OMB Director Russell Vought, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Ohio State President Ted Carter 

20:44The real goal of this other effort is to use food as a weapon of war and population control.

20:52Margaret Brennan:That's a violation of international law. Yes, it is. That's a human rights abuse. Senator Lindsey Graham was on Meet the Press this morning, and I want to ask for your reaction to something he said, because he was very strong in his words. He said because the ceasefire talks fell apart, Israel's reassessing. He said to expect a full military effort by Israel to take Gaza down, quote, like we did in Tokyo and Berlin. They're going to do in Gaza what we did in Tokyo and Berlin, take the place by force, start over again, present a better future. The United States is a huge supporter of the state of Israel.

21:31Is there anything that could prevent what he says is about to happen? Well, the United States should make very clear that it's unacceptable to use U.S. weapons to target or indiscriminately fire on civilians and civilian infrastructure.

21:52Margaret Brennan:Is this not like an occupation? Well, we also know just this week, members of the Netanyahu coalition, in fact, government ministers called for essentially erasing Gaza. And they said it will become a Jewish state statelet. And part of. So this was one of the who did say he didn't agree with. Well, here's the problem, though, Margaret. We continually see that Netanyahu, at the end of the day, does cater to his most far-right wing of his government. People like Ben Gavir, people like Smotrich. That is what has allowed him to stay in power. And so at the end of the day, he takes the most extreme positions.

22:38Margaret Brennan:Senator Van Collen, thank you. If you're looking for more Face the Nation, including extended interviews and special content, You can find it on 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 a lot more Face the Nation, including an update on the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, an interview with the French foreign minister, and a conversation about the future of higher education with the president of The Ohio State University. Stay with us.

23:29Margaret Brennan:Welcome back to Face the Nation. We turn now to the crisis in the Gaza Strip, where Israel's partial pause in fighting will end in a few hours. Our Elizabeth Palmer has the latest. In an abrupt reversal, Israel cleared the way for more aid to Gaza. Overnight, the military airdropped food and supplies. But those pallets are a fraction of what's needed. The bulk of the aid is on trucks waiting to go. And in what could be a game-changer, Israel says it will establish secure routes through the war zone so the trucks will no longer be shot at or looted. Gaza's misery has shocked the world. Why? And international medical agencies say children, especially the poorest and those with special needs, are suffering from acute malnutrition.

24:24Since March, when the ceasefire ended, aid has trickled into the war zone. But not nearly enough. Israel sidelined the main UN agencies and funneled most aid through the privately run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has only four distribution hubs for two million people. As hunger grew, so did reports of Israeli soldiers shooting at crowds trying to get something to eat. Even so, desperation pushed Gazans to risk death, plundering aid from moving convoys. Alongside the shooting war, there was also a war of words. Israel's military insisted it was letting in plenty of aid. It's just the U.N.

25:13agencies weren't picking it up. The agency said the army made it too dangerous. And while the blame game played out, Gazans grew thinner and sicker. Now Israel has announced a change of policy. Aid has begun moving under the new rules today. For Gazans, it's not a minute too soon.

25:37Margaret Brennan:That was our senior foreign correspondent, Elizabeth Palmer. We turn now to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barreau, who joins us this morning from Paris. Welcome to Face the Nation. I want to begin on what is happening in Gaza with those horrific images that we are seeing of starvation. Overnight, Israel has begun airdrops. We know Jordan, other states are looking to organize more aid. Are you exploring any further avenues to bring aid into Gaza? What's happening in Gaza right now is appalling. Gaza is now in the brink of a full catastrophe. And we've been working out over the months to try and relief the sufferings of the Palestinian people.

26:28We actually have 52 tons of humanitarian help stuck in El Arish, in Egypt, a few kilometers away from Gaza. So we're exploring all options to seize the opportunity offered by the Israeli government by opening the skies of Gaza. But we call for immediate, unhindered, and massive access by all means of humanitarian help to those who need it most.

26:53Margaret Brennan:Has Israel responded to your calls? We have with the European Union started tough discussions with the Israeli government who have made first commitments that have not been fulfilled yet. In the next few days, the European Commission will make clear what our expectations are. We expect the Israeli government to stop the operations of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that has caused bloodbaths in humanitarian health distribution lines in Gaza. We expect them to pay the 2 billion euros they owe to the Palestinian Authority and to lift the financial blockage that is now preventing the Palestinian Authority to implement its most basic missions.

27:39We also expect the Israeli government to bring to a stop its latest settlement projects, the E1 projects, with 3 ,400 housing units that might split the West Bank in two pieces and prevent the emergence of a political two-state solution. But what we call for is, of course, the immediate ceasefire, the liberation of whole hostages of Hamas that needs to be disarmed, and the entry, the massive entry of humanitarian help in Gaza.

28:12Margaret Brennan:You are headed to New York, to the United Nations, to help lead a summit to talk about a two-state solution. Your president announced France will formally recognize the state of Palestine at the UN in September. More than 100 countries recognize Palestine, but France is the first Western U.N. Security Council member to do so. And the United States opposes what you are saying. Secretary of State Rubio called it reckless. He says it serves Hamas propaganda, sets back peace, and considers it a slap in the face to the victims of October 7th. In your government's view, why is he wrong? So the reason why President Macron made this decision is that it was absolutely necessary to restart a political process, the two-state solution process, that is today threatened, more threatened than it has ever been.

29:06And the conference that will take place in New York tomorrow and Tuesday is a very significant milestone. Because by recognizing or announcing the recognition of Palestine, France has been able, alongside Saudi Arabia, that will be co-chairing this conference with us, to collect very significant historic commitments by all stakeholders, including the Palestinian Authority president and Arab countries in favor of the two-state solution and security guarantees for Israel. The two-state solution is very simple and I think everyone can understand what we mean by that. The only way to bring peace and stability back in this region is to have two states, the state of Israel and the state of Palestine, living side by side in peace and in security.

29:58And what we're doing, by bringing the Palestinian Authority leader to recognize 7th of October as a terrorist attack, by calling for the disarmament of Hamas and the liberation of hostages, by committing to deep reform of the Palestinian Authority, and by committing to elections within one year, by bringing the Arab countries for the first time to condemn Hamas and call for its disarmament, we are creating or recreating the conditions for this political solution that, again, is the only passport. And we are paving the way.

30:37Margaret Brennan:Minister Barrault, the president of the United States dismissed what President Macron said. The U.S. ambassador mocked it. Do you believe that your plans can succeed without U.S. support? Again, our efforts are very complementary. We share The short-term objective, ceasefire, liberation of all hostages of Hamas, and the long-term objective, peace and stability in the region. But in the meantime, until the U.S. administration provides, through the Abraham Accord logics, a political horizon for this crisis, we need to act in order to facilitate or create an off-ramp for the catastrophe ongoing in Gaza.

31:23In other terms, we will welcome and support future Abraham Accords, but in the meantime, inaction is not an option.

31:32Margaret Brennan:I want to ask you briefly about an incident that has gained a lot of attention this past week involving some young French citizens who were removed from a flight from Spain. The airline claims they were kicked off for being disruptive. The Israeli government came out, though, and said the French students were removed because they're Jewish. Have you determined whether this was indeed an act of anti-Semitism? I have called the CEO of this company to express our serious preoccupation. She has confirmed that an internal investigation is ongoing. My team has been reaching out to the ambassador of Spain in France, and we've made the same request.

32:19We'll keep following this situation as it unravels.

32:23Margaret Brennan:So too early to say, despite what the Israeli government is indicating. I cannot comment on that at this point. France has been very active diplomatically on a number of fronts. It was just five weeks ago when the United States and Israel bombed Iran. Since that time, France has talked to the Iranian government, along with other European powers, about what remains of Iran's nuclear program. How concerned are you that after these bombings, Iran may now covertly attempt to make a weapon and the world won't know? This is still a risk that we are facing. And alongside Germany and the UK, we have been very clear, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

33:15And we've been, over the past few months, reaching out to the Iranian authority in close coordination with the US authorities in order to express what our expectations are. 10 years ago, we reached a deal on the nuclear program that allowed for a significant rollback of Iranian nuclear capacity. Of course, things have changed till then, and since then, Iran has violated all commitments it had taken at the time of signing this agreement. We now want a more comprehensive agreement that would encompass both the nuclear dimension of Iranian destabilization activities, but also it's the ballistic component as well as the regional destabilization activities that Iran has been conducting.

34:08conducting. Unless we, unless a new and robust and durable and verifiable agreement is reached by the end of the summer, France, Germany, and the U.K. will have no other choice but to reapply the global embargoes that were lifted ten years ago when the nuclear agreement with Iran was signed, embargoes on weapons, on nuclear equipment, and on banking.

34:34Margaret Brennan:So France is ready to snap back sanctions on Iran as soon as August. Are you asking Iran to speak directly to the United States in order to avoid that fate? Oh, we've been speaking with Special Envoy Witkoff, Secretary Rubio, on a weekly basis on this topic that is highly important for the U.S. as for Europeans. We have supported US-led efforts to enter into discussions with Iran. We have pressed Iran after the 12-day war to go back to a discussion with the US. And we keep pressing them to do so because indeed, if there is no solid agreement that can be found by the end of August, we will have no other option but to snap back, meaning to reapply those global embargoes and we are ready to do that.

35:30Margaret Brennan:Minister Barrow, thank you very much for your time this morning. We go now to Columbus, Ohio, and the president of The Ohio State University, Ted Carter. President Carter, welcome to Face the Nation. Good morning, Margaret. Good to be with you on this Sunday from Columbus, Ohio. I wanted to ask you very directly about these Trump administration claims that Ohio State is one of 60 universities that they deemed may have anti-Semitic practices and policies on campus. They say you're being investigated for them and for failing to end diversity policies, which could be a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

36:09Margaret Brennan:What's the status of the probes and how much pressure are you under? To be quite frank, I'm not feeling a lot of pressure. Our understanding is we're on those lists because we had been previously on those lists under the Biden administration. We had been working with the Office of Civil Rights during that administration and I think mostly that was a holdover. We are more than happy to talk to anybody from the Office of Civil Rights. We stand behind our actions. We know how we acted during the time of the protests. We never had an encampment here at Ohio State. We had some attempted. We didn't allow that and that's our long-standing rules on the oval which is the centerpiece of our campus.

36:50So I'm confident that as this plays out forward that we're gonna be just fine.

36:55Margaret Brennan:The Trump administration did publish Ohio State on the list of universities. It's probing. And when you look at some of the issues they've raised at other places, you look at the results of freezing$3 billion in contracts at Harvard,$1 billion at Cornell, hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at universities like Brown. Are you worried that your federal funds could be in jeopardy because of this? Well, like I always say to my staff and my people, if we do the right things for the right reasons, everything will play out. And we've been doing it that way since I've been here since one January of 2024.

37:36Our research funding here at Ohio State has grown leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. We're actually ranked number 11th in the country ahead of Harvard, ahead of UNC Chapel Hill. our revenues last year were$1.6 billion. 775 million of that came from the federal government, largely in NIH and NSF. As we sit here today, we've had some research grants impacted, but in the tens of millions of dollars, nothing like you're seeing at our Ivy League colleagues. And a lot of that is still in litigation. So I can't even tell you what the number of dollars that we may lose, but against the$1.6 billion, it's pretty small, even though it's had some impact on some of our researchers.

38:22Unlike some of our counterparts, we have a significant research arm here, 14 ,000 faculty, postdoc students that do the research here, and it is significant. It goes way beyond the numbers and the dollars. It's what it's doing for the community, what it's doing to extend and save and change lives, and what it's doing in agriculture, what it's doing for our police force. So what I would tell you is at this moment today, even compared to where we were last year, we're still up in our research revenue about 7 percent from where we were last year. And we're we're proceeding to ask for more grants so that we can be a cancer free world here in our lifetime.

39:02Margaret Brennan:Well, we all hope for that future, sir. But you sound not to be concerned. But I did read that earlier when you had the Buckeyes football team at the White House earlier in the year, and that was well covered. The Wall Street Journal said you told President Trump and Vice President Vance that, quote, Ohio State is not the enemy. Why did you feel you had to say that? What did you mean? Well, that might have been taken a little bit out of context. I kind of said that in jest a little bit to the Vice President when I had a chance to meet with him. And we had a long conversation. It was a very productive conversation.

39:39I won't go into all the details. But the point is, they know that Ohio State is doing the right things for the right reasons. I have said publicly that I believe the future of higher education is going to go through the large public land-grant flagship institutions like the Ohio State University. I look at what we're doing today. And yes, like many other universities, there's a lot of concern about the future, what's coming out of the federal government, and even what's coming out of our state government here in Ohio. But right now, I feel like we can still play defense, still understand how to adjust, kind of make sure that we're getting our bat on the ball, so to speak, and playing defense and protecting the plate.

40:18But we're also looking at how we can play offense. This is a time where institutions like Ohio State, we are very financially secure. We're actually looking to invest in ourselves. I just reflect on the graduation ceremony that we just had this past May. We produce about 18 ,000 graduates a year, but at that ceremony, we graduated 12 ,400. All of them, by the way, got their diploma that day that they earned. And 90 % of those students, 90 % already had a job or they were going to another higher academic endeavor. And 70 % of those undergraduate students are staying in the state of Ohio. 66 % of the PhD and master's are staying in the state of Ohio.

40:58This is a wonderful workforce development program that is what is raising the confidence of Ohioans and the American public in higher education. And that is starting to change.

41:08Margaret Brennan:Vice President Vance was on this program a number of times, and one of them when he was still a senator, I spoke to him about his views on higher education. He's an Ohio State alum, undergrad. and he said he believes universities, he wasn't speaking of yours, but he said universities are controlled by left-wing foundations and they're going in the wrong direction. Do you think he has a point? I think higher education has started to build that reputation and you can even see that in the Gallup Lumina polls. You know, I was the superintendent of the Naval Academy from 2014 to 2019. You know, in that Gallup poll in 2015 said that nearly 60 percent of Americans had high confidence in post-secondary education.

41:52Now, go ahead and just move that needle nine years forward, and yet two in three Americans said they did not have confidence in higher education. That's a really bad mark. Americans were saying higher education costs too much. They were saying that the return on investment was difficult to prove. They were even saying some of the research being may not impact them or their families. And yes, it was this conversation about the potential indoctrination of students or that institutions were leaning very liberal. You know, we as administrators of higher education maybe ought to listen to the American public and say maybe we haven't always gotten it right.

42:29So I'm here to say here at The Ohio State University, we have paid attention to that. We are making efforts to make affordability a key issue for students. I mentioned that graduating class, 57 % of those undergraduates left with zero debt, zero debt. And the other 43 % that left with debt was less than$24 ,000. And as we look across, you know, our hiring practices, I have 8 ,500 faculty. That is the best group of faculty I have ever worked with in my 12 years of leading in higher ed. And that's saying quite a bit. And I will tell you that as we hire the future, we're looking across the entire political spectrum for who we hire.

43:06Margaret Brennan:On that point, you talked about what happened at the state level. The Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law that eliminates the diversity programs, does a number of things, but it also requires professors to post their course syllabus, syllabi online, and their contact information. Do you think that this is meant to intimidate? Are you concerned? Is your faculty concerned about the focus on what they're doing? Yes. I have talked to our faculty, you know, through our faculty senate and our leadership. There are some concerns of course because we've not done that before. We've got some time before we implement that.

43:43We have put all the pieces of Senate Bill 1, which is the General Assembly's bill here in the state of Ohio, into implementation phase. We're still working through some of the details, but let me tell you the principles of academic freedom, what is taught in the classroom, the move towards scholarly pursuit, the research that we do here at Ohio State, those are things that we are still very passionate about. And I know that we're going to continue that work and yet we'll still follow the law. We'll still follow some of the federal policies that are coming out. We're ready and prepared to do all that.

44:17Margaret Brennan:To that point, you saw what Columbia University did this week in paying the$200 million fine to settle their dispute with the Trump administration. They also agreed to an outside monitor to assure the school complies with stamping out diversity programs. Does this precedent trouble you? I mean, would you take a deal like that? Well, I can't speak to those institutions because I'm not leading them. I know both the President Shipman and some of the other Ivy League presidents are colleagues and they're having to do, I think, what I would call a be in survival mode, quite frankly. We're not going through any of that here at Ohio State and nor do I think that we will.

44:58I mean, obviously we have a new state law, we're a public institution. So that means we're gonna be transparent and put out everything that we do so that the state of Ohio, the people, and the entire country can see it.

45:10Margaret Brennan:We will watch to see what happens. Good luck to you, sir. We'll be right back.

45:17Margaret Brennan:That's it for us today. Thank you all for watching. Until next week, for Face the Nation, I'm Margaret Brennan. Today's guests were the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt, Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen, The Ohio State University President Ted Carter and the Foreign Minister of France Jean-Noël Barreau. The senior executive producer of Face the Nation is Mary Hager and the executive producer is Anne Hsu. This broadcast was directed by Shelley Schwartz. Face the Nation originates from CBS News in Washington. For more, we're online at facethenation.com and on YouTube.

45:52Margaret Brennan:We're also rebroadcast on our CBS News 24-7 streaming network at 1230 on Sundays. And we're available through our apps, CBS News and Paramount+.