudson River. National outcry. They said, "We're going to fire this guy." In the end, after going through the process, he only got a suspension. Everyone agrees it's too hard.The basic story is, you have two ways to fire someone. Chapter 75, the old way, is often considered the realm of misconduct: You've stolen something from the office, punched your colleague in the face during a dispute about the coffee, something illegal or just straight-out wrong. We get you under Chapter 75.The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act added Chapter 43, which is supposed to be the performance-based system to remove someone. As with so much of that Civil Service Reform Act, the people who passed it thought this might be the beginning of an entirely different system.In the end, lots of federal managers say there's not a huge difference between the two. Some use 75, some use 43. If you use 43, you have to document very clearly what the person did wrong. You have to put them on a performance improvement plan. If they failed a performance improvement plan after a certain amount of time, they can respond to any claims about what they did wrong. Then, they can take that process up to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and claim that they were incorrectly fired, or that the processes weren't carried out appropriately. Then, if they want to, they can say, “Nah, I don't like the order I got,” and take it up to federal courts and complain there. Right now, the MSPB doesn't have a full quorum, which is complicating some of the recent removal disputes.You have this incredibly difficult process, unlike the private sector, where your boss looks at you and says, "I don't like how you're giving me the stink-eye today. Out you go." One could say that's good or bad, but, on the whole, I think the model should be closer to the private sector. We should trust managers to do their job without excessive oversight and process. That's clearly about as far from the realm of possibility as the current system, under which the estimate is 6-12 months to fire a very bad performer. The number of people who win at the Merit Systems Protection Board is still 20-30%.This goes into another issue, which is unionization. If you're part of a collective bargaining agreement — most of the regular federal civil service is — first, you have to go with this independent, union-based arbitration and grievance procedure. You're about 50/50 to win on those if your boss tries to remove you.So if I'm in the union, we go through that arbitration grievance system. If you win and I'm fired, I can take it to the Merit Systems Protection Board. If you win again, I can still take it to the federal courts.You can file different sorts of claims at each part. On Chapter 43, the MSPB is supposed to be about the process, not the evidence, and you just have to show it was followed. On 75, the manager has to show by preponderance of the evidence that the employee is harming the agency. Then there are different standards for what you take to the courts, and different standards according to each collective bargaining agreement for the grievance procedure when someone is disciplined. It's a very complicated, abstruse, and procedure-heavy process that makes it very difficult to remove people, which is why the involuntary separation rate at the federal government and most state governments is many multiples lower than the private sector.So, you would love to get me off your team because I'm abysmal. But you have no stomach for going through this whole process and I'm going to fight it. I'm ornery and contrarian and will drag this fight out. In practice, what do managers in the federal government do with their poor performers?I always heard about this growing up. There's the windowless office in the basement without a phone, or now an internet connection. You place someone down there, hope they get the message, and sooner or later they leave. But for plenty of people in America, that's the dream job. You just get to sit and nobody bothers you for eight hours. You punch in at 9 and punch out at 5, and that's your day. "Great. I'll collect that salary for another 10 years." But generally you just try to make life unpleasant for that person.Public sector collective bargaining in the US is new. I tend to think of it as just how the civil service works. But until about 50 years ago, there was no collective bargaining in the public sector.At the state level, it started with Wisconsin at the end of the 1950s. There were famous local government reforms beginning with the Little Wagner Act [signed in 1958] in New York City. Senator Robert Wagner had created the National Labor Relations Board. His son Robert F. Wagner Jr., mayor of New York, created the first US collective bargaining system at the local level in the ‘60s. In ‘62, John F. Kennedy issued an executive order which said, "We're going to deal officially with public sector unions,” but it was all informal and non-statutory.It wasn't until Title VII of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that unions had a formal, statutory role in our federal service system. This is shockingly new. To some extent, that was the great loss to many civil service reformers in ‘78. They wanted to get through a lot of these other big reforms about hiring and firing, but they gave up on the unions to try to get those. Some people think that exception swallowed the rest of the rules. The union power that was garnered in ‘78 overcame the other reforms people hoped to accomplish. Soon, you had the majority of the federal workforce subject to collective bargaining.But that's changing now too. Part of that Civil Service Reform Act said, “If your position is in a national security-related position, the president can determine it's not subject to collective bargaining.” Trump and the OPM have basically said, “Most positions in the federal government are national security-related, and therefore we're going to declare them off-limits to collective bargaining.” Some people say that sounds absurd. But 60% of the civilian civil service workforce is the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security. I am not someone who tries to go too easy on this crowd. I think there's a heck of a lot that needs to be reformed. But it's also worth remembering that the majority of the civil service workforce are in these three agencies that Republicans tend to like a lot.Now, whether people like Veterans Affairs is more of an open question. We have some particular laws there about opening up processes after the scandals in the 2010s about waiting lists and hospitals. You had veterans hospitals saying, "We're meeting these standards for getting veterans in the door for these waiting lists." But they were straight-up lying about those standards. Many people who were on these lists waiting for months to see a doctor died in the interim, some from causes that could have been treated had they seen a VA doctor. That led to Congress doing big reforms in the VA in 2014 and 2017, precisely because everyone realized this is a problem.So, Trump has put out these executive orders stopping collective bargaining in all of these agencies that touch national security. Some of those, like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), seem like a tough sell. I guess that, if you want to dig a mine and the Chinese are trying to dig their own mine and we want the mine to go quickly without the EPA pettifogging it, maybe. But the core ones are pretty solid. So far the courts have upheld the executive order to go in place. So collective bargaining there could be reformed.But in the rest of the government, there are these very extreme, long collective bargaining agreements between agencies and their unions. I've hit on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as one that's had pretty extensive bargaining with its union. When we created the TSA to supervise airport security, a lot of people said, "We need a crème de la crème to supervise airports after 9/11. We want to keep this out of union hands, because we know unions are going to make it difficult to move people around." The Obama administration said, "Nope, we're going to negotiate with the union." Now you have these huge negotiations with the unions about parking spots, hours of employment, uniforms, and everything under the sun. That makes it hard for managers in the TSA to decide when people should go where or what they should do.One thing we've talked about on Statecraft in past episodes — for instance, with John Kamensky, who was a pivotal figure in the Clinton-Gore reforms — was this relationship between government employees and “Beltway Bandits”: the contractors who do jobs you might think of as civil service jobs. One critique of that ‘90s Clinton-Gore push, “Reinventing Government,” was that although they shrank the size of the civil service on paper, the number of contractors employed by the federal government ballooned to fill that void. They did not meaningfully reduce the total number of people being paid by the federal government. Talk to me about the relationship between the civil service reform that you'd like to see and this army of folks who are not formally employees.Every government service is a combination of public employees and inputs, and private employees and inputs. There's never a single thing the government does — federal, state, or local — that doesn't involve inputs from the private sector. That could be as simple as the uniforms for the janitors. Even if you have a publicly employed janitor, who buys the mop? You're not manufacturing the mops.I understand the critique that the excessive focus on full-time employees in the 1990s led to contracting out some positions that could be done directly by the government. But I think that misses how much of the government can and should be contracted out. The basic Office of Management and Budget (OMB) statute [OMB Circular No. A-76] defining what is an essential government duty should still be the dividing line. What does the government have to do, because that is the public overseeing a process? Versus, what can the private sector just do itself?I always cite Stephen Goldsmith, the old mayor of Indianapolis. He proposed what he called the Yellow Pages test. If you open the Yellow Pages [phone directory] and three businesses do that business, the government should not be in that business. There's three garbage haulers out there. Instead of having a formal government garbage-hauling department, just contract out the garbage.With the internet, you should have a lot more opportunities to contract stuff out. I think that is generally good, and we should not have the federal government going about a lot of the day-to-day procedural things that don't require public input. What a lot of people didn't recognize is how much pressure that's going to put on government contracting officers at the federal level. Last time I checked there were 40,000 contracting officers. They have a lot of power. In the most recent year for which we have data, there were $750 billion in federal contracts. This is a substantial part of our economy. If you total state and local, we're talking almost 10% of our whole economy goes through government contracts. This is mind-boggling. In the public policy world, we should all be spending about 10% of our time thinking about contracting.One of the things I think everyone recognized is that contractors should have more authority. Some of the reform that happened with people like [Steven] Kelman — who was the Office of Federal Procurement Policy head in the ‘90s under Clinton — was, "We need to give these people more authority to just take a credit card and go buy a sheaf of paper if that's what they need. And we need more authority to get contract bids out appropriately.”The same message that animates civil service reform should animate these contracting discussions. The goal should be setting clear goals that you want — for either a civil servant or a contractor — and then giving that person the discretion to meet them. If you make the civil service more stultified, or make pay compression more extreme, you're going to have to contract more stuff out.People talk about the General Schedule [pay scale], but we haven't talked about the Federal Wage Schedule system at all, which is the blue-collar system that encompasses about 200,000 federal employees. Pay compression means those guys get paid really well. That means some managers rightfully think, "I'd like to have full-time supervision over some role, but I would rather contract it out, because I can get it a heck of a lot cheaper."There's a continuous relationship: If we make the civil service more stultified, we're going to push contracting out into more areas where maybe it wouldn't be appropriate. But a lot of things are always going to be appropriate to contract out. That means we need to give contracting officers and the people overseeing contracts a lot of discretion to carry out their missions, and not a lot of oversight from the Government Accountability Office or the courts about their bids, just like we shouldn't give OPM excess input into the civil service hiring process.This is a theme I keep harping on, on Statecraft. It's counterintuitive from a reformer's perspective, but it's true: if you want these processes to function better, you're going to have to stop nitpicking. You're going to have to ease up on the throttle and let people make their own decisions, even when sometimes you're not going to agree with them.This is a tension that's obviously happening in this administration. You've seen some clear interest in decentralization, and you've seen some centralization. In both the contract and the civil service sphere, the goal for the central agencies should be giving as many options as possible to the local managers, making sure they don't go extremely off the rails, but then giving those local managers and contracting officials the ability to make their own choices. The General Services Administration (GSA) under this administration is doing a lot of government-wide acquisition contracts. “We establish a contract for the whole government in the GSA. Usually you, the local manager, are not required to use that contract if you want computer services or whatever, but it's an option for you.”OPM should take a similar role. "Here's the system we have set up. You can take that and use it as you want. It's here for you, but it doesn't have to be used, because you might have some very particular hiring decisions to make.” Just like there shouldn't be one contracting decision that decides how we buy both a sheaf of computer paper and an aircraft carrier, there shouldn't be one hiring and firing process for a janitor and a nuclear physicist. That can't be a centralized process, because the very nature of human life is that there's an infinitude of possibilities that you need to allow for, and that means some amount of decentralization.I had an argument online recently about New York City's “buy local” requirement for certain procurement contracts. When they want to build these big public toilets in New York City, they have to source all the toilet parts from within the state, even if they're $200,000 cheaper in Portland, Oregon.I think it's crazy to ask procurement and contracting to solve all your policy problems. Procurement can't be about keeping a healthy local toilet parts industry. You just need to procure the toilet.This is another area where you see similar overlap in some of the civil service and contracting issues. A lot of cities have residency requirements for many of their positions. If you work for the city, you have to live inside the city. In New York, that means you've got a lot of police officers living on Staten Island, or right on the line of the north side of the Bronx, where they're inches away from Westchester. That drives up costs, and limits your population of potential employees.One of the most amazing things to me about the Biden Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was that it encouraged contracting officers to use residency requirements: “You should try to localize your hiring and contracting into certain areas.” On a national level, that cancels out. If both Wyoming and Wisconsin use residency requirements, the net effect is not more people hired from one of those states! So often, people expect the civil service and contracting to solve all of our ills and to point the way forward for the rest of the economy on discrimination, hiring, pay, et cetera. That just leads to, by definition, government being a lot more expensive than the private sector.Over the next three and a half years, what would you like to see the administration do on civil service reform that they haven't already taken up?I think some of the broad-scale layoffs, which seem to be slowing down, were counterproductive. I do think that their ability to achieve their ends was limited by the nature of the reduction-in-force regulations, which made them more counterproductive than they had to be. That's the situation they inherited. But that didn't mean you had to lay off a lot of people without considering the particular jobs they were doing now.And hiring quite a few of them back.Yeah. There are also debates obviously, within the administration, between DOGE and Russ Vought [director of the OMB] and some others on this. Some things, like the Schedule Policy/Career — which is the revival of Schedule F in the first Trump administration — are largely a step in the right direction. Counter to some of the critics, it says, “You can remove someone if they're in a policymaking position, just like if they were completely at-will. But you still have to hire from the typical civil service system.” So, for those concerned about politicization, that doesn't undermine that, because they can't just pick someone from the party system to put in there. I think that's good.They recently had a suitability requirement rule that I think moved in the right direction. That says, “If someone's not suitable for the workforce, there are other ways to remove them besides the typical procedures.” The ideal system is going to require some congressional input: it's to have a decentralization of hiring authority to individual managers. Which means the OPM — now under Scott Kupor, who has finally been confirmed — saying, "The OPM is here to assist you, federal managers. Make sure you stay within the broad lanes of what the administration's trying to accomplish. But once we give you your general goals, we're going to trust you to do that, including hiring.”I've mentioned it a few times, but part of the Chance to Compete Act — which was mentioned in one of Trump's Day One executive orders, people forget about this — was saying, “Implement the Chance to Compete Act to the maximum extent of the law.” Bring more subject-matter expertise into the hiring process, allow more discretion for managers and input into the hiring process. I think carrying that bipartisan reform out is going to be a big step, but it's going to take a lot more work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub
The Kremlin throws cold water on the White House's plans for a bilateral meeting between Russia and Ukraine's leaders. We have the latest forecast on Hurricane Erin. Poor sales at this retail staple have led to a change of leadership. Hundreds of Health and Human Services staffers aren't happy with their boss. Plus, the clue that could mean TikTok is here to stay in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
More than a year ago, The Dallas Morning News set out to explore how Texas' overlapping abortion laws have altered the landscape of obstetric health care. Through more than 100 interviews with physicians and other health care professionals, researchers, advocates, legal experts, patients and family members, reporters documented deviations from the standard of care, as well as other unintended consequences. In other news, Dallas' new inspector general, tasked with uncovering corruption and ensuring the city government complies with its code of ethics, is not an attorney, and his recent hiring by the City Council violates the city's charter. In June, council members unanimously hired Timothy Menke, a former federal official who held a similar role in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; a group of teens in a car were shot at after police said they played ding, dong, ditch at a Frisco man's house in July. 58-year old Damon Wolfe faces a felony aggravated assault charge; and America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders has been renewed for a third season and is slated for a 2026 return. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Across Washington, student vaccination rates have fallen slightly over the past few years, but those statewide figures gloss over some parts that saw pretty big declines --- especially in one southwest Washington school district. The data showed the Naselle-Grays River Valley School District saw student vaccinations for diseases like tetanus, polio and rubella drop by more than 46%, making it the district with the lowest immunization rate in the state for 2024 to 2025. But what’s on paper doesn’t tell the whole story. Guest: Lori Ashley, clinical manager for the Pacific County Department of Health and Human Services. Related stories: K-12 vaccination rates in WA dropped again | The Seattle Times R.F.K. Jr. Cancels mRNA Vaccine Research | The New York Times Thank you to the supporters of KUOW, you help make this show possible! If you want to help out, go to kuow.org/donate/soundsidenotes. Soundside is a production of KUOW in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR Network.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Might the supposedly revolutionary future of AI healthcare actually be a return to the gig economics of Uber and Airbnb? That's the intriguing proposition put forward by former Kaiser Permanente Chief and Stanford Medical School professor Robert Pearl, a prescient observer of the future of his industry. According to Pearl, we may be returning to the digital future: freelance doctors, he predicts, will train people to use existing AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) for managing chronic conditions - essentially "Uberizing" medical AI guidance. The real question, of course, is whether this will cheer up both doctors and patients. Pearl isn't sure about either. But one thing he is certain about is that MAGA government isn't the answer to fixing America's healthcare future. Having been cautiously optimistic about RFK Jr six months ago, he now gives the US Secretary of Health and Human Services an “F” for his first six months in office. Maybe we should Uberize RFK Jr. It certainly couldn't make things worse. 1. Two Competing AI Healthcare ModelsPearl identifies two paths: expensive, FDA-regulated products from tech companies versus affordable, clinician-led training programs that teach patients to use existing AI tools like ChatGPT for chronic disease management—with the second potentially avoiding regulation entirely.2. AI Could Prevent 30-50% of Medical DeathsBy better managing chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes (which account for 70% of doctor visits and costs), AI could save $1.5 trillion and prevent massive numbers of deaths from heart disease, cancer, kidney failure, and strokes.3. The "Uberization" of Medical CareWith 40% of doctors already doing gig work, Pearl envisions freelance physicians training patients to use AI tools for continuous health monitoring—replacing the current system of infrequent office visits with real-time, at-home care management.4. Insurance Companies Will Welcome AI, Hospitals Will ResistInsurers will benefit from lower costs and reduced need for prior authorizations, while hospitals and drug companies will see fewer patients and medication sales—making them the primary opponents of AI healthcare adoption.5. Medical Education Faces Major DisruptionElite institutions like Stanford will focus on complex procedures (heart transplants, major cancers), while routine medical knowledge becomes commodified. Mid-level healthcare jobs will disappear, similar to what's happening in computer programming.Bonus Political Takeaway: Pearl gives RFK Jr. an "F" for his first six months, saying he's capitulated to the agricultural industry instead of tackling the root causes of chronic disease through nutrition policy.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
The Department of Health and Human Services revives a disbanded childhood vaccine safety task force. Illinois moves to tighten rules on artificial intelligence in behavioral health. And UnitedHealth Group finalizes its merger with home health provider Amedisys after resolving antitrust concerns. All that and more, coming up on today's episode of the Gist Healthcare Podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Financial Operator Podcast: Cash In, Chaos Out | Ep. 64 | Selling Businesses With Purpose & Profit Link to video podcast episode: https://youtu.be/2_N758pI-DM Empowering Women in M&A: Rachel Boynton's Inspiring Journey
In regards to recent promises made by the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services to "find the cause of autism" by September 2025, Dr. Karp and student producer Kaya Basatemur discuss the history of autism. In this episode, they cover previous attempts made by psychologists, researchers, and other scientists to determine the cause of this condition and to figure out what autism actually is. They also discuss the outdated myths regarding theorized causes of autism, who can have autism, the diagnosis of autism, and the social stigma surrounding those who have it. Why are there so many myths and misconceptions about autism? Is finding the cause of autism in under a month possible? Find out in the latest episode of Health 411.
Dr. Tevi Troy, former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and best-selling presidential historian, on this week’s Torah portion, political commentator George Will’s recent public opinions on socialist New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, President Trump’s peace summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On August 5, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Department of Health and Human Services would terminate almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine development grants and contracts, affecting 22 projects. Biologist and mRNA researcher Jeff Coller joins Host Ira Flatow to talk about what this move means for future mRNA research in the US beyond these immediate projects.Plus, reporter Casey Crownhart joins Ira to discuss the latest in climate news, including flooding in Juneau, Alaska; how Ford is pursuing further electric vehicle manufacturing despite federal roadblocks; and a startup using Earth itself as a giant battery.Guests:Dr. Jeff Coller is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of RNA Biology and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University.Casey Crownhart is a senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review in New York, New York.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
About this episode: The Department of Health and Human Services has cancelled nearly $500 million in funding for the development of mRNA vaccines, including for vaccines against potential new pandemic threats. In this episode: Professor Bill Moss delves into the misinformation surrounding mRNA vaccines, explains their potential to treat diseases like cancer and HIV, and warns of the national security threats posed by cuts to development. Guest: Dr. Bill Moss, MPH, is an infectious disease specialist and the executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Host: Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. Show links and related content: Johns Hopkins expert speaks on ripple effect of federal cuts to mRNA vaccine contracts—WBAL-TV 11 How Cuts to mRNA Vaccine Development Will Set the U.S. Back—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health What to know about mRNA vaccines as Trump admin pulls funding—Axios For mRNA Vaccines, COVID-19 Is Just the Beginning—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here's our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
As schools start to reopen across the country, new CDC data shows that a record share of US kindergartners missed required vaccinations last school year. It comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to downplay vaccine efficacy and slash funding for research and development. We hear from a county health administrator in Texas who is concerned an ongoing measles outbreak could soon arrive on his doorstep. Guest: Dr. Philip Huang, Dallas County Health & Human Services director Have a question about the news? Have a story you think we should cover? Call us at 202-240-2895. Host: David Rind Producer: Paola Ortiz Showrunner: Felicia Patinkin Editorial Support: Deirdre McPhillips, Jamie Gumbrecht Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The organ donation system is under intense scrutiny after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services directed the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to investigate America's organ procurement practices. The probe uncovered alarming findings, including nearly 30% of reviewed cases showing serious concerns—ranging from neurological signs inconsistent with organ donation eligibility to a shocking 28 patients who may not have been deceased at the time their organs were harvested.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.
Today's Headlines: Putin wants to meet with Trump next week to talk about ending the war in Ukraine, and Trump says he's hoping to follow that up with a three-way summit with Zelensky. While that's brewing, Trump's playing tariff hardball—he just doubled tariffs on Indian goods to 50% to punish them for buying Russian oil (which… they already said they were going to keep doing). He also announced 100% tariffs on imported semiconductor chips unless companies build in the US, but Apple's apparently promised $100B in US investments, so they're cool. In Georgia, a 28-year-old Army sergeant shot five fellow soldiers at Fort Stewart before being tackled by other troops. Everyone's expected to recover, and the Army's investigating. The Library of Congress had to admit that major sections of the Constitution—like habeas corpus and the emoluments clause—were missing from their site due to a “coding error.” Sure. RFK Jr., now head of Health & Human Services, just canceled $500B in contracts for mRNA vaccine development because he doesn't trust the science. Meanwhile, OpenAI inked a $1 deal to give the federal government access to its AI tools next year. And for some good news: crime in the U.S. hit a 20-year low in 2024, and early 2025 data says it's still going down. Resources/Articles mentioned in this episode: Axios: Putin proposed summit with Trump: White House AP News: Trump to put additional 25% import taxes on India, bringing combined tariffs to 50% WSJ: Trump Exempts Tech Companies That Invest in U.S. From 100% Chip Tariffs AP News: Army sergeant shot 5 soldiers before he was tackled and arrested at Fort Stewart, officials say Axios: Library of Congress blames "coding error" for missing sections of online Constitution NBC News: RFK Jr. cuts $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts, dealing major blow to promising area of research Wired: OpenAI Announces Massive US Government Partnership Axios: Nation's violent crime rate fell in 2024 to lowest in 20 years: FBI Morning Announcements is produced by Sami Sage and edited by Grace Hernandez-Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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