Trump's Economic Message, DC Helicopter Crash Report, New Nuclear Regulations

0:02So far this month, President Trump has ordered an attack on Venezuela, tried to take over Greenland, and responded to federal agents shooting citizens. Now he's trying to refocus on voters' top concern, the economy. How did he make his case? I'm Michelle Martin with Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from NPR News.

0:21Investigators blame last year's mid-air collision on deep failures at the Federal Aviation Administration. This was preventable. This was 100 % preventable. What went wrong that caused a military helicopter to crash with a civilian aircraft? Also, NPR obtained documents showing the Trump administration quietly rewrote nuclear safety rules. Environmental and security protections were loosened to speed construction. What are the real world effects? Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.

1:04Two simple taps. Be smart. Get wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, We bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast.

1:46For months, the president's immigration strategy has been on full display. Now some Republicans are having a hard time defending it. Yeah, I think that's a good weather vane for where the politics are headed in all of this. Cracks in the MAGA coalition. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. President Trump spoke last night in Des Moines. It's the start of a campaign for an election more than nine months away. Iowa Republicans are defending an open Senate seat and other positions in a state they normally would expect to win without much effort.

2:192026 is shaping up to be a year that takes effort. The president wanted to focus on a top voter concern, the economy. He's distracted from it by attacking Venezuela, trying to take over Greenland, and an aggressive mass deportation campaign that has horrified many voters, especially after federal agents killed two people. All of that this month. That's a lot. NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben is here to tell us what he said to move back to the economy. Danielle, good morning. Hey, good morning. Was the president able to focus? For the most part, yeah. I mean, you really got the feeling that he was trying to talk about something new after federal officers, like you said, shot and killed those two people in Minneapolis.

2:57Trump's tone last night was pretty typical for him. He was just trying to sell the economy as mega strong. Just after one year of President Trump, our economy is booming, incomes are rising, investment is soaring, inflation has been defeated. Our border is closed, totally closed. But data contradicts Trump's message here. I mean, inflation has cooled, but it's still elevated, and the job market appears to be slowing. And importantly, Americans don't feel that the economy is doing well. Trump's approval on the economy is double-digit negative right now. Now, all of that said, Trump brought in a lot of his usual attacks, including, as he often does, mocking Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

3:39Now, notably last night, someone in her town hall in Minnesota confronted and apparently sprayed her with something before getting tackled by security. Yeah, I guess we'll just note that she seemed to be OK and continued the speech, insisted on continuing her speech. Now, Michelle told us why Iowa is politically important, but let's mention why it might be politically vulnerable for Republicans. It's a rural state, lots of farmers hurt by Trump's tariffs. How did he try to sell those tariffs? Well, he used his usual tariff arguments. He said the tariffs will drive new investment and that he's using the tariffs to strong arm other countries on things like pharmaceutical prices.

4:16All that said, Trump did try another avenue of farmer outreach. We really haven't heard him do much. He said he'd push Congress harder to loosen environmental restrictions on the sale of E15, which is a high ethanol blend of gasoline. But ultimately, Iowa farmers still know that tariffs have driven up the price of machinery and hurt soybean sales to China. Danielle, you mentioned that Minneapolis didn't come up, but did we learn anything more yesterday about what Trump is doing there? Yeah, I mean, just before the speech, he did an interview with Fox News' Will Cain, in which Cain asked Trump whether removing Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino from Minneapolis constitutes a pullback.

4:54Here's how Trump responded. I don't think it's a pullback. It's a little bit of a change. Everybody in this room that has a business, you know, you make little changes. You know, Bovino is very good, but he's a pretty out there kind of a guy. And in some cases, that's good. Maybe it wasn't good here. So in other words, he's really just trying to brush all of this aside. How much does the economy really matter to voters? Well, right now it's a case of everything and. I mean, plenty of people have feelings about Greenland right now, Minneapolis, and the price of milk all at the same time. Now, come the midterms, yeah, the economy will matter.

5:25But it's hard to separate out what one issue is driving an election. People vote based on feelings. Do they feel safe? Does the government care about them? So Trump won't be on the ballot. But his approval is negative and his party pretty much does his bidding at this point. So his continuing choices are going to really matter. We make a choice to listen to NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben. Thanks so much. Thank you.

5:54Nearly a year after the mid-air collision near Washington, D.C., the nation's top safety investigators released their findings about the cause of the crash, which killed 67 people. The National Transportation Safety Board says system-wide failures led to the collision of an Army Blackhawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet. Investigators laid much of the blame for those failures on the FAA. NPR's Joel Rose is with us now with more. Good morning, Joel. Good morning. So investigators have been looking at this crash since it happened nearly a year ago. So what were the big takeaways?

6:26You know, in complex disasters like this, it is rarely just one thing that goes wrong. And the NTSB did not name a single cause. Investigators found a long list of contributing factors, including equipment failures that likely made the helicopter's pilots think they were flying lower than they were. Investigators also identified missteps in the air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on the night of the collision. They noted mistakes by the helicopter's pilots who probably never saw the airplane before the collision, according to the NTSB. So there was plenty of blame to go around, but ultimately the NTSB pinned a lot of responsibility for this disaster on regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration.

7:04And why is that? Well, the chair of the NTSB, Jennifer Homendy, said the FAA should have known that there was a conflict between this helicopter route along the Potomac River and the approach to Runway 33 at the DCA airport, where the American Airlines regional jet flying from Kansas was trying to land. Homendy says those two flight paths were separated by less than 100 feet. This was preventable. This was 100 % preventable. Having a helicopter route crossing runway 33 with only 75 feet separating a helicopter and civilian aircraft. Nowhere in the airspace is that okay. Nowhere. Hommendee says air traffic controllers had tried to raise concerns about close calls at this spot for years, but those pleas were apparently ignored.

7:55Hommendee said the FAA had plenty of data on these conflicts in its own records and simply wasn't paying attention to them until after the tragedy, and it was the NTSB that found them. Hommendee says the FAA was also supposed to reevaluate helicopter routes annually to make sure that they're safe. She said there's no evidence that that has been happening recently. And has the FAA had anything to say about that? Yeah, in a statement to NPR, the FAA said it, quote, values and appreciates the NTSB's expertise and input, unquote. The FAA says it acted quickly to implement the urgent safety recommendations that the NTSB issued last March.

8:30And the agency says it will carefully consider these additional recommendations that the NTSB made this week. Joel, I can't help but remember that when this terrible crash first happened, the president came out and basically blamed diversity initiatives for this. This investigation doesn't mention anything like that. So is there anything else from this investigation that stands out to you? What sticks out for me is that there were a few key moments where things could easily have gone differently. If the helicopter crew, for example, had heard the air traffic controller better over the staticky frequency and realized that the plane was coming from the left side of the river and not from the right, or if the crew of the plane had not agreed to land on runway 33 at all if they had declined and continued their approach to runway one as the jet landing just in front of them did.

9:18If this plane had been just a few dozen feet higher, missed opportunities where if things had gone just a little bit differently, those 67 people might still be alive. Yeah, that's something to think about. So, Joel, before we let you go, did the NTSB issue any recommendations to prevent something like this from happening in the future? The board voted to approve dozens of recommendations. Most of them were for the FAA and its air traffic control operations. There were also recommendations for the Army to fix its equipment and improve its pilot training. And some of these recommendations had to do with safety technology that the NTSB says can help lower the risk of future disasters.

9:55I think we're likely to hear a lot more about that and the debate over that technology in the weeks and months ahead. That is NPR's Joel Rose. Joel, thank you. You're welcome.

10:13The Trump administration has secretly rewritten a set of safety rules for nuclear reactors. NPR has obtained a copy of the new rules and found that they loosen environmental protections and security requirements. NPR's Jeff Brumfield has this exclusive story and is here to tell us what the rules mean. Jeff, good morning. Good morning, Steve. Where did these rules come from, first of all? Well, these aren't the rules for commercial nuclear power plants that exist today. This is about the next generation of nuclear reactors. Last year, Trump signed an executive order to speed development of those reactors, and that led to a program at the Department of Energy called the Reactor Pilot Program, which is helping 10 private companies build experimental reactors all over the country.

10:55Now, the goal is to have three reactors running by July 4th of this year. That's really, really, really ambitious. What we've found is that as part of this program, the Department of Energy has rewritten internal nuclear safety and security rules to help speed construction. They've shared the rules with the companies, but they haven't posted them publicly or announced them in any way that we can find. And then you got a copy of them and have had a chance to review them. Huge story here. So what did you find? Well, my colleague Arun Nair and I have been through hundreds of pages of these rules, and we've compared them to the old ones, which are public.

11:32And there's some really important changes. One thing I'll highlight is a change to protections in groundwater. In the old rules, it says groundwater, quote, must be protected from radiological contamination. The new rule says consideration must be given to avoiding or minimizing potential contamination. We found similar language for discharges into public sewers in the environment. I talked to Emily Caffrey, who's a health physicist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She said these little tweaks are a big deal. Anywhere that they have changed prohibited or must to should be or can be, that is a loosening of regulations.

12:12And we found a lot of these changes that could potentially affect everything from worker exposure to radiation to security at the reactor. I can hear the difference here. It's the difference between you have to do it and just saying, do your best, make an effort, see what you can do. And there are details here which people can find at NPR.org today. And in that story, you say the Energy Department contends the changes are necessary to cut red tape. Do outside experts agree with that? I mean, there's folks I spoke to who said, yeah, I mean, there's plenty of room to make things more efficient in the world of nuclear regulation.

12:46But these changes also reflect some longstanding wants of the nuclear industry. And let's just mention security here. Ed Lyman with the Union of Concerned Scientists told me the nuclear industry wants to cut back on security to save money. They don't really believe there's a threat out there. And they don't know why they have to pay so much money to protect against something that they think is never going to happen. And we found that over 500 pages of security requirements have been consolidated into a new document just 23 pages long. That means rules for things like firearms training and limits on how many hours guards can work in a day a week are gone.

13:22What does the energy department say about these changes? You know, they didn't respond by my deadline, but I've talked to them about this program previously, and they've told me that really they take safety very seriously. it remains their top priority, and they think they can do this safely. Okay, Jeff, thanks for your reporting. Really appreciate the energy you put into it. Thank you. That's NPR's Jeff Brumfield. You can read the full story at NPR.org.

13:51And that's Up First for this Wednesday, January 28th. I'm Steve Inskeep. And I'm Michelle Martin. If you enjoy starting your day with Up First and our radio program Morning Edition, please... What do you mean, if? If. Come on. Some people might just find it sober and important as opposed to enjoyable. Continue. Sorry to interrupt. Please consider donating to your local NPR station. Your money goes to supporting reporters on the ground in your community and around the world. Keep the NPR network strong. Visit donate.npr.org slash upfirst to contribute. Thank you. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Rebecca Metzler, Russell Lewis, Brett Neely, Mohamed El-Bardisi, and Alice Wolfley.

14:29It was produced by Ziad Bach, Nia DeMoss, Ava Pukach, and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Nisha Hines and our technical director is Stacey Abbott. Our supervising producer today is H.J. Mai. Join us tomorrow.

14:50There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here? And maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's On the Media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Consider This, ICE agents in Minnesota now reporting to Tom Homet, the architect of the president's family separation policy. Who does Homet report to? Up until now, it's been Stephen Miller, but I think the administration is seeing how much trouble listening to Miller has gotten them in when it comes to public opinion.

15:37This week on Consider This, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Lemelson Foundation, working to harness the power of invention and innovation to accelerate climate action and improve lives around the world. Learn more at Lemelson.org.