FDA Commissioner Makary & OMB Director Vought 7/22/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Marty McCurry, head of the FDA, is 100 days on the job. A controversial few months for the agency, measles cases at a 33-year high, and public trust trending lower. If we have vaccine mandates for young, healthy individuals, we were going to see a rise of an anti-vaccine sentiment, and I think that's exactly what happened. We saw a tremendous loss in public trust. And the White House is mounting pressure on the head of the Federal Reserve. OMB Director Russell Vogt takes issue with Jay Powell's revamp of the Fed's HQ, as well as his monetary policy.

0:42At every step of the way, we have problems with regard to the management of the Fed. He's too late and he's incredibly expensive with regard to his building project. And we're going to get to the bottom of that. Politics makes strange bedfellows from who's in favor at the White House to who's in favor in New York City? And President Trump announces new tariffs on Canada. Something must have made him mad. Our Megan Casella with the latest. Vast expansion of the trade war on multiple fronts just in the past few days. It's Friday, July 11th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand by in three, two, one.

1:22Fuel, please. Good morning. Welcome to Squawk Box here on CNBC. We're live at the Nasdaq Market side in Times Square. I'm Melissa Lee along with Joe Kernan. Becky and Andrew are off on this Friday. So yesterday you were like, it just wasn't, it wasn't like. I needed a break. It was a lot of a good thing. Thought I'd give it. That's what it is. Too much. There's a lot of things. There's a lot. I've never done, but I never had too much fun or too much. Melissa. So one day off. Now you're back. Back. Ready and ready and ready to go into saddle. Perfect. Good. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much.

1:58for being here in fact i'll wait for my edible arrangement um crypto prices they are soaring beyond that record said yesterday fresh records on bitcoin this morning look at that level 118 450 of four and a half percent ether up seven percent it has had a great week this week remember we talked to joe lubin earlier amazing and you know who everyone talks about is our guy that we usually you talk about for the S &P and stocks is Tom Lee. Tom Lee, yeah, because he's been a bull for a long time. But the way he is a bull, he's on here, and Bitcoin will be at 70, and he'll just, and I go, well, what do you think?

2:37And he goes, well, I'm expecting 120 to 150. Right, and you think he's nuts. And you think he's absolutely crazy. That's the way he was when it first went up to 20 ,000 years ago, and it dropped all the way to 3 ,000 or something. And he said, oh, I think we'll be back to 20 by the end of the year. And at one point before I got, before I got. But you became a believer. Orange-pilled. I got orange-pilled pretty early. But it was at$8 ,000. It went down to$4 ,000. But one of my purchases was at$4 ,000. Wow. Yes. So I had some at$4 ,000. Did you take profits? I sold a lot at$55 ,000. I still have pretty much.

3:12I still have them. I'm fine. I'm good. And I love them. It's tough to enter now. You can buy fractional shares. But if you're a long-term believer. If you're still a hodler, they've been buying all along. But I remember when he said it then, I asked him, I said, you're so good at it. Why do you delve in this? It's so much easier for stocks. And you're so good at calling short-term trends on the S &P. You know, why risk your reputation on this? What at that point was such a thing. He probably didn't view it as a risk. No, he didn't. He was so sure of his forecast. Crypto-related stocks, by the way, also catching a bid.

3:44We've got sort of the double whammy going of the crypto trade working. You know, the coins actually working. But also that core weave deal for Core Scientific, also raising the value of a lot of the Bitcoin miners out there. Core Scientific, of course, prior to being what it is now, was a Bitcoin miner. It's got a lot of compute power and those assets might be up for sale. So we're seeing nice gains pre-market across the board. President Trump announcing tariffs on imports from Canada of 35 percent. Something must have made him mad. I don't know what the latest is. Maybe Megan knows. They start on August 1st.

4:18Megan Casella joins us now from Washington. Any particular thing or just the, you know, slow walking the whole process? What did anything in particular spur this latest threat? Not that we know of yet, Joe. We might learn today, but we don't know exactly what sparked this latest Canada threat. But I'll say there were two big escalations overnight on the trade and tariff front from the president, Canada being the first one, 35 % on imports from Canada, which, by the way, the second largest U.S. trading partner and the largest buyer of American goods last year. Now, an administration official did tell me late last night that the exemptions currently in place for USMCA-compliant goods likely will remain, as will the lower 10 % tariff for energy imports.

5:05That would soften this a little bit, but still a significant escalation from the 25 % level where it is now to 35 % on everything else. I was told that decision is not final. And this does come, to your point, just a few days, I think two weeks, after the president was first angry about Canada's digital services tax. And then once Prime Minister Mark Carney pulled that back, then things seemed to be back on track. So we don't know what caused this one. The other big tariff threat overnight, though, is that President Trump also told NBC News he's considering raising the universal baseline tariff from the 10 percent level where it has been since April to 15 or even 20 percent.

5:43So that would mean everything U.S. companies and consumers buy from abroad would cost at a minimum an extra 20 percent in the form of tariffs. And if I can take just a step back, this week began with the president postponing that major July 9th deadline for the country-specific tariffs to kick in. It looked like a potential softening of his trade stance, or at least a delay. But since then, we've seen these new tariff threats for Canada and Brazil. Neither of them were facing the deadline before. a 50 percent tariff on copper, a potential 200 percent tariff on pharmaceuticals, and now a possible doubling of the baseline tariff.

6:18So, guys, a vast expansion of the trade war on multiple fronts just in the past few days. And enough to knock the market, I guess, off its balance a little bit, at least for today. But as we said, half percent moves after new highs yesterday in the S &P and Nasdaq. So time will tell. Everybody's waiting to see what happens. August 1st is coming. I can guarantee you that. It will come in a couple weeks. And then you know it's coming after that. August 2nd. And then eventually winter is coming. Are you a Game of Thrones fan? Oh, yeah. Winter. Winter eventually is coming. Let's get a nice fall, though, after this rainy spring.

6:57Wasn't it rainy? Rainy summer. Rainy summer. Thanks, Megan. All right. The White House campaign against Fed Chair Jay Powell is intensifying. OMB Director Russell Vogt said Powell has grossly mismanaged the Fed and suggested he had misled Congress about a pricey and ostentatious renovation of the central bank's headquarters. Vogt posted a letter to Powell on X saying that the project to renovate the Fed's headquarters could be out of compliance with the approved plan and may require the Fed to immediately halt construction. The Fed declined to comment on this letter, but OMB Director Boat will comment right here on Squawk Box.

7:36It's a crazy story. Yeah. It's for future Fed presidents? He's not going to be there, but does he want a nice digs for himself? I mean, it's weird. I mean, it's... It's a weird thing to... You know, in watching the administration, Harvard, Columbia, whatever, once you're in their bad, you know, in the line of... Fire. Yeah, yeah, line of fire, They'll find anything. And this is, they're overspending on the headquarters. NVIDIA, I thought this was interesting that I think, you know, Wong is, Jensen Wong is one of the most powerful, intelligent, amazing business people. Still got to go to the White House and say, hi, Mr.

8:21President. Still got to do it. Still got to do it. Jensen Wong met with President Trump at the White House yesterday. So Jensen Wong could be the most powerful tech executive in the world. He's still not the most powerful man in the world who people just have a hard time accepting that right at the moment. That's probably the bad orange man. And I'm saying that in a funny way because of the Trump haters. But this happened yesterday ahead of Wong's trip to China today. It's unclear what the meeting was about, but NVIDIA has been grappling with export controls on its AI chips. implemented by the Trump administration in April for national security reasons.

8:58President Trump highlighted Nvidia's stock gains on Truth Social yesterday, noting that Nvidia is up 47 percent since the tariffs were announced by Trump. Nvidia shares rose slightly in yesterday's trading, becoming the first company to close a trading day with a market cap over four trillion dollars. And just like Tim Cook and others, some of the what at times look like. Like capricious moves, maybe by by the Trump administration, still doesn't mean that you don't have to respond to those and massage, you know, go and actually try try to plead your case to the Trump administration to to look at all the angles of what's going on.

9:45And I would do it, too, if we needed something. Right. And Huang has been very critical of those export controls. He's been very outspoken, not shying away from making those criticisms because they are effectively shut out of the China market. To the advantage of the Chinese domestic players like Huawei. Right. For every chip taken out of the system in China made by Nvidia, Huawei steps in and sells its chip. Right. Huawei has the advantage here. But but Wong has benefited also because he he got all those deals in Saudi when they were in Saudi Arabia. He was cited by President Trump, lauded there.

10:21But and so he sees what being in good graces can do for the company. And we've seen President Trump. He can be very certain about something, but you could go to him and make a case for something. And he's not, you know, he's not so stubborn that he doesn't all of a sudden say, you know, I was talking to gents. And then especially if he likes a guy talking to him. And, you know, he's right about we've seen that in other areas where he's he's will go 180 degrees back to something else. Tick tock, for example, even crypto, for example, he was anti crypto. This is years ago. Jamie Dimon, we're going to tell us what he's talking about.

11:04Did you see his comments about the mayor? Oh, my God. I'm assuming. You said the mayor. I know. The possible mayor. Not yet. He's not the mayor. I'm worried. A lot of people work against that. I know. But at this point, he's on polymarket everywhere else. But we'll talk about Jamie Dimon's comments about Zoran Mamdani. Can we call him Zoran? Is that too much to just call him Zoran? Like Madonna? Or no? J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon spoke at an event in Ireland yesterday. He said he thinks the financial markets are underestimating the possibility of U.S. interest rates climbing higher. He said the market is pricing at a 20 percent chance of higher rates, but he sees a 40 to 50 percent chance and called it a cause for concern.

11:46Diamond said his higher probability was based on price pressure, citing tariffs, as well as the U.S. government's migration policies. He called the U.S. budget deficit inflationary, but Diamond also said the real time data on the U.S. economy is totally impossible to read. And in the past when he said things, he discounts the idea that the economy isn't doing well in terms of just what we see with the consumer. And he would know because he's at J.P. Morgan. I think he looks at our balance sheet like as a bank, as a risk averse banker would look at any balance sheet. And then we've got problems with 37 trillion in debt.

12:25Everybody knows that. But with all that said, so now he thinks the possibility of rates going up is 40 to 50 percent. Because of inflation. Right. 40 to 50 is still that means it's 60 to 50 that rates go down. What he said about Zoran Mamdani, he called him, sharply criticized the candidate, calling him more a Marxist than a socialist and warning against supporting his candidacy. He also argued that the platform includes things like rent-free, free public transportation, city-run grocery stores, reflects the same, in his words, the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world. So I don't know how many billionaires or leading businessmen you want criticizing this guy because that just makes his supporters say, see, he's right.

13:21Richie Torres yesterday, who I think is smart and, you know, as far as Democrats goes, he's not going to go. I like Richie Torres. He said something like, I guess, Mom Donnie put him on a list of people to be primary. And he says that's a badge of honor for me. Well, we'll see. I mean, money makes a big difference in politics. And right now does it. So you think 50 million puts Eric Adams back in the merits, 50 million additional dollars. Because right now there's a lot of money being raised for any anti-Mamdani candidate. Right, right. Cuomo had 20. Where'd that get him? Right. That's true. But you can make the case that Democratic primary is not representative of Democrats voting in the New York City broader.

14:07People make that case. Yeah. They know that it is. That this guy, look at Polly Market. I mean, it could be, suddenly Mayor Adams has a little bit of momentum, maybe. Yeah. But they are lining up. They're not lining up behind Cuomo, which is weird. But if Cuomo and Adams go in together, then it's going to be very difficult. Cheese will be next. Coming up next on Squawk Pod, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty McCurry. He's been in the job 100 days, and he is the key regulator when it comes to enforcing the Make America Healthy Again agenda of Cabinet Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's top health official.

14:46The promise of the Secretary Kennedy is to let people know that vaccines will be available if people want them. You will be able to get a vaccine if you want them. So that's a decision between you and your doctor.

15:02Welcome back to Squawk Pod. I'm producer Katie Kramer. The COVID-19 pandemic, now five years from the depths of the crisis, five years changed the very nature of public health in America. All this time, past social distancing, masking, and vaccine mandates, a new agenda has been ushered in with Donald Trump's return to the White House. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the Department of Health and Human Services is known for some skepticism towards chemical interventions in food and health care. And his approach to all vaccines, not just those to prevent transmission of the COVID virus, can be complicated.

15:37One of his key deputies is our next guest, FDA Commissioner Marty McCurry, responsible for the safety of what goes into our bodies, food, drugs, shots. He spoke about his approach as a regulator and much more with Joe Kernan and Melissa Lee. Joe kicks things off. Good morning, doctor. Good morning, Joe. Maybe you've been on a few times. I don't remember, but we all went through that period together, obviously. And there's a lot of look back now at that period. You know, it's a hot button issue. And sometimes it's tough to talk about. and there's conspiracies and controversies. I think of Novak Djokovic.

16:19Right now, he's going to be in the finals, I think, at Wimbledon. And at the time, I wondered about his decision, the decision of tennis. What do we know now, Doctor, in your view, about what we should have done with COVID? Should healthy people have been, not forced, but strongly coerced to take that? At the time, I thought it was a game changer and a lifesaver. Well, look, Joe, I had said during the time of the pandemic that if we have vaccine mandates for young, healthy individuals, we were going to see a rise of an anti-vaccine sentiment. And I think that's exactly what happened. We saw a tremendous loss in public trust.

16:59A study in JAMA found that 71 percent of people trusted their doctors and hospitals before the COVID pandemic. That's down to 40 percent. That's a 31 point drop. And I think it was from ignoring natural immunity. I think it was from vaccine mandates insisting that soldiers and firefighters and teachers be fired if they don't have the vaccine, even if they were young and healthy and had the infection already. They had circulating antibodies that could neutralize the virus, but they were antibodies the government did not recognize because it failed to recognize natural immunity. So we lost a lot of ground in public trust.

17:36And we're trying to rebuild that now through radical transparency and being very honest and telling people the government is not your doctor. Talk to your doctor and get good advice from your doctor's wisdom and judgment. There are some changes at the Vaccine Advisory Committee that a lot of hand-wringing and consternation about the new members. Is it anti-vax? Doctor, would you say? How would you describe your approach to preemptive disease management? Look, I think over at CDC, a different agency, they do have a reconstituted ACIP committee with a diversity of views. among people who do believe that vaccines save lives.

18:19The past committee had pushed for COVID boosters in young, healthy people. And of course, that is probably why we see such a backlash today. There was never great evidence for repeat boosters in young, healthy children. As a matter of fact, there was a myocarditis risk that was largely downplayed in young males. And I think if you look at the track record of that committee, there's a reason why 85 percent of health care workers did not get a COVID booster last fall. So we are taking an evidence-based approach. Dr. Vinay Prasad and I outlined it in the New England Journal of Medicine. And we're basically saying that there's got to be a risk stratified approach that is high risk versus low risk.

19:00Does a healthy 12-year-old girl today need another 60 doses in her average lifespan? That is a scientific unknown. And we'd like to see a clinical trial before approving the vaccine for that reason. How does removing the recommendation, though, increase choice, increase the patient's ability to come to a decision with doctors? Since so many insurance plans and programs depend on ACIP and CDC recommendations in order to provide the no cost, low cost vaccines, isn't this removing choice effectively from patients? Now, the promise of the Secretary Kennedy is to let people know that vaccines will be available if people want them.

19:42You will be able to get a vaccine if you want them. So that's a decision between you and your doctor. And each individual insurance company has their own policy. Look, some insurance companies don't pay for important cancer treatments that I, for patients that I saw as a cancer surgeon. And so that is another entire issue that's unrelated to the FDA. Okay, so the fact that private insurers, employer-sponsored insurance plans, Medicare Part D, Medicaid, the Vaccines for Children program, all of them link providing no-cost vaccines to CDC and ACIP recommendations. That removing the recommendations doesn't remove in some way the choice that patients can make, especially the vulnerable patients who may not be able to afford to pay.

20:31That's right. It does not remove the choice. And our job at the FDA is, and this is a charge by Congress, is to look at applications that are submitted to us and determine what is safe and effective. And so that is what we are committed to. I think there was some lost trust in the FDA when there was a new policy that basically said for a young, healthy, 15-year-old boy, we were going to rubber stamp a COVID vaccine without a clinical trial every year in perpetuity and the kid must get it. And I think we're saying we're going to be less absolutist when there's no evidence. I think the most dangerous thing you can do in public health is to demand something of a young, healthy individual when the evidence is just not that supportive for a new virus that creates a new protein and a new vaccine that creates a new protein where we haven't had a clinical trial in over four years.

21:22And those results in children were mixed back four years ago. The basic tenets of MAH, of Maha, or Make America Healthy Again, it seems to be it's proactive health care versus reactive. You'd have to do that with children, I think. And I immediately think about, as a country, our levels of obesity are just much higher than they need to be or should be. What does tackling that entail? And how does it play into these new drugs? And whether you really start, I don't know, is that what we need to do to all our kids? If we go V or Ozempic or something, doctor, or what's the answer? Is it foods? Is it additives?

22:09Is it the secretary has a lot of ideas? Yeah, it's all of the above, Joe. And we've not been talking about root causes in health care. I've been in academic medicine and been at all the major institutions giving grand rounds. We don't talk about root causes. We don't ask, why do 40 % of our nation's children now have a chronic disease? Why do a third of our nation's children now have prediabetes or diabetes? We've got to talk about school lunch programs, not just putting every six-year-old on Ozempic. We've got to talk about environmental exposures and chemicals in the food, not just chemotherapy.

22:46If you look at the types of cancer that are going up in young people, they are the GI cancers. That is the organ that interfaces with what we eat. So we've got to look at all the chemicals. We are doing an inventory of the 1 ,000-plus chemicals banned in Europe that appear in the U.S. food supply. You saw our action to remove all nine petroleum-based food dyes from the U.S. food supply. By next year, we're getting tremendous participation by the food manufacturers. We are looking into baby formula innovation. That recipe the FDA issues hasn't been updated essentially in 30 years. We need more innovation.

23:22Moms want baby formula without added sugar, without corn syrup, without seed oils. We need more innovation. It's been a regulatory failure. And we're asking the big question, why does it take 10 years for a drug to come to market? I mean, that is a giant existential question. And we're going to have to challenge deeply held assumptions to answer it. So we announced our program to reduce animal testing and replace it with computational modeling and organ-on-a-chip technology whereby drugs can be tested on cell culture medium in a lab with cells from the liver or heart or other organoids. We have a priority pathway now to pilot.

24:01Can we get a decision out in weeks instead of a year once that final application is approved? Can we run more continuous trials? and can we use AI more in the review process? We now have AI agency-wide for our reviewers. And yesterday we announced we're gonna make our decision letters, including rejection letters for drug public information so companies don't spin the results and developers can see exactly how the FDA thinks. And that's part of our radical transparency agenda. I wanted to talk to you, Dr. McCary, about the national priority vouchers, which does aim to speed up the approval process after a final drug application is submitted to get it down to one to two months as opposed to 10 to 12 months for national priorities.

24:47What qualifies as a national priority? I mean, you know, let's say there's an obesity drug that's even better than the ones out on the market. Is that a national priority for for the FDA to consider an expedited process? What falls into the category? Great question, Melissa. So it's a large unmet public health need. It is a priority identified as part of a U.S. domestic national priority, like the domestication of manufacturing as a national security issue. And look, the president is very adamant that he would like to see lower drug prices for Americans. And he doesn't like it that Americans are getting ripped off with drugs that are two, five, ten times higher in the United States than in London or France or Germany, other OECD countries.

25:34So we are including the affordability of drugs as a national priority. So we have a committee that's set up that will determine which products and companies will get these vouchers as a part of a pilot. Look, we've got to try new things. We've got to ask ourselves, why does it take so long for a cure to come to market? And we want to see more cures and meaningful treatments for Americans. We want to see big data used so we can have eyes on a drug immediately after approval and not just wake up five years later and say, hey, Vioxx may have killed 38 ,000 people. Maybe we need to take action. Or opioids may have killed nearly a million Americans 19 years after the approval of OxyContin.

26:17We're going to be having an incredible post-market surveillance program where we monitor drugs immediately after approval using big data and the cloud. And if we do it well, it can actually change the threshold for approval, especially when it comes to rare diseases. Can you give us an example of a health crisis right now? Just so we have an idea of what sorts of drugs, what sorts of companies may be seeking to use this national priority voucher program. You know, one of the cool things, Melissa, in this job is you get to see potentially promising treatments that are in the pipeline. And I'd like to see a cure for type 1 diabetes.