Trump's parade, FEMA phase out, and Warner Bros. Discovery divorces ... itself?

0:01NPR

0:12This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods, and a stone's throw from me, dancing in the dark, skulking in the shadows, is... Planet Money's very own Alexi Horowitz-Gazi! Hello! Thank you for having me, and hold on, wait, I'm getting a calendar alert on my phone. What is it? Oh, today seems to be... Indicators of the Week! So on today's show, we've got the cost of the big army parade. FEMA getting phased out. And a giant entertainment corporate breakup. We're talking about Warner Brothers Discovery here, guys. The tea will be spilled after the break.

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2:53Yes, we have heard of nothing else. This is the parade that celebrates the army's 250th anniversary, but also happens to coincide with Donald Trump's birthday. Yeah, you're getting two parties for the price of one. Even so, various lawmakers are criticizing that price of the parade. They're mostly Democratic, but even some Republicans. They're bulking at both what a military parade represents and also that they would rather save the money. Right, especially at this time of belt tightening across the government. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll says that the festivities will help with recruiting.

3:30That said, the Army has met its recruiting goal for the year. So what is this party for? Some say it's there to boost morale for the troops. But I think what's helpful in these debates is to put that money in perspective. Like, how much is$45 million? Obviously, it's a lot of money for you and me, but how much is it for the government? One way to look at it is what is$45 million as a share of defense spending? And it's about half a percent of 1 % of the military budget. OK, that sounds pretty small, but do you have any way to visualize that? Basically, if you spent last year's entire defense budget on festivals and parades, you could have 22 ,000 of them.

4:13So you have convinced me that the military parade costs are not that big in the scheme of U.S. government spending. But we also have the situation where the government is sending the Marines over to L.A. for the protests there. Yeah, so sending the Marines and National Guard to LA is more expensive at an estimated$134 million. And if that same cost were to be replicated in every American city over 1 million people, that would total$1.5 billion. Okay, so that's some serious money we're talking about. And a serious situation. Yeah, but don't forget just how massive U.S. military spending has been.

4:53It's been close to a trillion dollars a year. So even$1.5 billion would be less than a sixth of a percent of U.S. military spending. We spend a lot of money on the military here in the U.S. Indeed. And these costs are basically rounding errors. You can disagree with them for other reasons, but as a cost-saving measure, I think they're pretty insignificant. Moving on from big military parties, Waylon, what do you have for your indicator? My indicator is$30 billion. That's the approximate annual budget for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. And I'm talking about FEMA today because President Trump said this week that he plans to start phasing out the agency.

5:37He said this would happen after hurricane season, which started this month and goes through November. Phasing out FEMA. So this is the agency that goes in after big disasters to help people with food and shelter and financial assistance. Are these services going away if FEMA gets phased out? Well, the president talked about FEMA in a press briefing at the White House, and there weren't that many details. But Trump did give some clues as to what he's thinking. He said, we're going to give out less money. And he also said the funds would be distributed directly from the president's office. This would be a change from how FEMA currently operates.

6:12Right now, when the president declares a disaster, FEMA distributes the financial aid to states and individuals. OK, so this could potentially put these disaster relief funds in the president's control. Like, didn't we already have a confrontation this year over the L.A. wildfires? We did. Trump had threatened to withhold federal disaster money because he was unhappy with how California was managing water, among other grievances. So that raised fears that the president could use disaster relief to punish states or governors that, you know, run afoul of him. It seems like FEMA's been on the chopping block for most of this year.

6:45It already saw a bunch of staffing cuts. Yeah, CNN has reported that FEMA is projected to lose close to 30 percent of its workforce by the end of the year. Now, FEMA falls under the Department of Homeland Security. And Kristi Noem, who heads up Homeland Security, has talked about eliminating FEMA outright. She's walked back that language, but she and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are co-chairing a council that's doing a review of FEMA. They're going to suggest changes. And based on the way she and the president have been talking, it does seem like the changes could be drastic. And speaking of breakups and tough news, Alexi, what's happening in the world of entertainment?

7:25Okay, so from the drastic breakup department, my indicator this week is the number two. That's the number of companies that'll be created when the entertainment juggernaut, Warner Brothers Discovery, is split in half as early as next year. Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced earlier this week that one of these new companies will be dedicated to its cable and television services like CNN, and the other company is going to focus on its streaming offerings like HBO and also its studio businesses. Real talk, I cannot keep any of this stuff straight. Didn't Warner Brothers Discovery just merge a couple of years ago?

8:02Yeah, that's right. Listeners may remember Warner Brothers Discovery was created just three years ago through this big merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery. And the company as part of that took on around$50 billion in debt to finance the move. And the idea at the time was that legacy media companies needed to get as big as possible to compete with streamers like Netflix. And the company's CEO, David Zaslav, he came in with this big plan to combine all of the kind of reality TV offerings of the Discovery network with all the prestige programming of HBO and put it all on one platform, basically to lure people in with, like, the white lotuses of the world and then lock them down with, you know, 90-day fiancé or whatever.

8:45This is making the days of the controversy over HBO Max turning into Max seem like salad days. No, I'm still mad about that. Yes. But as it happened, that kind of bigger is better bundling strategy didn't really pan out. Most of Max's viewers still seem to be signing on for HBO's prestige offerings and not the wide array of reality TV shows. And the cable and TV parts of the business, which includes things like CNN, they still bring in money, though cable TV as a whole is widely seen to be in decline. So as the company's stock price dropped over the last few months, David Zaslav and the company's leadership decided it was time to do this sort of corporate U-turn and split the company up.

9:27They even announced last month that their streaming platform would be renamed yet again, going back to HBO Max. I am going to flip over a table in here, But OK, what about that$50 billion? They just have to, what, eat it? Well, the debt currently stands around$37 billion. And the company said that most of that will go to the cable and TV outfit after the split. Well, thank you, Alexei. You are the best guest from Planet Money we've had all week. Wow. Thank you. In a competition of one. I will take it. Sorry to admit it. And you're also the worst, I've got to admit. That's true. The best and the worst.

10:07It contained multitudes. Thanks for having me, guys. You've taken us to the max and back. Hey-oh! This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Kweisi Lee. It was fact-checked by Cyril Juarez. Kate Kincannon edits the show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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