NEC Director Kevin Hassett, Rep. Tom Suozzi, Ken Burns

0:00I'm Weijia Jiang in Washington and this week on Face the Nation, President Trump gets a big Independence Day win as his one big beautiful bill is signed into law and devastating flash floods killed dozens in Texas. Tragedy this holiday weekend as flash floods sweep through parts of Texas, killing at least 50, including 15 children, some of whom were at summer camp. We'll have the latest. Then, after a long week lobbying for votes and cutting deals with his fellow Republicans, the president spent the 4th of July celebrating the nation's 249th birthday by enacting his signature tax cut and spending plan.

0:43It's really promises made, promises kept, and we've kept them. But Democrats and even some Republicans are not happy with the bill's projected debt and deficit increases, cuts to Medicaid and other provisions. We'll talk with the head of the White House Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, and New York centrist Democratic Congressman Tom Swasey about his party's plan to build on voter apprehension about the new law. Finally, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson talks to filmmaker and historian Ken Burns about his new project as America moves towards marking our 250th year. The American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ in all of world history.

1:28He'll explain why the lessons learned by our forefathers still apply today. It's all just ahead on Face the Nation.

1:50Good morning and welcome to Face the Nation. Margaret is out today. I'm Weijia Zhang. We've got a lot to get to, but we do want to begin with the unfolding disaster in Texas, where officials say at least 50 people are dead and dozens are missing after devastating flash floods. CBS News correspondent Jason Allen reports from Kerrville, Texas. More than 1 ,300 state and local emergency responders are still desperately searching the banks of the Guadalupe River this morning, marking cars and homes, picking through piles of debris, trying to find survivors of a historic and deadly flash flood. The deluge that began early Friday morning caused the usually tranquil river to rise 26 feet in only 45 minutes.

2:37We're at Camp Mystic looking for our kids. Much of the focus is on this summer camp, where more than two dozen third and fourth grade girls are still missing. Their parents are desperately searching. And then we're looking for places that they're going to potentially be alive. There's over 20 of them still out there. Kerr County does not have an outdoor warning system. That's typically the sirens that are used to alert people to tornadoes or other strong storms. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has been a part of discussions about changing the federal government's role in responding to major disasters, said that the weather alert system needs to be updated to give people more time and more warning ahead of extreme weather.

3:23The National Weather Service has indicated that with that and NOAA that we needed to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many, many years. And that is the reforms that are ongoing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has now signed an expanded disaster declaration order. You can see there is a little bit of rain here in the area this morning, but it's not expected to be anything like we saw the past couple of days, Weja. And although officials say that this is still an active rescue mission, they acknowledge that as the hours go by, it becomes less and less likely that they will find anyone alive.

4:01Our hearts are with all those families. Jason Allen in Kerrville, Texas, thank you. We turn now to Kevin Hassett. He is the director of the National Economic Council and one of President Trump's top advisors. He's also very popular on that driveway where I'm usually alongside about a dozen reporters. So, Kevin, thank you so much for your time this morning. I want to start with trade because there's a big deadline coming up on Wednesday. As you know, that 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs that the president announced back in April is set to end. So far, the U.S. has announced a few deals, the U.K., Vietnam, and you're inching closer to a final agreement with China.

4:42Do you expect to get any more deals done with America's biggest trading partners by Wednesday? Yeah, first I do have to take a pause and share your thoughts and prayers with the people of Texas. It's an incredible, heartbreaking story, and Kristi Noem and the president have instructed the federal government to throw everything they've got at helping the survivors and helping clean up that place. So anyway, I'm really heartbroken today to see these stories, and I want you to know that in the White House everybody is putting every effort they can into helping the people of Texas today. On trade, there's going to be quite a bit of news this week.

5:17And I think the headline of the news is that there are going to be deals that are finalized. There are a whole number that Jameson Greer has negotiated with foreign governments. And then there are going to be letters that are sent to countries saying, here's how we think it ought to go because the deals aren't advanced enough. And the headline is going to be that countries are agreeing around the world to open their markets up to our products and to allow us to put some kind of tariff on their products when they come into the U.S. And exactly what the numbers will be will be things that you'll find out in the news this week.

5:47And, Kevin, you said there are going to be deals. For those really important trading partners, if there's not a deal by Wednesday, is the president going to extend this pause? You know, the United States is always willing to talk to everybody about everything that's going on in the world. And there are deadlines and there are things that are close. And so maybe things will push past the deadline or maybe they won't. In the end, the president's going to make that judgment. And you also mentioned those letters that will start going out tomorrow, according to President Trump. He said about 10 to 12 countries will receive them.

6:23Can you tell us who's going to get one and what they say? I'm sorry, I can't. Because, again, the part of the letter that could be happening, right, is that we're close to a deal. We're not really satisfied with the progress that we're making in the deal. And so we're saying, OK, fine, we're going to send a letter. But maybe you get a deal at the last minute, too. Until we see everything that plays out, I think that we need to just hold our fire and watch for the news this week. Is it fair to say that those notices are going to go to our smaller trading partners as you negotiate with our bigger ones?

6:53I think that it could be that it'll be both. But also don't forget that when we have great trade deals, our smaller trading partners could become much bigger trading partners. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why countries are racing to set deals up with us ahead of the deadline. I have to ask you about the deadlines, Kevin, to make these deals, because you just mentioned you're always open. The president said there's not really any flexibility left between now and Wednesday. Less than two weeks ago, the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, said that deals would be wrapped up by Labor Day.

7:23So I wonder, you know, how can companies plan if the goalposts keep moving? How can countries negotiate if they don't even know how much time they have left? Right. Well, the rough outlines of the deals are becoming clear to everybody because we have some deals like the U.K. and the Vietnam deal that are starting to be, you know, I guess guidelines for what might happen. But one of the things that we're seeing that's really interesting to me is that people are just on-shoring production in the U.S. at a record rate. And so we've had record job creation, record capital spending, and this is even ahead of the big, beautiful bill.

7:57And so I think what's happening is that people are responding to President Trump's potential threats to have high tariffs on countries by moving their activity here into the U.S., which is creating jobs, more than two million jobs since he took office, and raising wages. Wage growth is heading up towards the really, really high pinnacles that we saw in 2017. And so I think there's a race right now to get activity into the U.S. And in part, that race has been kicked off by President Trump. I remember after these reciprocal tariffs were announced, you told me that there are about 15 deals that countries were bringing to the president.

8:33How close, if you could give us any number at all, what number are we going to see this week? Yeah, you'll have to get that from Jamison and the president. I think that we've seen lots of deals that have been finalized by our negotiators, and then the president finds things that could make them better. And so I'm not going to get ahead of the president on the number of deals. Okay, thanks, Kevin. We'll look out for that. I want to move now to the one big, beautiful bill that, of course, the president signed into law on Independence Day. You have it, and now you have to pay for it. And there's a consensus that this bill adds tremendously to the deficit.

9:10I know that you are so familiar with these numbers. The Yale Budget Lab estimates it will add$3 trillion to the debt. The Tax Foundation says this tax portion of the bill could also add$3 trillion to the deficit. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which factors in interest on the debt, says it could add up to$5 trillion over the next decade. And on this very program, even Speaker Johnson answered in the affirmative when asked if this bill would add over$4 trillion to the deficit. I know that the administration says the bill will actually shrink the deficit by$1.5 trillion. Help me understand why there is such a drastic difference between your number and all those others.

9:54Well, first of all, let's remember that science is not democracy. Truth is not democracy. Our estimates are based on modeling that we used last time when I was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to say what would happen if we had a bill, how much growth we would get. And we said, and we were criticized soundly that we would get 3 % growth. And we even had the really technical macroeconomic models that said that we would get 3 % growth. We run the same models through this tax bill. It's even better. And what we're seeing is that if you get 3 % growth again, then that's$4 trillion more in revenue than the CBO and these other bodies are giving us credit for.

10:31They have been wrong in the past, and they're being wrong again in our belief. But the thing that disappoints me is that if I put out a model and I say, hey, here's what's going to happen, we're going to get 3 % growth, and then it turns out it's 1.5 % growth, then as an academic economist, as a scientist, then it's my duty to say, what did I get wrong? What did my model miss? These people aren't doing that. And that's the thing that I find disappointing, because we put peer-reviewed academic stuff on the table, said we're going to get that 3 % growth, and then we got it right last time, and we believe we're going to get it right this time.

11:02But if you think that 1.8 % growth is what's going to happen over the next 10 years, then you should agree with the CBO number. But there's another part of the CBO number that you need to worry about, and that is that if we don't pass the bill, then it's the biggest tax hike in history. And with that big tax hike, then of course we would have a recession. The CEA says that we'd have about a 4 % drop in GDP and lose 9 million jobs. If we had a 4 % drop in GDP and we lost 9 million jobs, what would happen to the deficit? And so I don't think that the CBO has a very strong record. I don't think these places have a very strong record.

11:33And what they need to do is get back to the basics of looking at macroeconomic models. There's a really famous macroeconomist at Harvard named Jim Stock. They should go back and read everything Jim Stock has written for the last 15 years and fold those into their models, and then maybe we could talk. I want to talk to you, Kevin, about another number that I know you and the president disagree with, but that Democrats and many Republicans are worried about. And that's the CBO's projection that as many as 12 million Americans could lose Medicaid coverage because of this law. What is the NEC's estimate for how many people could lose coverage?

12:07Well, yeah, let's unbundle that a little bit. Because first, on the CBO coverage, so what are we doing? So what we're doing is we're asking for a work requirement. But the work requirement is that you need to be looking for work or even doing volunteer work. And you don't need to do it until your kids are 14 or older. And so the idea that that's going to cause a massive hemorrhaging in availability of insurance doesn't make a lot of sense to us. And that if you look at the CBO numbers, if you look at the big numbers, they say that people are going to lose insurance. About five million of those are people who have other insurance.

12:39There are people who have two types of insurance. And so therefore, if they lose one, they're still insured. And so the CBO numbers on that side don't make any sense to us at all. But on the other side, go back to 2017 when we had work requirements for Obamacare. They said that we'd lose about 4 million insured between 2017 and 2019, and about double that over the next 10 years. And in fact, the number of insured went up quite a bit by more than 10 million over those two years, because the bottom line is the best way to get insurance is to get a job. And we've got a big, beautiful bill that's going to create a lot of job creation and a lot of insurance, and the CBO is just not accounting for that.

13:15And again, they need to go back and look at all the things that they got wrong. You realize that they're underestimating Medicaid spending by 20%. They should look back at all the things they got wrong and explain what they're going to do to get it right in the future and to do a better job. And if they do that, we'll take them more seriously. But right now, I don't think any serious thinker could take them seriously because they've been so wrong for so long. Even back, if you go back to when President Obama passed Obamacare, they got every single number there wrong about how many people would get private insurance and how few people would get Medicaid and so on.

13:44And so their record in this modeling space is about as bad as it's possible to be. In fact, you could kind of roll the roulette wheel and come up with a better set of numbers, better history, track record history than CBO. Kevin, what about the enhanced subsidies? Is that number wrong, too, that the ACA allows about$705 for people to help pay for their health insurance? That doesn't sound like the waste, fraud, and abuse that I know you and the president have talked about eliminating. That just sounds like people who cannot afford coverage. And now it's going to be even more so with these subsidies gone.

14:21Right. Well, well, what what if you're if you're looking at the the change in the tax on the providers, which is something that has been a key talking point for the Democrats, they say that that's going to close down rural hospitals. What has happened is that rather than let the states the states have this game where they give a dollar to a hospital and then the federal government matches the dollar, and then the state taxes some of the dollar away. In other words, we have an agreement with the states that they're going to match, but then they have this trick where they tax the hospitals after they give them money, so really it's the federal government giving them the money.

14:54And that's why we've been overspending Medicaid by 20 % since this trick started happening. And so what we've done is that we've put a haircut on that, but we've also put$50 billion into a trust fund to make sure that the rural hospitals are there to treat the sick. And so I think this is a prudent forum. It's sound budgetary politics. And I think that nobody's going to lose their insurance. Kevin Hassett, we will watch for how that ages. Thank you very much. Really appreciate your time. If I get it wrong, we'll check. And we'll talk about why I got it wrong, I promise. Thank you. We'll have you back.

15:27Thank you very much, Kevin. Face the Nation will be back in one minute. Stay with us. We turn now to New York Democratic Congressman Tom Swasey. Congressman, thank you so much for your time this morning. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Well, you just heard from Kevin Hassett. You know, like President Trump, he said without this bill, it would be one of the greatest tax hikes for the American public. They say it is the greatest tax cut in American history. You sit on the Ways and Means Committee, so I have to wonder how you describe it. I describe it as the big, ugly bill, not the big, beautiful bill.

16:08It's going to do a lot of things that are going to hurt a lot of people in our country. The biggest one, which you talked about with Mr. Hassett, is increase the deficit enormously in the country. And what that does is that creates inflation that keeps interest rates high. That makes it hard for people to buy homes. Makes it hard for them to borrow money to do the things that they want to do. In addition, it's going to knock a bunch of people off of health care. We know that the Republicans have tried for a decade to undo the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. And this is kind of a backdoor way to take health insurance away from people that really need it the most here in our nation.

16:42And it's going to cause health insurance costs to go up for a lot of people. One of the president's biggest issues he campaigned on was reducing prices rapidly on day one. We're going to cut the costs. Well, costs are not going down. Enflation is going to be affected by this deficit. Interest rates are going to stay high. And this is going to have a negative impact on health insurance costs for many people in our country. I know that you just brought up Medicaid and potential loss of coverage. What do you say to some Americans who might wonder, well, why should the able-bodied not have to work in order to access Medicaid?

17:18Well, you have to understand that 92 percent of the people that are able to work are currently working, and the 8 percent that are not are often people that are taking care of disabled children. Remember that two-thirds of the people in nursing homes are on Medicaid. One-tenth of all the veterans in the United States of America are on Medicaid. Medicaid is a lifeline for so many people that are facing such difficult circumstances that we can't even possibly imagine. And why would we be taking health insurance and food benefits away from some of the most needy Americans while we're providing what I believe is an unnecessary tax break for some of the wealthiest Americans?

17:55It just doesn't make sense that you're reducing taxes for some of the wealthiest people, hurting some of the lowest income people while blowing the biggest deficit in the budget that we've had in the history of the country. Those things just don't add up. Well, just last week, you said you agree with 75 percent of what's in this package. That's a pretty significant number. So why isn't it worth the 25 percent that you don't like? Because those things that I just mentioned are so devastating. I like the idea that we're investing more money to secure the border. I like the idea that we are providing tax breaks to lower income folks and hardworking middle class folks and people aspiring to the middle class.

18:37I like the idea of providing tax breaks for those folks. But why are we providing? And when the economy is doing as well as it has been over the past several years, why would we be providing a tax decrease, tax breaks for some of the wealthiest Americans in our country while blowing a massive hole in the deficit. Congressman, I want to turn to an op-ed that you wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week saying Zoran Mondani's win in the New York City's Democratic mayoral primary should be a, quote, loud wake-up call for Democrats. What lessons do you think your party can learn from his campaign?

19:17Well, you know, I disagree with Mr. Mondani. I have to make that very clear that, you know, I'm a Democratic capitalist. I'm not a Democratic socialist. And but you have to recognize that he tapped into something. He tapped into the same thing that Donald Trump tapped into, which is that people are concerned that the economy is not working for them. Affordability and the economy is the number one issue in the country. And too often Democrats are not perceived as being focused on affordability and the economy and the middle class and people aspiring to the middle class and their economic concerns.

19:52They see Democrats as being primarily focused on reproductive rights and on LGBT protections, which are important issues. But they're not the issues that people think about every night when they're lying in bed thinking about paying their bills or when they're talking about how they're going to send their kids to school. So Democrats have got to do a better job learning from both Trump and Mondami, not with their solutions, which I think are wrong, but with the diagnosis of the problem that we're frustrated, we're concerned. Everybody in America, whether you're a right-wing conservative or a left-wing progressive, should believe that in return for working hard, you make enough money so you can live a good life.

20:31You can buy a home. You can educate your children. You can pay for your health insurance. You can retire one day without being scared. People don't feel that currently, and we have to do a better job of communicating that. Well, I'm glad you brought up the perception, because you also wrote that Democrats must recognize the future starts with a message of economic security for American families. I covered the Biden campaign. I covered the Harris campaign. That was the center of their messages. So what's the problem here? Is it the messenger? Is it the messaging? Because they have that message already.

21:04It's a combination. Number one, the Democratic Party as a whole has to have this platform that focuses on what the people care about. They care about the economy. They care about immigration. They care about taxes. They care about crime. They care about health care. But then we have to recognize that the media infrastructure is fractured. And Trump figured it out before the Democrats have, which is that it's not just traditional media like your shows and newspapers, but it's social media. It's podcasts, podcasts, the top 500 podcasts in America. 400 of the top 500 are right leaning. 100 are left leaning.

21:38And of the 100 left leaning ones, half of them beat the you know what out of the Democrats. Then you have other national media, and then you have some of this ethnic and underground media related to WeChat and WhatsApp and different types of apps that people use. So we have to communicate across all those platforms because people are getting their messages in these fractured environments and living in these echo chambers. And we have to do a better job communicating across all these platforms and getting Democrats as a whole to focus on the economy, immigration, etc. All right, Congressman, we are all trying to learn all those new languages.

22:16Thank you so much for your time this morning. And we'll be right back with a lot more Face the Nation. Stay with us. If you're looking for more Face the Nation, including extended interviews and special content, you can visit our YouTube page or subscribe to our podcast. It's available on all platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon. We'll be right back with an interview with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns on the American Revolution. Stay with us.

23:01Welcome back to Face the Nation. A day ahead of America's 249th birthday, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson met up with filmmaker and historian Ken Burns at Monticello, Virginia, the home of our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Burns has a new film out this November on PBS entitled The American Revolution, and he gave us a preview. You call the revolutionary period a civil war. Was that always your conception of the revolution? How did you come to think of it that way? I think because there are no photographs and there's no newsreels and they're in, you know, stockings and breeches and powdered wigs, there's a sense of distance from them.

23:42I think we also are so proud, rightfully, of the power of the big ideas that we just don't want to get into the fact that it was this bloody civil war, patriots against loyalists, disaffected people, native people, enslaved and free people within it, foreign powers that are ultimately engaged in this. This is a big world war by the end. I think we perhaps are fearful that those big ideas are diminishing. They're not in any way. They're, in fact, become even more inspiring that they emerge from the turmoil. How should we think about the Declaration of Independence this period in America in our present day?