Key Trump Nominees Await Confirmation After Bruising Hearings
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From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum. I'm Mina Kim. A Senate panel has advanced the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary, while another contested nominee, Tulsi Gabbard's key committee vote, is underway. Kash Patel, Trump's pick to lead the FBI, sat for his confirmation hearing last week as the administration pushed out high-level FBI officials and career prosecutors in an unprecedented purge.

It's just one of several shocks to the federal government, as Elon Musk also tries to shutter the nation's 60-year-old humanitarian agency, USAID. We analyze these latest developments. Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Nina Kim.

We have a clearer picture of how the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting effort known as DOGE, which was created by executive order, carries out its aims, sweep through federal agencies, try to take over operations and demand access to systems and sensitive data, or try to dismantle them, as is the case with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

At least one Democratic senator has threatened to blog votes on some of President Trump's nominees in response to attempts to close down USAID. We take a closer look at the latest upheaval in Washington and the status of Trump's most controversial nominees. Joining me is Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent at NPR. Domenico, really glad to have you today. Hello, great to be with you. So USAID. First, remind us what the agency is and does.

Yeah, USAID gives out about half of US foreign aid and is a pretty large organization, about $50 billion in a budget. They provide humanitarian aid across the world, everything from the program PEPFAR, which they run, which is trying to stop the flow of HIV and AIDS in Africa, to everything –

like trying to create open markets for American companies promoting democracy. They were established in 1961 by executive order from President John F. Kennedy. They were

given the room to do that by an act in 1960 and essentially what Congress was saying was that the U.S. needs a degree of soft power to counter essentially then the Soviet Union to be able to push democracy around the world and do that with

With this kind of an agency, of course, it's drawn the ire of Elon Musk, who's in charge of this kind of outside group, somewhat inside now on, you know, because they think that there's a lot of wasteful spending within. Somewhat inside now, because this more than 60 year old organization that has operated pretty independently has been severely gutted and absorbed by the State Department.

Yeah, and done in pretty drastic, fast ways. This is – it's not like there was a process that played out trying to go through Congress to say, OK, let's study this. Here are the issues that we see. Here's what we want to roll back. No, instead you had Elon Musk.

who went on his platform X and had a spaces conversation saying that there aren't worms in the apple, that it's a ball of worms, that the entire thing is a problem and that it's got to go.

And there were real questions about Elon Musk's – whatever his tenure is and his accountability, lack thereof, and what people are doing within these organizations going into every single agency essentially and trying to see where –

they are committing funds or doing programs that don't line up with what they see as Trump's priorities. Yeah. As you say, this was a very chaotic process. I've been reading reports how employees were told overnight not to return to work on Monday because their offices were closed, that they were then not allowed to go in to get their things or only a small number once they were had to run in with garbage bags to try to get everything they could for themselves.

and their colleagues, and it just sounds like an incredibly traumatic process.

Yeah, it was and is still for sure. And that's why you saw a lot of Democratic congressmen now showing up at the USAID building, trying to say that this is not the way things are supposed to be done. You know, you had congressman from New Jersey, Andy Kim, who was talking to the security guard, trying to figure out who was allowed in and who wasn't allowed in. It is a chaotic situation, but it's something that I think that Trump and Musk welcome in doing to bring progress.

this provocation to say that the federal workforce is bloated and that they don't need any of this spending. But, you know, I think there are a lot of people who would counter that and, and talk about all of the things that USAID has done over the years to be able to provide humanitarian support of,

around the globe, despite some of these smaller, you know, provocative things that they'll pull out to say that they funded this type of transgender opera in Colombia, as we heard from the press secretary yesterday, Caroline Leavitt, when there's so much more that USAID has done is known for and has always been a critical piece

of American soft power. Now, there have been questions about the, you know, the grants process at USAID, who gets the funding, whether or not that money is getting to local villages fast enough. But that is that's more of a scalpel approach and an oversight issue than it is just a wholesale axing of something. Yeah, listeners are already reacting. And you can do that at the email address listenersforum at kqed.org.

On our social channels at KQED Forum, we're on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. Angela writes, this action to shutter USAID by Elon Musk must be stopped. Lives around the world depend on our support.

So many worthy programs, disaster relief, disease prevention, literally starving children. This is good work that frankly needs to have increased support for Musk and Trump to throw this good work and this life or death aid to the wood chipper quote is absolutely unconscionable. Please, citizens and legislators rise up to stop this. Another listener on Discord writes, as far as Elon taking over USAID, the Dems better get busy or we will lose checks and balances in our system of government.

You mentioned, Domenico, there are a lot of questions about whether Doge or the so-called Department of Government Efficiency can do this. And what are Democrats also saying? How are they fighting back? Are they choosing to make this their issue?

It seems pretty clear legally they can't do this, but that's not stopping them from making these employees – putting these employees on their back foot, making them very concerned about their livelihoods. I mean remember these are human beings who are trying to figure out whether or not they're going to have a paycheck next week, how they're going to go about doing that, and the court system takes action.

a while. It's slow. Trump and Musk understand this. They know that if they can sort of create a big splash and even if it gets rolled back, they can sort of declare some victory or say that the deep state was against them and these things are entrenched in the system. And a lot of it is politics for their base and trying to say that they think that these are programs that they disagree with from a worldview perspective. I mean, just looking back at the act

in 1960 that created USAID, it said that it was fundamental. That is a fundamental principle of America's foreign policy to be able to essentially help countries economically, socially, and politically, especially developing countries, to be able to multiply American soft power across the globe. That's fundamentally different from Donald Trump's isolationist America First view, which is far more transactional than long-term.

Well, Senator Chuck Schumer warned that if USAID could be dismantled under Elon Musk, that you can be sure that they will move on to another target tomorrow, was his quote. But USAID is not the only agency Musk has targeted. He's gone after the Office of Personal Management, the U.S. Treasury, and its payment system. Domenico, can you help us understand the implications of this?

Yeah, and it's not going to stop with USAID. I mean, we've had reporting just today about the Department of Education. And I think that there will be other agencies that the Doge folks are kind of going around and trying to figure out what to do and where. We know that they're already sent out.

this three-page questionnaire to FBI agents about what they did in working on January 6th cases. They've now, those agents, anonymously in a class action have sued the Justice Department, who they work for, saying that they're afraid that this is going to mean retaliation against them. So we're seeing sort of

chaos that's enveloping really the hierarchies within Washington, the different agencies. And I think Trump's team is trying to test the limits of his power to figure out what he can and can't shake loose. And if it means that a lot of people just don't go back to work and they can win by attrition because then they can say that they shrunk the size of the workforce simply by scaring enough people not to go back to work.

Yeah, the lawsuits with regard to the payment system was basically saying that it contains sensitive payment information related to trillions of dollars in federal disbursements and that it has the personal identifying information, not just of government employees, but potentially anybody who gets money from the federal government.

Yeah. Anybody who gets money – I mean the Social Security, Medicare, they had access at Treasury on all of that. And I think there are some real questions on Elon Musk's potential conflicts with grants or groups that he might be competing against because Elon Musk is –

intertwined in the federal government, even before he has taken on this advisory role with President Trump, because he, you know, has has been on the, you know, essentially, has been the reason or the he's he's been integral, I should say, in Ukraine, for example, when they needed communications abilities, and the Pentagon asking him to use his

devices that connect to satellites that connect to each other so that they could be able to communicate on the front lines. They don't have a replacement for these kinds of things. And this has been an issue for years before the 2024 presidential election where there were a lot of questions raised about how intertwined Elon Musk was with the federal government anyway.

So there is a Democratic Senator, Brian Chatz, who said he would block Senate votes on President Donald Trump's nominees for State Department positions because he's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in response to this attempt to dismantle USAID. Can you tell us about that and what that would really do?

Well, I mean, I think Democrats are trying to figure out any way and process possible to be able to slow down some of Trump's picks, because even today we saw that RFK Jr. is likely to get through because Bill Cassidy, a senator from Los Angeles,

Louisiana, a doctor, Republican, who had very serious questions about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination, voted with his colleagues to put him through on committee 1413 that vote, which means he's probably on a glide path for the nomination now, probably very narrowly. But Democrats are looking to slow down things as much as they possibly can. But life in the minority is very difficult in

uh and you don't have a lot of powers especially when republicans are likely to try to get as much through as they possibly can through reconciliation which is a budget process you have to basically say anything that you're putting through is tied to the budget has a limit of 10 years but you would only need 51 votes to get something through rather than the you know 60 vote threshold with the filibuster um of course there are uh you know uh

the Congressional Budget Office would say whether or not something qualifies or not. But when it comes to things like, you know, tax cuts, it probably would be able to get through on reconciliation. We're talking with Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent in NPR on the latest developments in Washington, as well as latest shocks to D.C. And we'll have more with him and you after the break. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about

The latest developments in Washington, including the status now of Trump's most controversial nominees. Earlier today, the Finance Committee voted to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary today.

There was some question as to whether or not Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a necessary Republican vote for Kennedy to secure the nomination, might still be struggling and be a no vote. But today he explained why he was a yes. Let's listen. Oh, and it looks like we are still looking for that cut. But I want to ask you about this, Domenico. Just talk about what happened in the case of RFK and what Cassidy did.

Like I said, he's a doctor from Louisiana, a Republican, somebody who is more – he's conservative but he's more open-minded to more moderate positions. And he certainly understands the science of vaccines and that was the big stumbling block for him with RFK Jr., in particular the false –

notion that vaccines cause autism, which they do not. There was one study that RFK Jr. and many others who are concerned about autism cherry picked a small study that was then discredited many years ago, tiny sample of people and was deemed to be not worthy of

of the scientific journal that it was going to be running. And, you know, it became a worldwide phenomenon though, where conspiracies kind of just took off, especially because you see the continued numbers of people who are diagnosed, children who are diagnosed with autism that have, you know, gone up,

considerably, you know, something like one in 36 children now. But that's because of increased diagnosis, increased awareness, and has very little to do, if anything at all with vaccines, nothing at all to do with vaccines. It's one of the most studied environmental factors. But people are grasping for something to figure out why their children might have autism, why their child might be on the spectrum. And this is something that

RFK Jr. has run with. He's cast doubt on vaccines. And Bill Cassidy really pressed him on that. And it seemed like he might be a no vote because of it. And then I guess he got some assurances from the White House. He talked about them today on the Senate floor, that he was going to be more of a partner with RFK Jr., that he was going to have some input in the types of people that he's going to nominate. And I think that that really tells you more about the

politics on the right than it does anything else or the science of any of this, because Bill Cassidy is up for reelection in 2026. And a vote against one of Trump's nominees like this would have almost certainly sunk his potential to be able to win reelection. And Louisiana is also looking at potentially getting rid of partisan primaries that would certainly help him. But you know, voting against one of these nominees is essentially saying that you're retiring.

Well, let's hear just a couple more comments from different senators during today's vote on Kennedy. Here's Senator Elizabeth Warren, who obviously was a no vote, referencing the many lawsuits against companies who make vaccines. Twenty years ago, we watched vaccines just move away if they did not have protection from these kinds of lawsuits.

The consequence of Mr. Kennedy's ability to make those lawsuits easier is also the ability to shut down access and manufacturing for vaccines for every one of us. And I think that's a terrible mistake. And then here, Senator Tom Tell is explaining why his support for Robert Kennedy was around the fact that RFK is a disruptor.

The president said he was going to go wild in the Department of Health and Human Services. I hope he does. I hope he goes wild and actually finds a way to reduce the cost of health care. Listeners, we're asking for your reactions to

The status of Trump's most controversial nominees, the advancement of RFK, the comments senators made today as they voted, if you would like to respond to that. Also, your reactions to attempts by Elon Musk to shut down USAID and his broader efforts to take over government agencies in the name of cost-cutting. Let me go to caller Alice in Sierra Madre. Hi, Alice, you're on. Hi, thank you. Great program. So my comment and question is,

Doge is not a legal entity. It was set up through an executive order. I understand that Trump is pushing his authority to see how far he can get, but it's not a legal authority. Doge is not legal. So everything that Musk is doing, especially to these awful things about USAID, are not legal. So my question is,

For corn's sake, who is bringing up a lawsuit against Doge? Because there's lawsuits against EOs all the time. Thanks. Thanks, Alice. And of course, the word department is a total misnomer, Domenico.

Yeah, it's not a real department. The president can't create a department on his own. He did, as the caller noted, had an executive order that changed the name of the U.S. Digital Services, USDS, to DOGE, to essentially Department of Government Efficiency, and

I don't think that's exactly what they called it in the EO, but use the acronym to essentially say now that's what we're calling the USDS. So now that's essentially what Musk is a part of, although we're not sure how he's – if he's being paid, if it's a volunteer thing, if the people with him are volunteers, who the people are who are part of the staff, where they're going, why they're –

looking at what they're looking at. And Trump yesterday, we saw him sort of maybe have a little bit of a potential curb on Musk if he goes too far in saying everything that gets done has to be approved by me. And I you know, this brings up this point of egos when it comes to Trump because, you know, you might remember when Steve Bannon ran Trump's campaign in 2016. He got treatment from a national magazine putting him on front page. So someone saying essentially the headline was that he was

Trump's brain. And he was out shortly thereafter, because Trump doesn't want anybody around him to look like they're an equal, or that they're happy or that they have a bigger say. As far as the legality of Doge, I think this is all an open question on what it's going to be doing. And a one group that's been filing a lot of lawsuits

against a lot of what the administration has been doing is a group called Democracy Forward. I know that they've put forward quite a few complaints and actions. And I believe they did have one that named the Department of Government Efficiency, DOJ, as well that came out, I think, right when Trump was put into office. So I think we're going to be seeing a lot that goes through the courts over the next several months.

A listener on Blue Sky writes, how can USAID be a priority for spending reform? The country's been running up 2 trillion annual deficits. USAID's 50 billion is nothing at all. And

Another listener writes, USAID has certainly helped some people, but as the guest said, more than anything, it is an arm of American soft power. USAID works closely with private sector firms handing out multimillion-dollar contracts to U.S. corporations like DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola to carry out development and aid projects in the global south.

And then another listener writes, this is nothing less than a coup. Musk has the keys to all our tax dollars. What is preventing him from simply repurposing our money to the billionaire? Noel on Discord writes, I was sorry to hear that the physician Bill Cassidy on the committee rolled over and voted for RFK Jr., hoping we don't have to deal with another major pandemic. And what are we going to do about bird flu? If he wanted to lower the price of eggs, wouldn't the priority be with dealing with bird flu head on? But no, we can't challenge that.

Agribusiness. So listeners, you are responding to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination advancing as Health and Human Services Secretary. You are also responding to Musk's shutdown of USAID or his attempts to do that and his broader efforts to gut government agencies in the name of cost-cutting as well at 866-733-6786 at the email address forum at kqed.org and on our social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

I want to move on to the status of Tulsi Gabbard's nomination. And for that, I want to bring in Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, who also served in the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. Javed Ali, thank you so much for being with us.

Mina, nice to be with you and always nice to be with another Wolverine as well. So go blue. So one of the things that we have heard time and time again, that especially many Democrats, but also even Republicans have raised with regard to their concerns around Tulsi Gabbard was her lack of experience for the DNI job. In fact, there was a letter where nearly 100 former senior U.S. diplomats and intelligence and national security officials were

wrote to senators trying to raise alarms about her fitness for the job. Can you talk about Gabbard's experience relative to other DNIs? Well, I actually, as you ticked off my bio, during my FBI career, I served for several years in different assignments

in ODNI. So I have a pretty good sense as to what it's like to work inside that organization. And when I was serving in these different roles in the mid-2010s, Jim Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence. So that's certainly one model of what a DNI can look like. Three-star military officer and General Clapper was also unique because he had served as the head of

Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and just his own long career in intelligence. But General Clapper is not the only or has not been the only DNI over these past 20 years. And there's been a whole host of folks with different backgrounds, from diplomats to folks with military careers, not even on the intelligence side, like

General Clapper and Senator Dan Coats was President Trump's first DNI from 2017 into 2019. So we've seen a collection of different people with these different backgrounds. And so there's no one-size-fits-all model. But at the end of the day, whoever the DNI nominee is, whether they have a lot of experience in intelligence or not, they are picked by the president and then they have to go through the Senate, Congress,

confirmation process. So we're now going to just wait and see whether the Senate believes that Representative Gabbard has the sort of qualifications to now assume the position. Well, the vote is underway, Domenico, and there is good reason to believe that Gabbard will advance as well, in part because she won the support of Maine's Susan Collins and James Lankford and others who had

previously expressed reservations. Help us understand Susan Collins' reasoning, Domenico. Well, that and Todd Young from Indiana, who also had questions. There were a lot of people had a lot of different questions for Tulsi Gabbard. The one thing that seemed like it might sink her on the right was the fact that she refused to call Edward Snowden a traitor and, you know, had defended him in the past. Others had questioned her about her, you

you know, statements that had been in line with with Putin. She had visited Assad in Syria and said that she did not know about a cleric that she met with who said that he you know, would he said some provocative things about what he would do to the United States if they ever came into Syria and then later did find out about what he'd said and then denied that she'd said that she knew about it at the hearing. So, you know, there were a lot of questions, but

Again, this is all comes down to the loyalty test to Donald Trump and most of the senators on the right wanting to defer to Trump. And, you know, look, it usually is the case that senators will defer to the president of their party for the people that they put into office. But it's also true that one or two usually fail.

It's not always the case that they're all just rubber stamped and pushed through. So it was a little surprising that Gabbard, considering her hearing and considering the pushback she got, seems to be on her way to becoming confirmed. Given that, Domenico, where does Kash Patel's nomination to lead the FBI stand, do you think?

Well, he was seen as probably having the strongest hearing of the three despite some of the past comments that he had made. He denied basically all of those statements or flip-flopped on them, the ones that were most controversial about the FBI agents, the work that they do, the work around January 6th and all of that. So they thought that –

hearing from Republicans on Capitol Hill, you know, that they thought that he did as good a job as any of the three, if not the best job of the three. So it looks like he's going to be director of the FBI. Steve Bannon on his podcast said that Kash Patel, far from being the person most likely to oversee Trump's plans for retribution, probably helped inspire them in the first place. And there are certainly things in his background that would make Bannon and others see that as

Can you just remind listeners of a couple of those things? Well, I mean, one of the things that Kash Patel did that sort of raised a lot of eyebrows was help organize that January 6th, quote unquote, hostage choir that Donald Trump would play, you know, the the Star Spangled Banner from it.

at his rallies which is really shocking when he did it for the first time and finding out that cash patel was one of the people who was behind that and you know these guys a lot of them have gone on right wing podcast and said really provocative things

You know, Pete Hegseth included the secretary of defense now. I don't think they ever thought that they were going to be, you know, a director of one of these agencies. And, you know, if Trump won, then they thought all for the better because they'd gotten a lot more attention for themselves and shown themselves to be warriors for the right.

And now this retribution against the FBI agents and leaders appears to be already underway. It was picking up while Kash Patel was in his hearing. Domenico, can you just remind us what happened at the FBI? Nine high ranking officials being pushed out?

Yeah, there are senior FBI officials who were told to either resign or be fired by yesterday. And we know that there, as I mentioned a little earlier, this three-page questionnaire that's been going around the FBI to dig even deeper to find out people who had worked on January 6th.

And there's some thought that at the Justice Department as well, more broadly, that the prosecutors at the Justice Department are also going to be continued to be weeded out. I don't think this is going to be limited to just the FBI. And Java Nelly, to what extent is this unprecedented? To what extent is it legal? I mean, can they be pushed out like this without cause?

So, I mean, on the FBI side, um, based on what Domenico said and others have reported that if there's been a handful of senior agents who've either resigned or fired, not sure kind of technically what, what happened to them, but, um,

I would have to imagine that that senior level of management, most of those folks, if not all, were probably eligible to retire from the up and now doesn't diminish the probably the dissatisfaction of leaving probably sooner rather than later, but they all probably could have retired. I think the bigger question is now going forward.

how much deeper are these planned cuts to the FBI beyond this kind of senior ranks? And if there are anticipated,

if there isn't an anticipated reduction in force, what does that do to the FBI as an organization? Because the FBI is so critically important in keeping the country safe from a range of threats, both on the national security side and the criminal side. So if we're going to have a smaller FBI organization,

What does that mean from a mission perspective? And I think that's one of the more important questions that has to be answered. And this has gone further than just those officials, is my understanding, as well as folks in field offices and the like. And to your point, New Jersey's Chris Christie raised alarms about the length of time it takes to train an FBI agent. 12 to 18 months, he said, Javed, is that about right?

Yeah. Now, I also want to make clear, I was not an FBI agent in my FBI career. I was a senior analyst. But even understanding the roles of agents and analysts and how they come into the FBI sort of at the ground floor level, there is a pipeline for both of those

really important roles and it usually takes that period of time that Governor Christie described to bring somebody in. And then even when you get in, you go to your first duty assignment, whether it's in Washington, D.C. or any of the 56 field offices

throughout the country. And then you have to start to learn the tradecraft of either being an agent or an analyst, and there are other staff roles too. So these are all things that have to be thought through in terms of sort of the future of the Bureau.

We're talking with Javed Ali, who served in the FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and is associate professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. More with him and Domenico after the break.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking with Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent at NPR this hour, and Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, about the latest upheaval in Washington, the latest developments as well with regard to President Trump's nominees. And you, our listeners, are reacting to what do you think of Musk's attempts to shut down USAID and

and to also sweep into other agencies to, in the name of cost-cutting and waste reduction. What do you think of the Trump administration's recent moves to purge high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice officials, we should note, as well as the departure of career civil servants? And what are your reactions to the advancing of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to health and human services, as well as the status of

Trump's other controversial nominees. The phone number is 866-733-6786. The email address is forum at kqed.org. And you can find us on our social channels at KQED Forum. Susan writes,

Nancy writes, we should all begin writing emails and letters and calling the White House, directing our comments to President Musk. Perhaps that will bring his reign to an end. Eloise writes, for Kennedy to become HHS secretary would be great for improving the sad state of the health of most Americans. He is right that the power of big pharma and big ag has contributed to the level of chronic disease that is worse here than many other nations. The Democratic Party is captured by corporations.

Casey writes, anti-intellectualism both baffles me and deeply affects me personally. When did being qualified become so partisan? It used to just be that the appointees were from the industries they were supposed to regulate. At least they had some relevant knowledge. Let me go to Seth in Berkeley. Hi, Seth, you're on.

Hi. Thanks for listening to me. I just think that there's a stunning disconnect between the administration's anti-DEI stance, claiming that DEI ideology endangers us all by putting uncompromising

unqualified people in important jobs and Trump's own nominees who are the least qualified people to ever have these crucial jobs, like folks like Pete Hegseth, who's never managed an organization with a budget of over a few million dollars, who's now in charge of a trillion dollar...

Department of Defense budget, or Tulsi Gabbard, a known conspiracy theorist now in charge of coordinating work across 18 intelligence agencies, or Kash Patel, who's a children's book author and low-level Trump lackey in the first administration for FBI director, or Robert F. Kennedy, who's going to be in charge of a behemoth like HHS, which has literally trillions of dollars flowing through it for Medicare. So it's really clear that they're not bringing their best here.

Well, Seth, thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Javed, I want to ask you about this with regard to Kash Patel and his qualifications. He does have some relevant qualifications related to, I guess, serving the Department of Justice before and so on, but it does feel like he does not have...

widespread support among the FBI. And there are people who are reacting to the purge in various ways. Like we are seeing actual some level of institutional resistance. James Dennehy, the top agent in the FBI's New York field office said that it's time to dig in and has refused to comply with orders related to, you know, um,

getting rid of employees who have, you know, good standing at the organization, at the agency. I'm wondering if you could just talk about the extent to which you see this kind of institutional resistance at the FBI and if you think it will continue. Well, whether it's resistance or some other dynamic, what seems to be playing out is a level of pressure against the FBI that just doesn't seem like this has happened in modern times.

So, I mean, there's clearly a very different dynamic underway in FBI, but how it's playing out between headquarters and

in the field offices. I mean, it's hard to know. I mean, you'd have to actually have to be inside the FBI. And as Kash Patel is a nominee, as I keep going back to my point about Tulsi Gabbard, like a president Trump nominated both of them. They, I'm sure he understands their qualifications or their background. And now it's up to the Senate to sort of determine whether they believe that both of those individuals are sort of candidates for the positions to which they've been

Kash, as you mentioned, had served in the Department of Justice. He served in the Trump White House on the National Security Council. And then he had a couple of different roles in the Department of Defense. And I think he had a short stint in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So he is young. I think he would be or he already is the youngest FBI nominee ever. But he does have the national or some of the national security background.

qualifications. And now, again, it's a question of whether the Senate will select them and how this then plays out into

the sort of the pressure that's going on inside the FBI, this will be something that, you know, if he does get confirmed, then will he try to calm the waters or will there actually be more of this kind of internal internal churn? We don't know the answer to that. Well, relative though, to other FBI directors and also to the role itself, supposedly being one that's insulated from politics with the fact that it's supposed to be a 10 year role. I, you know,

It would be fair to say that he's very much out of the ordinary along those lines, right, Javed? Right. So the FBI director has a 10-year term, and that was instituted in the aftermath of J. Edgar Hoover serving for almost 50 years as the director of first the Bureau of Investigation and then when it became the FBI in 2008.

1935, and no one wants to go back to that version of the FBI because we all know the sort of bad things that happened under the COINTELPRO program from the late 50s to the 70s. So now there's a 10-year term. Director Mueller actually served more than 10 years in the transition between

President Bush and President Obama and then Director Wray, I believe, served seven years before resigning late last year. So the person can, whoever is, depending on when they

They come into an administration, they can stay inside one political eight-year term or they can transition between two. But ultimately, the FBI director serves at the pleasure of any president. And so that will just be another one of these factors that we have to wait and see how it plays out.

Well, Domenico, Javid has said a few times, it's up to the Senate. It's up to the Senate. And you were saying earlier that you actually have been pretty surprised that these most contested nominees appear to be candidates.

Well, not only appear to be advancing, they are advancing, but the ones whose votes are final yet appear to be doing okay with regard to statements made by the Senate GOP since they hold the majority. Why does it surprise you? And what do you think that says?

I guess I'm not surprised that the nominees are getting through. I guess I'm a little surprised based on the performances of RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and what some of the questions were from Republicans. They seemed very skeptical of the nominees in different ways.

Gabbard in particular, I think she's the one who was most surprising. I think most people thought after watching her hearing and listening to Republicans questions that maybe she's the one who they're going to say doesn't get through. And even Trump himself seemed to say, well, you know, it's up to them. We'll see what happens. I like her, but you know, it's up to them almost like, you know, distancing himself. But clearly he holds significant sway with Republicans and, you know, someone like Kash Patel,

He was very savvy in the way he answered some of these questions, reminded me of sometimes the Supreme Court justices where you weren't exactly sure what they're going to do when the decision is in front of them. I remember one line of questioning from Dick Durbin from Illinois, a Democrat who asked him about the commutations and pardons on January 6th, including specifically one person who had attacked law enforcement. And Patel said, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with Trump doing that. Anybody who attacked law enforcement

shouldn't have been – had their sentence commuted. At the same time, this is somebody who wrote a book about the FBI called Government Gangsters and he wrote in it, the rot at the core of the FBI isn't just scandalous. It's an existential threat to our republican form of government.

This is a long list of things that he has said and done over a long period of time that's provocative that he then just sort of dismissed or said he didn't remember or didn't agree with or doesn't feel that way anymore.

So he was able to sort of navigate very tricky waters in that way. And we're not sure what he's going to do or how he's going to interact. Is he going to use this quote unquote enemies list? And he said, I don't have an enemies list. Is he going to go after people? Is he going to try to root out some of the FBI agents who he doesn't think are good or are at the core rot, as he would put it? And more importantly, what is the FBI's focus going to be?

He said it's going to be on crime. What kinds of crime? Is he going to pursue strongly investigations against extremism in the United States or cases where guns are at the core of it? We don't know exactly, but we do know that a lot of the people that Trump has put forward are ideological and they have chips on their shoulder. And that's not always a good combination.

The sister writes, I'm worried that Trump's actions aren't about reducing government personnel, but replacing government personnel. He certainly talked about replacing them with loyalists. Let me go to Roger in Fairfax. Hi, Roger. Thanks for waiting. You're on.

Yeah, how do you do? Thank you. It's been a great program. You know, I'm just wondering if maybe the strategy needs to shift. It sounds almost like, you know, we don't protest too much. When it's been since 1989, since the last time there was a presidential nominee rejected, you know, rejected, that was President Bush's John Tower nomination. And it was 1925 before that.

I don't know. Shouldn't our, if you will, or, you know, the resistance be more along the lines of giving them enough rope to hang themselves? You know, say, OK, you know, you won the election here. We're going to we're going to approve everybody and the voters will decide two years from now. Interesting, Roger. Let me get Domenico's thoughts on that. What do you think about what Roger is saying?

Well, I'm very curious to see what Democrats do. I mean as far as what we're doing, I'm reporting the news and analyzing on what the events of the week have been. I think the Democrats have not been clear on what exactly their focus should be at this point. I mean I think that they get a vote. They get the advising consent vote.

vote in the Senate. And I will say to the point of the John Tower point, it's true that there hasn't been a cabinet level nominee who's been rejected since then. But that's because the ones that have been problems have withdrawn before there was a vote because they knew that there would be a problem. For example, think about someone like Tom Daschle, who is pretty well regarded former senator from South Dakota, Democrat, who had, you know, it seems quaint now, one of the nanny tax issues

uh... in being nominated to be health and human services director under prep former president obama uh... he withdrew uh... after became clear that he wasn't going to win nomination uh... so you know it's a it's a little skewed as far as uh...

who gets rejected or who doesn't. But I do think there's a big question on how Democrats wind up, quote unquote, fighting back. You know, we saw them sort of coalesce a bit and find their footing a bit with the spending freeze memo that went out

Because so many programs within the government, some people who maybe don't pay as much attention or are ideological about government just being too big or feeling that way, which is an understandably held belief about efficiency in government.

don't realize how many things the government does. And I think that all those open questions wound up leading to the administration pulling back on that memo to get, number one, get themselves out of court because a judge had put a block on it. And they're trying to figure out, I guess, through Doge, what things they are going to wind up freezing or not freezing. But I think that's where one place where Democrats seem to be able to find some footing. But

Look, there's going to be a presidential campaign that happens starting literally in about two and a half years. There's going to be midterms that are next year. And we're going to see who emerges from that, who has a vision for the country going forward that can lead Democrats beyond, you know, the Obama, Biden, Clinton, you know, 30 years of the Democratic politics. And well, let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

And doesn't testing the limits of presidential power in these ways come with potential political consequences, have great political risks? How far will people allow this to go? Right, Domenico? Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is one thing I've written about a bit is that presidents tend to overread their presidential mandate, quote unquote. I always kind of wince when I hear a president say, I have a mandate, because it

Especially these modern days, we don't have like 65 percent popular vote elections in favor of one person or another. So it's pretty divided, the country overall. And Trump didn't win even a majority of the popular vote. He got close but didn't get there. So to say that he has a mandate, if he had a mandate for anything, it was to lower prices and taxes.

Even that is something that he said is not his top priority. He's now said twice in the last two weeks. He said, how can you-- you can talk about the price of apples doubling, and then what are you going to do about it? How much can you talk about it? And he noted that his top priority is immigration. But I'm not sure that the people who crossed over maybe lower information, maybe working class, maybe struggling to make ends meet, who were upset with the price of their grocery bills,

were voting necessarily for Trump to be able to put in this entire regime of culture war, societal changes that he is pushing for. And what's always really lit up him and his base

Presidents can definitely go too far, and it's happened before. President Obama talked about the caution of second-term overreach. And at the same time, he said, I did win an election. And Trump doesn't have another election to have to run on. So if he does go too far, then it's only going to hurt his party, and there are very narrow majorities. And I think to that point, then Democrats have to be –

careful on what they pick and choose so that they don't protest too much, as the caller talked about, and seem to be able to lift out why people should care about this specific thing that they're upset about. Yeah, that's really hard. Yeah, Javit, I mean, the FBI and other major departments that you have worked in are not known for being the kind of entities that are going to have a bunch of activists or revolutionaries who are going to try to

you know, react against their own administration. But do you see a point where some of these actions could go too far, even for a department like the FBI, which I think has never had anyone lead it who's a Democrat or generally identified as such? Yeah, well, I mean, the world that I was in in my government career, national security, counterterrorism, the intelligence community, generally, culturally, most of those organizations are

are just sort of the, the kind of culture is conservative, uh, but it doesn't, you know, no one, it's very apolitical, you know, no one is sort of driven by politics, certainly at the civil service level. And the Bureau is a law enforcement organization and a national security organization. I would argue that culture's, uh, sort of fairly conservative as well, but, um,

we're just going to have to wait and see again with how deep are these sort of cuts going to go inside the FBI? Will there be more lawsuits kind of challenging, uh, attempts to drive people out of the, uh, organization? Um, how much smaller will the FBI become or will it not again? And it's, it's really tough to tell, but just sort of culturally the Bureau, uh, and most of these other, uh, organizations in national security are, are, um,

for the most part, conservative. Yeah, well, this listener about Wade and See says, while Democrats wait for the bromance between Elon and Trump to break down, the Republican sledgehammer swings. It reminds me of Mitch McConnell's takeover of the Supreme Court. While Republicans take devastating and lasting actions, Democrats talk about democracy looking weak and ineffective. For example, Chuck Schumer holding up an avocado and bottle of Corona. Is that all you got? Dems?

Another listener on Blue Sky writes, our response must involve both action in the courts as well as peaceful, nonviolent mass demonstrations exercising our right of assembly under the Constitution. Another listener on Discord writes, engagement by the citizenry is more important than ever. This is the greatest test of the democracy we live in. We need to have our voice individually and collectively. Domenico Montanaro, thank you so much for talking with us.

Hey, thanks for having me. Domenico is senior political editor and correspondent at NPR. Jabhat Ali, thank you as well. All right. Thank you, Mina. Associate professor of practice at the School of Public Policy. Thank you, as always, listeners, for sharing your reactions and thoughts and insights as well. My thanks to Susie Britton and Mark Nieto for producing today's segment. You've been listening to Foreign. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.