RFK Jr. Tapped To Head HHS, Trump & Government Bonds, Biden Meets Xi In Peru

0:02President-elect Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic who's pushed conspiracy theories, so how would he handle a department overseeing public health? I'm Steve Inskeep with Michelle Martin, and this is Up First from NPR News.

0:21Stocks climbed after the election while bond markets sent a different signal. Bond prices suggest investors see higher inflation and higher debt in President-elect Trump's economic plans. How might that affect your economic situation? And President Biden sits down with China's Xi Jinping in Peru for their last meeting before Biden leaves office. There is actual work to do in this critical moment to ensure that we don't run into any problems. Biden is focused on keeping relations steady during a delicate transition of power. Will their meeting help maintain stability? Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day.

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2:15Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be nominated by President-elect Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The environmental advocate and vaccine skeptic made many claims during the presidential campaign. He said he will drastically reduce rates of chronic disease in just two years. He also spread several conspiracy theories. While chatting with the podcast host Joe Rogan, RFK Jr. said Wi-Fi causes cancer. While talking on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that school shootings are linked to antidepressants. And elsewhere, RFK questioned the link between AIDS and HIV, which is the virus that causes it.

2:50Joining us to tell us more about Kennedy's background and what his confirmation could mean for the agency He is NPR health policy correspondent, Selena Simmons-Duffin. Selena, good morning. Morning, Michelle. So obviously many people have heard of Kennedy. He's part of a very famous Democratic political family that includes the former president, John F. Kennedy. But tell us more about him as a public figure. Well, most recently he ran for president as an independent before dropping out in August and endorsing Trump, who's been enthusiastically using his Make America Healthy Again line. Kennedy is an attorney.

3:21He went to Harvard in the 70s and got his law degree at UVA. He struggled with drug addiction, and it was actually an arrest for heroin possession in the 80s that led to volunteering with the Natural Resources Defense Council to fulfill community service hours. That led to a whole career in environmental advocacy. And around 20 years ago, he got interested in vaccine conspiracy theories, especially in the disproven link between vaccines and autism. That has been a huge focus of his work and life since that. Okay, so what about the agency he would be in charge of? Give us a tour of the Department of Health and Human Services.

3:55So HHS is enormous. It's got one of the biggest budgets in the federal government,$1.7 trillion. That's trillion with a T. That's about the GDP of Australia. And within HHS, there are a lot of health agencies. Medicare and Medicaid are under HHS. So is the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those are probably the health agencies people hear the most about. But there are all these other agencies. like one that runs community health centers across the country. There's another for mental health. In all, HHS employs about 90 ,000 people across these agencies.

4:32Trump has promised to let Kennedy, quote, go wild on health and dramatically shake things up. Do we have any idea of what Kennedy going wild on health might look like? Well, he recently said he'd like to fire 600 NIH employees. He's talked a lot about rooting out corruption. Some of his ideas are pretty mainstream, like promoting nutritious foods and addressing chronic disease. He said he wants to ban prescription drug advertisements. He rightly points out that American life expectancy is really pretty bad and lags behind other wealthy countries by a lot. But he has some views that are really far out of the mainstream.

5:06We've talked about vaccine skepticism. Current CDC director Mandy Cohen wrote to NPR yesterday, quote, I don't want to go backwards and see children or adults suffer or lose their lives to remind us that vaccines work, and so I'm concerned. unquote. The idea of someone who's actively sowed misinformation about vaccines being in charge of the government's scientific research and public health agencies really horrifies a lot of people in those fields. This is a Senate confirmed position. Do we have a sense of whether he will have the votes to be confirmed? Well, we'll have to see. Some Republican senators have responded enthusiastically to his nomination.

5:42Others won't say yet. Interestingly, his campaign website says he supports abortion access. He wrote, quote, I'm for choice and medical freedom. We'll see how that position plays out among Republicans who are eager to curtail abortion access federally once they take power in Washington. That is NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin. Selena, thank you. You're welcome.

6:09Stocks surged following Donald Trump's re-election, but the bond market is a different story. They've been selling off in a big way, and that affects everything from interest rates to inflation. Yeah, bond investors say they're alarmed about parts of the president-elect's economic agenda, which is important because the bond market matters so much for business and governing. If interest rates are low, your company and your government can borrow lots of money cheap. And if interest rates climb, life gets more expensive fast. For more on this, we are joined by NPR senior business editor, Raphael Nam.

6:39Raphael, good morning. Hey, Michelle. So just briefly, give us the basics of what are bonds and why do they matter? We've said a little bit about that, but just what are they? Good question. A lot of people don't get bonds, but it's actually pretty simple. The way it works is that the government sells bonds to investors. We're talking banks, other countries, individual people. Think of it as a loan. The government needs to borrow money to function and to afford all of its spending. These investors are the bank, and they're lending their money to Uncle Sam. Then Uncle Sam promises to pay back these investors with interest.

7:13And when bond investors get spooked, they demand more interest. from the government. And that's exactly what's happening now. So why the sell-off? Well, there are two critical things to the economy that could get worse under a new Trump administration, inflation and the government's finances. Now, let's tackle inflation first. Although Trump has promised to lower inflation, many bond investors believe he could actually do the opposite and take tariffs. Trump is proposing a wide range of tariffs, and the U.S. imports a lot of things, clothes, toys, shoes, tech gadgets, you name it. Tariffs obviously make those things more expensive.

7:50Trump also wants to cut taxes. For example, he wants to exempt workers in restaurants and other places from paying taxes on tips. All of that could make the country's finances a lot worse. And they're already pretty bad. The budget deficit in the last fiscal year was $1.8 trillion, the third highest on record. So you heard Steve earlier say that bonds wield a lot of power. How do bond investors wield their power? Because they can essentially tell the government, we won't be lending you any more money. And that would put the government in a pinch. Now, if the interest of U.S. pays on its bond surges, and it can also create a lot of pain to the country's finances.

8:29And these fears in bond markets can spread to other markets like stocks. Fear is pretty contagious after all. And it has happened before around the world. About two years ago in the United Kingdom, bond investors revolted. It helped create a financial storm, and it took down the prime minister in a matter of weeks. There's even a term for bond investors that wield their power this way, bond vigilantes. These investors could stop buying bonds. It's effectively telling the government, like I was telling you, we're not going to lend you any more money unless you reconsider some of your policies. Now, the U.S.

9:03is obviously much bigger than the U.K., and we also don't know what Trump is actually going to do. But things could get rocky very quickly if he does all the things he's promised. So very briefly, how would this affect regular people? Yes, because the U.S. bond market influences all kinds of interest payments from credit cards to auto loans to mortgages. So when there's pain in the bond market, it's not just the Trump administration that will feel the impact. It could be people like you and me. That is NPR's Rafael Nam. Rafael, thank you. Thank you.

9:40President Biden is in Lima, Peru, where he's meeting with leaders from the Asia-Pacific region, including China's President Xi Jinping. The two will sit down tomorrow in what is expected to be their final summit before Biden leaves office. Here's how the president's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, described it. So it's an important meeting. It will not be just a valedictory, although there will be an element of reflecting over the course of their long relationship. There is actual work to do in this critical moment between the U.S. and China to ensure that we don't run into any problems in the next two months in this transition of power.

10:12NPR White House correspondent Asma Khaled is in Lima with the president, and she is with us now. Good morning. Good morning, Michelle. So as, of course, we all know, President Biden is at the end of his time in office. What can he actually get done at this meeting tomorrow? I mean, there are two main missions for this meeting. One is that Biden wants to cement the policy cooperation he feels he's been able to achieve in this relationship over the course of the last four years, you know, work to stop the flow of fentanyl coordination on climate issues and discussions around the challenges of artificial intelligence.

10:43But I would say most importantly, the other main mission here is to emphasize that it is important to keep the lines of communication open, particularly the lines of military to military cooperation. You might recall those stopped for a bit because of tensions over spying. And Biden wants to make this point clear during this transition period where one administration is handing off to the next because they believe this administration believes that it is a delicate moment. Here's how Biden's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, explained that. Transitions are uniquely consequential moments in geopolitics.

11:17They're a time when competitors and adversaries can see possibly opportunity because you have this change in government here. And so part of what President Biden will communicate is that we need to maintain stability, clarity, predictability through this transition. But how can he credibly make that point about predictability, given that President-elect Trump wants to roll back and change much of what President Biden has done? That is a fair understanding, given how much disagreement there is in Washington over policy. But one rare area of bipartisanship is China policy. There's been a degree of continuity.

11:54For example, Trump in his first term put sweeping tariffs on imports of Chinese goods, and Biden, for the most part, has kept those in place. And one thing that caught my ear is that Biden's national security advisor told reporters that he sees some continuity in China policy based on who Trump has selected for national security advisor. That's Congressman Mike Waltz and also his pick for Secretary of State, Senator Marco Rubio. Both of these men have been really focused on the challenges with China. And this White House feels that competition with China is going to be the defining issue for what the world looks like in the coming decades.

12:33And so in order for the U.S. to succeed over the long run, they feel that U.S.-China relationships really need to have bipartisan support. And to that point, one thing the Biden administration really aggressively went after during its time in office was something called export controls. This is the regulating the sale of certain technology to China. And experts think that that may continue in a Trump administration. Trump has said he wants to hike tariffs on China. That is something he promised during the campaign. Do we know whether Biden is going to talk about that with Xi? Biden is expected to talk about unfair trade practices.

13:06But what that looks like isn't clear. One person I spoke to before this trip, Danny Russell, he was a top State Department official during the Obama years. He told me he thinks Biden could use this meeting to try to underscore that China needs to shift its ways rather than just threaten to escalate and retaliate. And President Xi, though I should point out, has his own relationship with the former and now future President Trump. They had meetings during Trump's first term and trade was always front and center. So I'm not sure that Xi or Trump will be looking for advice there. That is NPR's Asma Khaled.

13:41Asma, thank you. My pleasure.

13:47And that's Up First for Friday, November 15th. I'm Michelle Martin. And I'm Steve Inskeep. Up First comes your way on the weekend, too. Aisha Roscoe and Scott Simon have the news in this feed or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Diane Weber, Pallavi Gagoy, Roberta Rampton, Mohamed Elbardisi, and Alice Wolfley. It was produced by Zian Budge, Nia Dumas, and Julie Deppenbrock. Our executive producer is Erica Aguilar. We get engineering support from Robert Rodriguez, and our technical director is Zach Coleman. We hope you'll join us again on Monday.

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