FDA’s Dr. Makary on Women’s Health & Warren Buffett’s Update 11/11/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Rule by deal? The provocative take Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has on the Trump 2.0 strategies toward tariffs, revenue and business investment. The point I'm making in the piece isn't that industrial policy is bad in and of itself. It's rather that we need to have a comprehensive institutional approach. A landmark change from the FDA removing a long time and chilling warning for women in menopause considering hormone replacement therapy. Commissioner Marty McCurry. We're going to be removing those black box warnings.

0:42We want women to have the right information. A radical shift in directives that some critics say may be short on evidence. We'll get into it. Arguably with the exception of antibiotics and vaccines, there may be no medication that can improve the health outcomes of women on a population level more than hormone replacement therapy. Plus, pasta prices. Warren Buffett says he's going quiet. Sort of. And the government shutdown on the way to reopening, but not without some painful consequences due to the longest shutdown in history. Someone's got to be there. Someone's got to be there, sure, but we should also pay them.

1:19How about we have government function for a change? It's Tuesday, November 11th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue it, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And here we go on this Tuesday morning. On this vote, the ayes are 60, the nays are 40. The bill, as amended, is passed. Under the previous order, the motion to reconsider is considered made and laid upon the table. Mr. President. Senator from Maine.

2:03Mr. President, I just want to reiterate my gratitude for my colleagues, our staff who have worked night and day, literally, and all of those who have brought us to this point. The Senate passing a bill to fund the federal government through January and end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The bill passing 60 to 40 with seven Democratic senators and one independent voting in favor, along with all Republicans, minus Kentucky's Rand Paul. The bill still needs to pass the House, and President Trump needs to sign it to end that shutdown. The president said he supports the deal, but House Speaker Mike Johnson is not committed to allowing his chamber to hold a separate vote on extending Obamacare health subsidies.

2:50That was a key part of the Senate deal. So we still have some work to be done. Probably done by tomorrow. You think? Yeah, I think it's probably. How is that piece of it going to get resolved? I don't know whether Speaker Johnson has actually said that he's not going to do it or not. Maybe we just don't know. But holding a vote doesn't mean anything. No, it doesn't. But in the meantime, these guys are going to miss paychecks again. Yeah. They have not been paid since October 1st. Expecting people to volunteer, particularly if you're living paycheck to paycheck or every couple of paychecks, maybe you can miss a couple of paychecks.

3:27They haven't been paid since October 1st. They're about to miss another one. And just because they pass the vote doesn't mean that they automatically get paid. You have to wait for the next paycheck. The dynamic in the Democratic Party is where everybody's mad at Chuck Schumer and he voted. No, but a lot of people think that guys like Ro Khanna or others that are just fuming need to thank the seven that took the flack for that, because you don't want to be sitting there doing. You just pointed out how bad it is. It's terrible. Exactly. So they get to the government gets to reopen. So they don't they're no longer going to be blamed for what's happening.

4:05So I'll be thanking the ones that gave me cover to pretend that I was still a no. So that's, you know, not today's. It doesn't portend good things for what we're looking at between now and 2026 in the election. Things are ugly and getting uglier. Without an end, official end, the shutdown, air traffic controllers are still not getting paid. Air forts are still facing some heavy delays. Controllers are set to miss their second paycheck. Airlines are supposed to cut 6 % of the flight starting today, up from 4 % last week and going to, I think, 10%. soon. Flight aware. There's a new one you like now.

4:43We don't like flight aware. Flighty. That's what the point's guy told us about yesterday. I've heard of flighty for a long time and didn't want to go all in. But you have to pay for it, right? Because of the charge. But I'm told now it's worth it. And given what's happening out there, maybe it is. What's the charge? How much? A couple dollars a month. You don't want those adding up. You know me. Then it gets to dozens of dollars, which, you know, FlightAware says close to 3000 U.S. flights were canceled yesterday. 1400 have been cut so far today. Yesterday on True Social, before the Senate bill passed its funding, President Trump told air traffic controllers to get back to work immediately, saying anyone who didn't would have their pay docked.

5:29And he said for those that did nothing but complain and took time off, even though everyone knew they'd be paid in full shortly after in the future, I'm not happy with you. But then he said he'd be recommending a$10 ,000 bonus for any controllers who haven't taken time off. This ticked me off, too. The idea that, you know, you're not here. You should be doing this for us. Easy to say when you don't have bills to pay that you can't pay. Exactly. You've got to get a second job. Right. But they really do need to. They do need to come in, but we do need to pay them. But you're going to get back paid.

5:59They're going to get back paid. Sure, but tell that to your landlord. Tell that when you can't put food on the table for any of these things. Oh, so you're not giving any credit to the people that did show up? No, I am. I'm giving complete credit to them, and they should get a$10 ,000 bonus. But the idea, if you didn't show up, I think that's understandable. If you were asked to volunteer for two months at a time, you didn't have enough money in the bank to cover it, I get it. You have to take a second job. It's not like us, where no one would miss us. I mean, it does matter. I might feel compelled to go in and make sure nothing happens.

6:27It does matter, but if you have to take a second job because you can't pay the bill. Well, if they're going to cut, you know. Listen to Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, who has talked about how most of them are the primary breadwinners for their family in air traffic control. Most of them are already working six days a week. He wants them to be there, but I don't think you're not a patriot if you don't show up because of the sacrifices that you may be making. And they know that if you cut back on, you know, go six, ten, whatever it is, ten percent, that hopefully there's enough. But we were already dealing with an air traffic controller shortage of 4 ,000 people.

6:594 ,000 air traffic controllers that we were already short. So these people have already been overworked. They're already asked to work six days a week before you even got to this chaos. Then when you have people who are calling in sick and you're expected to pick up for your colleagues on top of that and you're not getting paid in a volunteer situation. Someone's got to be there, sure, but we should also pay them. How about we have government function for a change? We wanted to pay them. Yeah, we should. Trump wants to pay them. We should. Italy's biggest pasta importers are preparing to pull out of U.S.

7:30stores as soon as January. They say tariffs and anti-dumping duties totaling 107 percent will make doing business in America just too costly. The tariff on Italy is 15 percent for most products, but the Commerce Department announced a 92 percent anti-dumping duty on pasta made by 13 Italian companies. the Commerce Department cited a long-running probe into pricing practices and complaints that accused Italian producers of selling pasta in the U.S. at below market prices. Apparently, the producer of this hour is just beside himself. And to make matters worse, it's Cantino's birthday. Happy birthday.

8:14How do you do? Happy birthday, Rob. How do you do slap in the face? Yeah. How do you do do do do do do do do do? So that's your birthday present, Rob? No pasta. Could be a blessing in disguise. We want you to live a long time. Rob, you're welcome. Okay, we gotta go. He's telling us, T's next. T's will be next. Coming up, tech and tariffs. Facebook's co-founder Chris Hughes has a critique of the Trump administration's policies when it comes to international duties. Is it economic nationalism? Is it industrial policy? Greg Ipp in The Wall Street Journal calls it state capitalism. I see a group of dealmakers, the president himself, but also the Commerce Secretary and the Treasury Secretary, going one by one, picking winners and losers.

8:59Squawk Pod will be right back.

9:06We're back. This is Squawk Pod. Up in Andrew, Q. You're watching Squawk Box on CNBC. I'm Andrew Osorkin, along with Joe Kernan and Becky Quick on a Tuesday morning. Joining us right now on The Economy, Big Tech, and much more is Economic Security Project co-chair Chris Hughes, who is also the co-founder of Facebook. His new piece in The American Prospect, Rule by Deal, is a criticism of the Trump administration's industrial and tariff policies. And Chris, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Let's start with the piece first, the way you've laid this out. You make a lot of pretty deep and important points.

9:43you're looking at the deals that the Trump administration has cut when it comes to semiconductors, when it comes to rare earths, but when it comes to lots of other things too. And your point is that this is not new economic nationalism and it's not state capitalism. What do you think it is? Yeah, exactly. I think we got to take a step back. This is rule by deal and it's not going very well. And I'll tell you why. So a lot of people are trying to figure out what all these private deals are. You know, two weeks ago, it's nuclear power. Before that, it was MP materials. Before that, it was Intel and video.

10:17We know the sequence of them. And people are trying to figure out, is it economic nationalism? Is it industrial policy? Greg Ipp in The Wall Street Journal calls it state capitalism. And I see something a lot more basic. I see a group of dealmakers, the president himself, but also the Commerce Secretary and the Treasury Secretary, going one by one, picking winners and losers. And that is exactly the criticism that so many leveled at the Biden administration. And what's actually happening here is that there are particular companies that can find their way to the White House. They find their way through the negotiations, and then they can get really meaningful public investment, and the private capital crowds in without any thorough consideration of competitors, industrial landscape, no transparency, and so far, very little accountability to follow up on it.

11:04So this is exactly how one doesn't want to do. Yeah, I see your point when it comes to picking winners and losers and doing a deal-by-deal basis. I'm not a huge fan of that. But I will say there are some arenas that the Trump administration has pushed into that could require a government intervention because these are national security issues. Absolutely. Specifically, if you look at rare earths, if you look at semiconductors, if you look at a lot of these areas, we're in a much more complicated position because of the dominance that China has in some of those areas. Whether it's rare earths and they say, we're not going to sell them to you anymore after they drove us out of the business from a capitalistic point of view 20 years ago, to what happens if they decide to try and take over Taiwan and the semiconductor business there.

11:51Yeah, and I think that's why we have to get this right. So the point I'm making in the piece isn't that industrial policy is bad in and of itself. It's rather that we need to have a comprehensive institutional approach. So we'll take critical minerals because I'm 100 % with you. We have got to use the public sector to get those industries moving. So we need a clear mission. Are we producing the critical minerals in the United States? Are we okay doing that with our partners and friends like Canada and elsewhere? Then we need an institutional capacity who's charged with putting that mission into place.

12:24I think the Development Finance Corporation, which is actually a Trump 1 invention, would be a great place to put it. And then we need a process to say, hey, if you are either mining, extracting, or doing any kind of innovative work around these minerals, you need to come to the government and say you're doing it and we will invest in you. We have the template for this with the CHIPS program. $40 billion was put forward. Don't love the CHIPS program either. We had five of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world open up fabs. And we did it in a thorough and fair way. We did it in a thorough and fair and really slow way.

13:00And that's part of the problem with this. In fact, we had Intel's former CEO, who was just with us a couple of weeks ago, who said it was years that they were waiting for the Commerce Department under the Biden administration to hand out those funds. And in the meantime, things collapse. With something like Rare Earths, it's probably going to take us five to seven years, even if we start today to be in a position where we are not reliant on China. Yeah, well, I mean, the chips package was passed in the summer of 2021. And then by the end of the Biden administration, 34 million, 34 billion dollars had been committed.

13:28So that's three years. I'm with you. It should have been half that. Totally agreed. But the only way to do that is to work with Congress, to give an institution a clear mission and then work with Congress to streamline that rather than just doing one deal here or there because your buddy called you up and you know somebody. And so here's$80 billion for Westinghouse, or here's a suspension of export controls for NVIDIA, or we're going to take this one equity stake in Intel because we had a special conversation. There's no coherency. And I think that runs the risk of enriching certain private market actors and misallocating private capital, which is the big fear that so many have had about industrial policy for so long.

14:06Can I ask a separate question? OpenAI recently put out a statement around the way the government should think about potentially investing in data centers in the country. And they effectively were trying to, I think, trying to argue to some degree that it shouldn't be a situation where the government's spending money and then private sector's on top of it. But it was sort of hard to understand exactly where they were going with this. But long term, do you see the government playing a big role in data centers? Yeah, I saw the news that you're talking about. I thought that was pretty rich, particularly coming a few days after this accidental disclosure of a desire for a government backstop for open AI.

14:47I mean, there is so much private capital moving into not just open AI, but the AI ecosystem. I mean, the CapEx numbers are you guys talk about them all the time. Well, pushing close to half a trillion dollars this year. When you see an industry with that much private capital rushing in, that's the exact moment where public capital should lean back. We don't need any additional funds. If anything, I worry about a bubble in that space with so much money. So, I mean, the government should be monitoring that, thinking about that, analyzing its implications on national security concerns. But if I had the magic wand around what industrial policy to pursue, I'd be thinking a lot more about things like critical minerals than I would AI.

15:29And then, say, building on tariffs, you know, I was talking to a CEO of a automobile maker, U.S. automobile maker, recently. And they were basically making the argument that 10 years from now, we will just have a domestic car market given the way, and that parts of the rest of the market will be this way as well, where we will have cars that cost more money, that are less competitive, that, you know, don't have the same features that you can get in China or elsewhere. And whether you think that that's a good thing, a feature, a bug. It's a bug. And if it's a bug, therefore, what should happen?

16:02Because the truth is, and you've heard Elon Musk make this comment, if we didn't have tariffs on automobiles, it is not clear we would have an automobile industry at all in this country and whether we should just say we want to be a services industry, and that's cool too. I don't know the answer. Yeah. Listen, I think tariffs can be used tactically to accomplish certain public policy goals, but the kinds of tariffs that I don't think make any sense are these kind of sweeping tariffs across all imports or across all kinds of industries. It's automobiles, avocados, Rolex watches, you name it. Everything is tariff.

16:33I think that's a bad thing for trade. I think that'll lower economic growth and makes little sense. I can see, you know, the Trump administration early on believed that making domestic automobiles was important. And so worked that into the renegotiation of NAFTA. Biden did something similar with electronic vehicles from China, putting targeted tariffs on those. I think those kinds of policies can at times make sense. But the idea of tariffing so aggressively and so across the board that the entirety of automobile production would be domestic rather than international, I think would be a bad thing for consumers.

17:11And people are tired of paying higher and higher prices. And the tariffs are only accelerating the price hikes. And I think that is going to increasingly become a problem for this administration and for the Republicans in Congress. Chris, I want to thank you for joining us today. It's good to see you. Thanks for having me. Next on Squawk Pod, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makari is defending the agency's decision to remove black box warnings from hormone replacement therapy for menopause. No subsequent clinical trial has ever found that hormone replacement therapy increases breast cancer mortality.

17:49And the cardiovascular complications are a function of when you start hormone replacement therapy. His perspective on women's health, right after this.

18:03You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Here's Becky Quick. Questions around the use of female hormone replacement therapy for years have kept women on the fence about these treatments. But in a new Wall Street Journal opinion piece, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty McCary says that it is time for drug manufacturers to remove black box warnings from these products because they've inappropriately scared women off. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty McCary joins us this morning to go more in depth on this and Commissioner thank you for being here today. This is a really big deal and something that probably is not talked about often enough but there was a Women's Health Initiative study back in 2002 that proclaimed that women who use these therapies, estrogen and progesterone, have a much higher risk of things like heart disease, breast cancer, associated other problems.

18:58And when the study came out, it cut the use of hormone replacement therapy by almost 50%. What happened? What are you looking at that makes you think we need to rethink all of this. Well, that's right, Becky. That was a real American tragedy. The fear machine that started in 2002 with that headline took on a life of its own. And tragically, 50 million women in the United States since then have been denied, not offered or convinced to not take hormone replacement therapy when they go through menopause. And what happened back in 2002 was that the study went to the media, the authors took it to the media, and they broadcast scary headlines about it causing breast cancer and increasing cardiovascular disease complications, when in reality, no subsequent clinical trial has ever found that hormone replacement therapy increases breast cancer mortality.

19:55And the cardiovascular complications are a function of when you start hormone replacement therapy. When it started more than 10 years after the onset of menopause, then yes, the cardiovascular complications invert the risk-benefit ratio to make it unfavorable. That is, there are cardiovascular complications. It needs to be started within 10 years of the onset of menopause. And when it is done that way, it dramatically reduces heart disease. In one study, a 30 to 50 percent reduction in heart disease, and in another study that It just came out two years ago, a 48 % reduction in heart attack deaths.

20:34Well, heart attacks are the number one cause of death in women, and that's just one of the profound long-term benefits of hormone replacement therapy, on top of alleviating the symptoms of menopause, the hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, weight gains. There are 50-plus different symptoms of menopause. 80 % of women experience them. It is not like I was taught in medical school where, oh, some women go through those symptoms, but they usually last a few years and they're mild. No, they can be severe. 80 percent of women experience them and they last on average eight years. And when you look at the long term benefits alone and reducing cognitive decline by up to 64 percent, reducing Alzheimer's by 35 percent in some studies and reducing the rate of bone fractures, those long term health benefits are profound.

21:21Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty compelling argument for why this should at least be considered and discussed between women and their doctors. Dr. McCary, there was a Yale Medicine write-up about some of the flaws, the critical flaws, they said with that 2002 study by the Women's Health Initiative. Just for starters, they exclusively studied women who were on average 10 years post-menopause with an average age of 63. which is a demographic that's already vulnerable to cardiovascular disease. And secondly, they only evaluated one delivery method, a daily pill that combined both estrogen and progesterone.

22:02And I believe the delivery methods have gotten a lot better since then. That's right. Now there are more identical forms to the intrinsic form of estrogen that a woman's body produces. The slight increase in breast cancer observed, that is breast cancer diagnosed in that original study, was attributed to the type of progesterone use called MPA. It is no longer a type of progesterone commonly used for hormone replacement therapy. Again, it did not translate into an increase in breast cancer mortality. If you look holistically, arguably with the exception of antibiotics and vaccines, there may be no medication that can improve the health outcomes of women on a population level more than hormone replacement therapy.

22:49And so this is a message we want people to know. Unfortunately, around that time in 2003, the FDA slapped black box warnings. It was part of a group think. It was a pile on. It was not scientific or rational. And so we want, we announced yesterday we're going to be removing those black box warnings. We want women to have the right information. all these issues of women's health have not received the attention they deserve in a historically paternalistic male culture dominated medical establishment. So in the Trump administration, we're elevating issues of women's health that have been underappreciated, underrecognized and underfunded.

23:27You saw our announcement on IVF a few weeks ago. And so this is, I think, one of the bigger ones that impacts every single woman in the United States. Yeah, I mean, we don't want to swing in the opposite direction. I'm guessing you're not necessarily suggesting that every woman should be on this, but it should be a conversation women are having with their doctors and that there is a much more kind of open and educated discussion that's taking place. That's right. There are some contraindications like an underlying predisposing risk to blood clots, somebody with active breast cancer, somebody who may have had breast cancer in the past and their doctor has a concern.

24:06But those contraindications are rare. And the vast majority of women who go through menopause, which is two million women each year, are great candidates for hormone replacement therapy. It is a conversation with your doctor. We're not promoting a product here. But we are getting away from the fear machine whereby women would pick up these products. They bring them home and they see this very scary black box warning that is not nuanced as it should be. And they decide not to take it. Is it simply women who've experienced breast cancer who should be more concerned about this or women who have had any type of cancer?

24:42Because I've spoken with women who've had uterine cancer, who have had bone cancer, other issues who've thought, I shouldn't do this because I've had cancer. Yeah, so there are a few types of cancer, and it's the types of cancers with estrogen receptors. Now, every cell in the body has an estrogen receptor, which is why in somebody without cancer, there's sort of brain health benefits to taking hormone replacement therapy. But when a doctor sees a condition where there's an upregulated estrogen receptor that could interact directly with the cancer, they're going to recommend against it. And that's a well-accepted practice.