DOGE’s HHS Overhaul & Maine Sports Standoff | 3.28.25

Speaker 1 Doge continues its cost-cutting mandate, saying they've already saved $100 billion. That's $800 per taxpayer.

Speaker 2 The sheer amount of voice reporting the government is astonishing. It's mind-blowing.

Speaker 1 I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.

Speaker 3 It's Friday, March 28th, and this is Morning Wire.

Speaker 1 Trump takes presidential action against the elite law firms that targeted him.

Speaker 4 We've taken action against a number of law firms that have participated either in the weaponization of government, the weaponization of the legal system for political ends, or have otherwise engaged in illegal or inappropriate activities.

Speaker 3 And voters in Maine overwhelmingly support taking men out of women's sports. But the state's governor is still defying Trump's order.

Speaker 5 You can't create laws by thinking them, by tweeting them, by issuing press releases, by issuing executive orders.

Speaker 6 Congress makes the laws.

Speaker 1 Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned.
We have the news you need to know.

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Speaker 3 The Trump administration and Doge are continuing their efforts to slash federal spending with major cuts to the health department announced Thursday.

Speaker 1 Daily Wire's senior editor Cabot Phillips is here with the latest, hey Cabot, so it's full steam ahead for Doge. This time it's RFK making some very significant cuts.

Speaker 1 What are we seeing from him and his department?

Speaker 9 Well, we just saw one of the largest cuts to the federal workforce since Donald Trump took office.

Speaker 11 This time it was the Department of Health and Human Services on the chopping block.

Speaker 12 Secretary Kennedy announced Thursday morning that they'd be cutting 10,000 jobs from across the department.

Speaker 11 When all is said and done, that'll be 20% of the entire HHS workforce.

Speaker 11 Among others, the FDA will let go 3,500 employees, though Kennedy did stress that the cuts would not impact inspectors looking at drugs, medical devices, and food.

Speaker 9 The NIH will lose 1,200 workers, the CMS, 300, and the CDC, 2,400.

Speaker 15 The list goes on.

Speaker 16 The overhaul will also eliminate 13 of the department's 28 existing divisions and create a new administration for a healthy America.

Speaker 12 According to Kennedy, the cuts will save taxpayer money and force health agencies to become more efficient.

Speaker 17 When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don't even come to work.

Speaker 17 As part of President Trump's Doge Workforce Reduction Initiative, we're going to streamline HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective.

Speaker 17 We're going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA.

Speaker 18 The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles spoke with Kennedy at the White House yesterday. Here he is with an example of just some of the wasteful spending he says he's encountered within the agency.

Speaker 19 Putting the money and the personnel in there is not alone going to solve the problem.

Speaker 19 And what I found when I came to HHS was really a sprawling bureaucracy. We have over 100 communications departments.
We should have won.

Speaker 8 And it's worth noting, according to Kennedy, a lack of funding is not the problem with American public health.

Speaker 10 He noted how America ranks last in health among 40 developed nations, but actually spends two to three times more per capita on each patient.

Speaker 9 He went on to describe how certain agencies were selling patients medical data for profit, colluding with the very drug companies they were supposed to be regulating, and even withholding information from the secretary himself in an effort to slow his efforts at reform.

Speaker 11 He also noted that HHS funding increased by nearly 40% under the Biden administration, as staffing went up nearly 20% during that time.

Speaker 14 So he's arguing that this week's cuts will simply reduce the workforce to where it was pre-pandemic.

Speaker 20 So we've heard MAGA, then we'd have Maha, and now we've got AHA. The The list grows, yeah.

Speaker 1 And these weren't the only cuts this week, Red.

Speaker 8 Right. Far from it.

Speaker 12 A day earlier, Kennedy moved to pull nearly $12 billion in COVID funding that had been allocated to state health departments, NGOs, and a variety of international groups.

Speaker 10 Those funds were being used for COVID testing, COVID vaccines, et cetera.

Speaker 21 According to a DHS spokesman, quote, the COVID-19 pandemic is over and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.

Speaker 11 Instead, they say, quote, HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump's mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic.

Speaker 16 And epidemic is the key word there.

Speaker 9 Remember, according to the CDC, six in 10 Americans suffer from a chronic disease. Four in 10 suffer from at least two.

Speaker 11 Kennedy says the HHS must focus not just on treating existing illnesses, but addressing the actual root causes of those illnesses and hopefully preventing them before they happen.

Speaker 1 Some major changes at HHS and Doge continues to leave its mark on the federal government. We've got to hear a little bit from the Doge team last night.
What did we hear from them?

Speaker 18 Yeah, Elon Musk appeared on Fox with seven members of Doge to talk about their process for eliminating federal waste. He says the agency has already saved taxpayers more than $100 billion

Speaker 18 and that his team routinely uncovers wasteful expenditures exceeding $1 billion.

Speaker 18 According to Musk, his agency has focused heavily on eliminating fraud within Social Security. One Doge engineer, for example, said 40% of calls to the agency are fraudulent.

Speaker 2 What happens is they call in, they claim to be a retiree, then they convince the social security person on the phone to change the way the money's flowing. It actually goes to some foster.

Speaker 20 This is happening all day, every day.

Speaker 1 Well, no signs of slowing down from the Doge team, that's for sure. Kevin, thanks so much for reporting.

Speaker 20 Anytime.

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Speaker 1 Public universities in Maine are backing down from their transgender policies, but Democrat Governor Janet Mills is still refusing to comply with Trump's order on girls' sports.

Speaker 3 Here with the details is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestijacomo. So, Amanda, what did Governor Mills say this week about Trump's order?

Speaker 6 Hey, Georgia. Yeah, she said that order has no power and it's not law, and she also said that she just won't comply.
Here she is speaking to reporters on Monday.

Speaker 5 My issue is about the rule of law, pure and simple. It's not about transgender sports, it's about who makes the laws and who enforces the laws.
I read the Constitution.

Speaker 5 It doesn't allow him to make laws out of whole cloth.

Speaker 6 Now, it is true that congressional Republicans have been slow to codify Trump's order on girls' sports. However, Title IX separates sports based on sex to ensure equal opportunity.

Speaker 6 And it was only during the Biden administration that the federal government decided to interpret Title IX through the lens of so-called gender identity.

Speaker 6 And Trump, of course, is very much not on board with that. Additionally, a total of eight public universities in in Maine have said that they will comply with Trump's order.

Speaker 6 That change was made in response to the Department of Agriculture threatening to withhold federal funding over this issue.

Speaker 6 Now, other investigations have been opened by different departments into these transgender policies in Maine, and Health and Human Services said that they actually did find Title IX violations and they gave the state 10 days to comply with Trump's order.

Speaker 6 That letter was sent on March 19th. I spoke to Maine Wire's editor-in-chief Steve Robinson about potential consequences over all of this noncompliance, and here's what he told me.

Speaker 22 The letter stipulated that if there is no voluntary compliance on the part of Maine, it's going to be referred to the Justice Department for prosecution, which could mean that you see indictments come out for the Commissioner of Education in Maine, Pender Macon, maybe the governor, the head of the Maine Principals Association.

Speaker 22 I don't know. Pam Bondi was pretty aggressive in New York when the state was giving away driver's licenses to non-citizens.

Speaker 22 So the ramifications for the people of Maine, I don't think, have been totally contemplated by the people who are making these decisions. I think there's a lot of ego and stubbornness here.

Speaker 22 They're not used to being told that they're wrong or that they don't have the authority to do something.

Speaker 15 So this is an unusual situation for them to be in.

Speaker 3 Now, we know the majority of Americans disapprove of having boys and girls sports, but Maine is a more liberal state. Do we know how they feel there?

Speaker 6 Yeah, we do. New polling from the American Parents Coalition, which was exclusively shared with the Daily Wire, shows that Maine residents side with Trump on this issue.

Speaker 6 63% said that school sports participation should be based on on biological sex, and 60% said that they would support a ballot measure to protect girls' sports, including 64% of independents.

Speaker 6 Here's what Robinson told me about what he's personally seeing in Maine.

Speaker 22 Well, I would say all the activism has been in favor of Representative Laurel Libby, in favor of Trump, in favor of keeping boys out of girls' sports.

Speaker 23 I don't think you've seen any counter demonstrations.

Speaker 22 It really seems like the national attitude of basically 80-20, 90-10 is reflected here in Maine, even if Maine is a blue state.

Speaker 6 Robinson mentioned state Representative Laura Libby there. She was actually censured by state Democrats for her Facebook post that drew attention to this issue.

Speaker 6 She posted public images of a male taking first place in girls pole vaulting at states after he formally competed with boys.

Speaker 6 Now, despite Maine residents being clearly opposed to allowing males in girls' sports, Maine Democrats just voted on Tuesday to continue Libby's censure.

Speaker 6 That means she's still barred from speaking on the House floor. And just last week, Maine Democrats pushed a bill that would effectively install tampons in middle and high school boys' bathrooms.

Speaker 6 So as of now, Democrats in Maine are digging in on this issue despite its unpopularity.

Speaker 3 While a risky move for them. Amanda, thanks for reporting.

Speaker 19 You're welcome.

Speaker 3 President Trump is taking action against top law firms that have ties to people who drove investigation and litigation against him.

Speaker 1 Here to talk about the chaos breaking out among elite law firms is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce at Deb. So Trump targeted another law firm on Monday.

Speaker 1 His executive orders are really a source of some distress for these legal elites, if you will. What's going on here?

Speaker 24 Well, at some level, it's legal payback. So on Monday, Trump signed an executive order targeting the law firm Jenner and Block.
The order is similar to a few others he signed in recent weeks.

Speaker 24 It blocks the firm from entering federal buildings and revokes its attorneys' security clearances. It also bars federal agencies from contracting with the firm.

Speaker 24 The president spoke about these orders this week. Here's what he said.

Speaker 25 I just think that the law firms have to behave themselves, and we've proven that. We have others that want to make a settlement also.
They

Speaker 25 having to do with the election and other things, they behave very badly. Our elections are very dishonest, very corrupt.

Speaker 24 A federal judge blocked one of these Trump orders earlier this month. That one targeted Perkins Cooey, the Clinton-tied law firm at the center of the Russian collusion conspiracy in 2016.

Speaker 24 The judge in that case is Beryl Howell. She was appointed by Barack Obama, and she called Trump's order unlawful and and a violation of the First Amendment.

Speaker 1 So what's behind this? Why is the president going after these particular firms?

Speaker 24 Well, they all have deep ties to the Democratic Party and Trump's top antagonists. In fact, Trump's latest order singles out Andrew Weissman.
He was a partner at Generon Block from 2021 to 2022.

Speaker 24 But before that, he was a top deputy for special counsel Robert Mueller. Weissman was suspected to have really driven forward the investigation into the bogus Russia collusion narrative.

Speaker 24 Now, these orders don't appear to be final, as in Trump will negotiate with the law firms if they come to the table.

Speaker 20 Here's Trump last week.

Speaker 3 What do you say to critics who say that your actions towards law firms are amount to coercion?

Speaker 26 Well, the law firms all want to make deals. You mean the law firms that we're going after that went after me for four years ruthlessly, violently, illegally?

Speaker 26 You mean are those the law firms you're talking about?

Speaker 25 They're not babies.

Speaker 26 They're very sophisticated people.

Speaker 24 And make a deal is what Paul Weiss did. That's another law firm with deep ties to the Democratic Party.

Speaker 24 To avoid sanctions, Paul Weiss agreed to make several commitments, including $40 million worth of pro bono work for causes the White House supports.

Speaker 1 A lot of free labor right there. Before we let you go, we've got some more legal news.

Speaker 1 We have Republicans in Congress trying to limit the power of district judges who have really tripped Trump's administration up to this point. What's the latest there?

Speaker 24 Yeah, they think judicial overreach is a real problem here.

Speaker 24 Repeatedly, since Trump took office, a district court judge has used the case of one or several plaintiffs to issue these sweeping nationwide injunctions.

Speaker 24 Those rulings have really stifled Trump's agenda. Here's GOPS Senator Chuck Grassley on Fox News.

Speaker 27 We've had Democrats speak out about this in the past and Republicans speak out about it. So I would hope we would get a bipartisan agreement to a piece of legislation.

Speaker 27 And then I think the professor you had on previous to me said how even Justice Kagan said that this is abused.

Speaker 27 So I don't know how much better you can get from both sides of the aisle that we got a problem we have to deal with, and it's really exploded since Trump's become president of the United States.

Speaker 24 Grassley needs Democrats to get on board for this to beat a potential filibuster and stop district court judges from derailing the president's agenda.

Speaker 1 We've really seen them throw wrenches in Trump's plans to this point. Tim, thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker 15 Good to be on.

Speaker 3 Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.