Amanda Aronchik

That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact... You're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

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Yeah, what Elaine and her team did over eight years, the Trump administration says it will do over a year and a half. Doge is supposed to cease to exist by July 2026.

After the break, if we cut every single federal job that Trump wants, how much money would that save?

So the last time a president really focused on shrinking the size of the government was 32 years ago with Elaine K. Mark leading the effort. So she does have like unique insight into what the Trump administration is doing now. Are you just like the most sought after you've ever been in a long time? Well...

The Trump administration says there are too many. So we asked Elaine, just how much money can you save by cutting jobs? And she says, here's one way to think about it. Let's say you cut every single federal worker. There were no more federal jobs, none. The U.S. would save $271 billion a year. That's salaries and benefits. $271 billion, that's how much we spend a year on federal employees?

On federal employees, yep. That is everything, okay? $271 billion sounds big, and it is big, but for context, it's like 4% of the federal budget. 65% of the federal budget goes to paying for work. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the other things the U.S. has to pay for, mandatory spending, right?

We pay trillions and trillions of dollars out in those benefits every year, which Elon Musk did just say may be next. But the point is, federal jobs are just not the expensive stuff.

OK, but to be fair, if we only look at the official federal jobs, that doesn't really give us the whole picture because there is another kind of like hidden category of worker doing government-ish work that the government also pays for, federal contractors.

We have more contractors than civil servants.

We don't actually know how many federal contractors there are. According to Elaine's estimates, there are 2.7 million individual contract workers. Some say more. And that is on top of the official federal employee numbers. And contract workers have been losing their jobs, too, when the Trump administration stopped paying some of its contracts.

A lot of the goods we contract out for are for defense. We pay contractors to build aircraft carriers and to make socks for the military. And this kind of contract work, people generally think it makes the government more efficient. Like we don't need the federal government to make yellow legal pads for judges or to manufacture floor mats for when it rains. Right.

It's also things like cybersecurity experts, nuclear physicists, translators.

Elaine can appreciate at least the spirit behind what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish with all these cuts. But she says there's a process. Like when the government fires someone, Elaine says there has to be a reason like performance or, you know, we're getting rid of this whole division because we have email now. You can't just. blanket everyone who is probationary is fired.

And it's been, uh... A little chaotic. A lot of mixed messages. A lot of mixed messages. Like, first, they offered buyouts to every single government employee, but not enough people took the buyouts. Then thousands of workers were fired in, like, a blanket way. But then, oh, no, a judge said they actually can't do that. There was that...

Elaine says you have to do it piece by piece. And she says only each individual agency, like the Department of Defense, can fire its own employees, which the Trump administration has not been doing. That's why they've been getting pushback and lawsuits related to the firings. The White House Office of Personnel and Management mass fired probationary workers.

And a federal judge recently ruled that it did not have

The Trump administration has already tried to hire back a bunch of workers that were fired, like the people who work on the bird flu that is making egg prices so high right now, the people who work on the nuclear weapons programs.

Take the Defense Department. It was initially announced that the Defense Department would cut 76,000 defense-related civilian jobs. But there are laws that the cabinet secretary, Pete Hegseth, has to follow.

I'm fine. I'm fine. A tear, Cole, is doing fine for a federal worker right now.

Email where government employees were asked to reply with the five things they did that week. The White House told agencies they wanted maximum elimination of functions. But then the White House was like, oh, wait, no, actually, we don't have the authority to tell agencies what to cut. Some people have been rehired after they were fired.

Deregulation is coming. Trump issued an executive order telling all agencies they had 60 days to identify regulations that could go. And their deadline is late April.

This episode of Planet Money was produced and also reported a little bit by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jing and engineered by Jimmy Keeley with fact-checking help from Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. We also want to give a special thanks to Ben Zipper at the Economic Policy Institute. He also really helped us understand who the federal workforce is.

I'm Sarah Gonzalez. And I'm Amanda Aronchik.

The IRS is preparing to cut up to 50,000 jobs. The Education Department just announced it's cutting half of its staff, like 2,000 jobs.

That would be a lot of jobs. But we've done it before. We've actually cut more. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sarah Gonzalez.

Though not quite at this pace. Today on the show, what we learned the last time, where they found waste, and why jobs just might not be the best place to look if you're trying to save taxpayers' money.

So, yeah, the number of federal jobs has stayed about the same, even though the U.S. population has grown by 68 percent. But, you know, yeah, maybe there's still too many jobs. OK, surely you think that there is some waste in the government, right, or that there are some federal positions maybe that shouldn't even exist.

And you would know because you have done this exact thing.

Yeah. At the time, there was this story circling around about government waste and government inefficiency. And it all started with this mythical hammer. The story was if you bought a hammer like on the street, your local hardware store, it would cost six dollars. But if the federal government bought a hammer, it cost four hundred dollars. The $400 federal hammer.

And it cost this much because of all the federal rules and regulations around buying something for the government. The paperwork, the red tape, the people involved in just procuring the hammer.

Yeah. So like If someone eats some bad lettuce with E. coli, a doctor would flag it. And then this system that Atir works on would help everyone try to identify where the E. coli outbreak is coming from.

You can kind of say that RIGO was the precursor to DOGE. And they hired Elaine Kamarck to steer the ship for their big effort.

There were three prongs to Rego's mission. They were going to make the federal government more modern, like get every federal agency on email and actually just on the internet.

Yeah. And of course, they wanted to also cut And that is the side of things that we are going to focus on today.

Elaine actually found that the most cumbersome regulations were around procurements, the way the government, mainly the Defense Department, had to buy things. It's this massive system of rules and checks and balances for even the tiniest purchases.

the mythical expensive government hammer was real. And Elaine says they also found like the over-regulated expensive ashtray and super expensive government floor wax. They collected all their inefficiencies from across the government. And on September 7th, 1993, Elaine and Al Gore presented their big report on the White House lawn with a lot of fanfare.

It's always a show, these things, you know. Al Gore also went on David Letterman to brag about all of the inefficiencies that they found.

Al Gore actually showed up with the symbolic expensive government hammer to smash the symbolic expensive government ashtray.

It was a hammer. Yeah. And their big report said, we are going to overhaul that massive procurement system, all the regulations around how the federal government can buy things. And also, yeah, a bunch of people were going to lose their jobs.

Elaine honestly can't talk about what she did in the 90s without, like, alluding to what is going on now. But even she will admit things got a little bit weird back then, too.

Was it a real hammer? A real hammer in a frame?

Yeah, kind of tacky, but also their effort was pretty comprehensive.

They were very proud of their $6 hammer awards. And, you know, they did many, many rounds of reviews and cuts over many, many years. They cut jobs, they cut whole offices, and they got...

We're now Doge. Doge. The U.S. Digital Service was now going to be the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk's team.

Right, obviously. This is basically the start of our relationship with tea. Okay. Wait, these were tea tasters? Yeah, they were tea tasters. Like a real little agency with paid government employees under the Food and Drug Administration who met every year in a converted Navy warehouse in Brooklyn to sample the tea that was being imported into the U.S. So refined. Right?

The board was technically a remnant from the 1890s when there were these... concerns about tea exporters sending the U.S.

There were also subsidies that Elaine says were costing taxpayers money that they also got rid of, like the wool and mohair subsidy.

It was like to boost domestic production of wool, basically?

Like it doesn't just go away, right?

The Wyoming farmers, I'm sure, pushed back. Right. This wool and mohair thing is actually really indicative of how difficult it is to undo things in the federal government. Even a really small, not that beneficial anymore subsidy.

Was your boss like Elon Musk? No, my boss was still my boss. Atiyah says some Doge people did ask everyone on her team for this interview, like a tell us what you do here interview.

When they wanted to overhaul the way the government bought hammers or planes that the military uses to move other planes, they passed a procurement bill through Congress. When they undid the tea tasters and the wool law, Elaine says, they needed bipartisan support. Congress voted on those things.

When they finished their big effort, the Clinton administration had created the smallest federal government since Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. And they ended up saving taxpayers about $136 billion in all over the whole eight-year effort. So, you know, not groundbreaking, but yeah, sizable.

Before we start, we want to hear your questions. Now that the election is over and there will be a second Trump presidency, we want to know, what would you like us to cover? Do you have questions about tariffs or immigration or presidential control of the Federal Reserve? You can email us your questions about the economy to planetmoneyatnpr.org or tag us on social media. Thanks.

That is where we left the story back in 2019. And since then, the researchers have been busy. They're known as the Opportunity Insights team based at Harvard. And they have put out a steady stream of papers that have made the director, Raj Chetty, into something of an economic rock star.

Our own newsletter writer, Greg Rosalski, called him the Beyonce of economics because each new paper is like an album drop. Anyway, before we get to his latest release, we asked Raj Chetty himself to catch us up on the biggest hits or maybe findings since our original episode.

His new paper called Changing Opportunity is about how the gap between rich and poor is changing over time. So is it more or less likely that a poor kid will end up rich? So to do this, they looked at data from 57 million people born between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

So if you grow up in a community where more of the adults are working, you have more of a shot at rising up. And over time... low-income white communities saw steep drops in employment rates compared to Black communities.

Raj says he was surprised at how fast some places changed in just over a decade or so. Some communities created more opportunity. Many low-income Black communities, for instance. And even if some other ones changed in the wrong direction, the idea that opportunity can change in a given place is hopeful to him.

He says the biggest and most powerful way to find opportunity for a given kid from a poor family is still to move to opportunity. But he's making progress on figuring out what changes opportunity in a given place. So you can watch for more studies to drop on that front over the next few years. Now that we know who will be president in 2025, help us make episodes that you want to hear.

What questions do you have about a second Trump presidency? Email us at planetmoneyatnpr.org or message us on social media. We are at Planet Money. Today's episode was originally produced by Aviva de Kornfeld and edited by Bryant Urstadt. This update was produced by Sean Saldana, and it was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark. I'm Amanda Aronchik. This is NPR.

Thanks for listening.

Here's the episode.

Five years ago, we did an episode about the American dream. What does it take to climb up that economic ladder? And how real is that ladder anyway? Well, since then, there's been kind of an explosion in answers to those questions, led by work from Raj Chetty and his team based at a Harvard. They've got some new work out just recently.

So here's our original episode, and then we'll talk with Raj Chetty about the latest insight into the American dream from 2024. Here is Karen Duffin back in 2019.

Perry, Iowa is about to change, drastically, and not for the better.

This week, Tyson Foods announced that it will be permanently closing its pork factory in Perry, killing around 1,200 jobs in a town of just 8,000 people.

Tyson Foods has its eyes on a different class of workers. The company is now offering new jobs to asylum seekers.

His incoming border czar announced that Chicago would be one of the first targets for raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sometimes called ICE. People assumed Little Village would be particularly high on the target list.

The way Chloe puts it in her paper, their findings from the Secure Communities program suggest that many immigrant workers are complements to citizen workers instead of substitutes.

OK, so let's say you run this. We're running this restaurant and the unauthorized workers are not there anymore because they have been deported. Like, why won't I just offer more money to just pay citizens to work and bus the tables? Like, I could just make it a better job.

Chloe is not the first person to use a big deportation to try and study this stuff. There is a paper looking at the late 1920s and early 1930s where hundreds of thousands of people from Mexico were repatriated out of the United States.

And there was another paper that looked at a time in the 1960s when a change in immigration law resulted in half a million seasonal workers disappearing from the U.S. labor market. Both of those studies came to basically the same conclusion as Chloe's, No positive impacts for U.S. workers.

Laura Gutierrez runs this restaurant. Her dad opened it back in the day.

And I'm Amanda Aronchik. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erika Barris. And I'm Amanda Aronchik. President Trump has promised the largest deportation in history. Today on the show, what that looks like on the ground in a community that fears being targeted.

There are also non-reporters, just a handful of people who seem to be going about their business, going to the dentist or to the grocery store.

Jennifer Aguilar, our guide slash lifelong Little Village resident slash head of Chamber of Commerce, says people are laying low right now.

Jennifer was not surprised. She said people are scared that talking to the media will put a target on them. What has surprised her though is how quickly the mood has changed in this area.

More than 75% of people here are Mexican or Mexican-American, including Jennifer. She was born here, raised here, got her quinceañera dress here. What did your dress look like?

We reached out to the White House for comment and did not receive a response. But what seems to be true is that these new immigration policies are in some ways a response. In the last few years under President Biden, southern border crossings more than doubled to record high levels. about 2 million people a year.

And while those crossings are through Mexico, only about a third of the people crossing were born in Mexico. The others come from Central and South America, and there are people coming from as far away as China, India, and Senegal.

Chloe East is an associate professor of economics at University of Colorado, Denver, and she has spent many years studying deportations. And she says it's worth noting that so much of the attention this week has been around these raids. And raids are just one strategy that the government uses to find people without legal status and deport them.

Because she has carefully studied this very thing. A time when the U.S. government changed policies to make deportations easier. It's a perfect case study from not very long ago.

It was a program that technically began under George W. Bush right before Obama took office, but Obama expanded it. It was this big post-9-11 initiative called Secure Communities.

The training video, kind of cheesy. We see an American flag, the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, more American flags.

Under this program, when anyone was arrested for a criminal offense, their fingerprints would automatically be sent to an ICE office, you know, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

And Chloe says it's worth noting that 17 percent of those people were arrested but not actually convicted of a crime. And of the people who were convicted, 79 percent of them were convicted for nonviolent crimes. You know, things like traffic violations or violating immigration law, which, of course, are crimes. And 21 percent of the people convicted were deported for violent crimes.

And, similar to the 2000s, Trump has justified mass deportation as a safety issue, national security. What's different, though, is that there's also this economic piece to his promises. There's this idea that mass deportation should help American workers.

And it is a significant tourist destination. People from all over the country come to eat and shop and, yes, buy a dress at one of the dozens of quinceañera shops. But today, it is very, very quiet. Yes, it is. And that is because about a month before President Trump was sworn into office,

What do people generally assume is going to happen to U.S. citizens when people are deported?

In economics terms, that model assumes that people without legal status act as a substitute for American citizen workers.

It had this sort of staggered rollout, county by county, which was useful because it would let Chloe study what happens when the program suddenly switched on in one place, but not in another place.

Chloe started to study this back in 2017. And her team's basic question was, did all those deportations ultimately help U.S. workers?

OK, that seems very dramatic.

Well, Chloe says there are two main reasons. Reason number one, simply when a bunch of people are removed from an economy when they've been deported, this has an economic impact.

But reason number two, most U.S.-born workers and unauthorized workers do not seem to act as substitutes in the real world. When you deport someone who doesn't have legal status in the U.S., that does not mean a U.S. citizen is going to take that job.

So they are being extra super duper careful.

Yeah, but being all in one place makes me nervous. But I think for the most part, people in this field or in this area will say to you, yeah, that's a good idea because it'll help you have strong passwords.

Yeah.

Yeah. This is how we get the internet for free is we give up our data.

I don't know. Oh, yeah, I was just going to say also just for basic password manager, if you have an account that offers two-step authentication, do it, use it. That seems to be how people hack very easily is setups where they didn't do two-step or multi-factor authentication is the other term for it.

Yeah, that's fun.

So, I mean, the sad part for me in all of this, though, is how much is put on you, Kenny, how much was put on me. I think this is some real BS. I don't think we should have to spend all of our time and money. There is an industry of identity theft protection.

And a lot of these protections are so that you're not the lowest hanging fruit, right? So that you're actually kind of a pain to hack. That's what you're doing here is trying to make you a less obvious target.

Oh, exactly when you put it like that.

Good.

Well, Kenny, thank you. This has been fun. Thank you, Amanda. No problem. Happy to share all this.

I'm going to do that.

Yes, it's about the illegal and legal markets for our data.

We go on the dark web. It's fun.

And I'm Amanda Aronchik. This is Planet Money from NPR.

I will tell you that part of the genesis of this episode was while I was making the data breach episode, I would like lie there at night and be like, oh, my God, I got to go change my bank password. And then like I'd wake up and then I'd like, oh, my God, I got to go set up two step authentication. I would have all of these like.

So over the course of making the episode, I learned a lot about how to protect your data, my data. And now I'm going to share that.

It really does. This is super helpful. We're very grateful when you subscribe. And with that, we hope you enjoy this conversation. We will be back with a regular episode for you later this week.

Oh, yeah. Kenny, you just love to shuffle a little piece of paper, don't you?

So that letter, just FYI, that is required, I believe, by all states that they send you a letter saying, hey, sorry, my bad. We got hacked.

And it does seem like those are prime targets. These companies that are like central warehouses for data. Yeah. Hackers are identifying places that have a ton of data on hand as opposed to like, oh, I'm just going to go hack you, Kenny. What's the point when I could go get hundreds of millions of data about all sorts of different people?

Yeah. I'm so sorry, Kenny. That's the worst.

Yes. I will do my best.

Yes. These episodes come out every two weeks. You know, basically our bonus episodes, they might be extended cuts of interviews. They might be interviews that come from our newsletter. We might talk about how an episode was made. Occasionally we do a movie club where we talk about economics and a film. Kenny, I understand that you are going to do that again soon. Love it.

Equifax. Equifax, I always forget.

Yes. Are you credit worthy? Is it worth lending you some money? Can you pay it back? Have you historically paid it back?

Yes. That one is helpful. It is always helpful to get your credit report, take a look, have a sense of like what they're keeping track of. And a big reason to do this is because the time between the hack and And when you get that letter, it's not supposed to be very long, but sometimes it takes months. So it is very possible that something bad and suspicious happened in that time period.

So that's going to be backwards looking.

So this is a check in. I mean, this is something that people should just do regularly anyway. This is a helpful thing. Make sure that you know, you know, has your credit been impacted by the hack? And maybe even you'll just see some other things that have nothing to do with the hack that you should just be aware of.

And this is very easy to do, by the way. We're going to say this over and over again, but we will put links in our show notes. So if we mention anything here in this episode, we are going to put links in our show notes. You can go find those.

Yeah, this is a funny one. Some states actually require that they offer you free credit monitoring if you've been involved in a data breach. But again, it depends on the state and also the personal data involved. There is actually an academic paper from 2012 that says if they offer you this service, this free credit monitoring, it's going to reduce the likelihood that you sue them by a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. What will often happen is you'll get this letter and it'll say in there that they've made some sort of arrangement with another company and that company will offer you free credit monitoring, which is basically a report. It's not your credit report. It's like a report that comes to your inbox or you can have it mailed to you. And it's going to say like, hey, you know, we were watching this.

We saw some suspicious activity here. We saw this email used here. Somebody pinged us about this. I have been doing it for years with Experian. And that one's actually pretty detailed.

Yeah. And I will admit that like I've gotten this offer so many times. I don't pay that close attention to it. Maybe.

To the emails that they send me. It's not not useful. Yeah.

It's not useful.

Yeah. So here's the trick with these things. Yeah. So let's say you were offered credit monitoring from one of the big three credit bureaus. This is where you want to be a little bit careful as you sign up. It is very possible that as you go in, and this is what happened to me, that as you go to sign up, you will be asked to waive your right to legal action.

You will not be able to sue the credit bureaus.

Yeah, take a look. I mean, always take a look at the fine print, but like the whole internet is based on us not looking on the fine print. But if you can do it, try. Sometimes it's well-written.

Is that really the movie? Yeah.

Yeah.

You know who doesn't want to hear from you? The U.S. Federal Trade Commission. No, that's not true. You can try. I mean, the way the FTC is handling this is if they get a lot of complaints about something, they will go and act on that. Are they going to call you, Kenny, and be like, hey, Kenny, I'm going to help you out?

Yeah.

We've all talked to the FTC a couple times. They are trying with their limited resources to help people. So you can send a complaint to them if you want.

I actually do encourage you to do that. It is very well written. It's very straightforward. They have guides for consumers, and they also have guides for businesses. Like they have, you know, so you've been hacked. What should you do for your customers? And they're actually not bad. They're not bad resources. We'll provide links.

Yes. So if you, again, go to the big three, Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, there are a bunch of things that you can do while you are there. And one of them is place an alert on your credit file.

What this is going to do is if somebody, like, let's say you go to Macy's and you decide you're going to go get one of those, like, Macy's cards or something like that, and Macy's calls to see if Kenny is worth giving a Macy's card to, they're probably going to call you up. They're going to contact you and be like, did you actually want this? Got it. So that's what that fraud alert does.

Yeah. That one is not a bad idea. Okay. Not bad. Not bad. Fraud alert.

No, you do not. If you place a fraud alert on your credit report with one of the credit bureaus, they say that they will notify the other two.

Yes, this does appear to be the kind of gold star of what you can do to protect yourself, which is you are going to freeze your credit, which means that, as you said, you are no longer able to get a loan for anything. But it's not – it isn't actually – I was a little bit surprised when I started to dig into it a little bit more. It doesn't stop all sorts of other processes.

Like people can still – like if you were trying to get a job – Somebody can still call up Experian and be like, can I look at the report? And the answer is probably yes.

You're not trying to like open a new line of credit. That makes sense. So most things still happen, but your credit is frozen. And so nobody can get a loan in your name. Yeah. The big three make this quite easy. You just go online.

Yeah, to freeze and thaw. Freeze and thaw? Is that the terminology? Yeah, that is the parlance, yeah.

Yeah, and it will not take you very long.

Yes, not a bad idea.

Yeah, we at NPR have a service called Delete Me, which is like a privacy service that helps scrape you off of the internet, your name, your phone number, your address.

Yeah, they're trying to peel some of your information off of the internet so you're harder to find your address, your email, your cell phone number, harder to find. And it's honestly, it's been effective.

Yeah. I mean, you should look on your credit card. You should look on your bank statements.

I can't believe we didn't say that. Go look and see if there's any weird charges that you don't recognize.

No, no. Not okay. I guess it's connected to your credit card. Like you probably like, or maybe not.

Your credit card is your friend in fraud. Like they do not want you defrauded. It is very expensive for them. They have very good mechanisms set up to like find fraud. So you should be watching your credit card and you should be calling them up if you see charges that you don't recognize. Same with your bank.

This is something that I learned also doing research here was like I think that feeling of like, oh, my gosh, I've got to change my passwords constantly feels very overwhelming because you have so many passwords. So one thing you can do is just make sure you do the big ones. You do your email. Change that all the time. You do your bank. You do your credit card.

You do the things that have access to your financial and personal like most sensitive information. Right. Right.

Right.

Yes, you definitely want to be protecting your email because, yes, because chances are too at some point you've emailed a password to somebody and it's sitting there in your email. It's a lot of personal information in your email. And the password manager thing, I have very mixed feelings about. I'm using Google Chrome password manager. It's fine. It's sort of out of laziness.

Yes, that's true. And for the season of giving, I come bearing news you can use. It's whatever. It fits in a stocking. Yeah, you wrap it up, you put that under the tree, put it in the stocking. This is advice on what you can do to protect your personal information if you've been part of a data breach. Even if you have not been part of a data breach, some of this will be news that you can use.

I have not done the best and brightest research on this. I have not done a ton of research on this. But we are offered a password manager at work. I have not taken it partly because I think of password managers as centralized tools. Repositories of data. And they get hacked, too. It is a centralized repository of all your passwords. They get hacked, too.

Hey, it's Amanda Aronchik. The year is almost over. You've heard a lot of pitches asking you to support NPR. To the many of you who have given, thank you. Now, if you are sick of these pitches, chances are you are a heavy podcast listener that you get a lot out of NPR podcasts like Planet Money, The Indicator, Up First, the NPR Politics podcast.

Did Argentina dollarize? No. Millet promised to replace the collapsing peso with the U.S. dollar to dollarize, but he has not done that. Not yet, anyway. Is the peso still excrement? What? Yeah, that is how Millet described the peso. And no, it is complicated because there is a black market rate and an official rate for the peso, but it is much stronger than it was.

Has inflation in Argentina gone down? Yes, by a lot. The monthly inflation rate was just over 25% last December. At one point, inflation in Argentina was the highest in the world. This past October, it went down to 2.7%.

A lot better.

Okay, I'm going to list through these real fast. And I'm going to only answer the economic policy changes. We're going to put the cultural stuff aside, the political stuff aside. Okay, so. He cut more than 30,000 government jobs. He reduced the number of government ministries. He devalued the peso. He cut subsidies on energy. He cut subsidies on transportation. He cut pensions.

He cut government salaries. He cut public works. He wasn't kidding when he said he was going to bring a chainsaw to the state. How much time is left? Just about a minute. Oh, God. Okay, so skip ahead to question 68. I have not gotten to the bad stuff yet.

Yes. All those cuts to subsidies mean that heating your home costs more, taking public transit costs more, groceries cost more. There was a recession this past year. Before Millet was elected, 42% of the country lived below the poverty line. Now 50% do. What about homelessness? Homelessness is up in Buenos Aires.

Look, Millet came into office saying that this was going to be really hard, and it has been, for many people, really hard.

You know, many people do. When the last guy left office, his approval rating was down to 18%. Millet's approval rating is nearly 50%, which in Argentina, that's not bad. He is doing many of the things that he said he would do. Hopefully, all of this shock therapy will turn into more jobs and higher wages and investments and growth.

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If you listen to two or three NPR podcasts each week, we could be talking about 12 hours worth of sponsor messages in a year. So just consider, like, what is 12 hours of your time worth? And imagine spending that on something that matters and keeping those 12 hours. Supporting public media is a public good, especially right now. Information matters. Facts matter. Context and perspective matter.

We know you know this. So please. This is Planet Money from NPR.

Good to see you. What have you brought for us? Well, now, I know that this episode is not a competition, but I win. Of course. All you do is win, Amanda. But what are you talking about? What do you mean you're winning? Well, the premise of this episode is to bring you updates on our stories that ran over the past couple of years.

And my update is the most updatiest because my update is of two episodes that I did about Argentina.

Oh, that is not enough time. Argentina elected this totally radical new president, Javier Millet, and boy, has he changed a lot. I distilled it down to 75 questions. Here is the list. Amanda. Yeah.

Hey, it's Amanda Aronchik. The year is almost over. You've heard a lot of pitches asking you to support NPR. To the many of you who have given, thank you. Now, if you are sick of these pitches, chances are you are a heavy podcast listener that you get a lot out of NPR podcasts like Planet Money, The Indicator, Up First, the NPR Politics podcast.

In order to make all our shows possible, NPR has sponsors. Sponsors slot messages into podcast episodes. You hear them every show unless... Thank you so much for having me. So just consider, like, what is 12 hours of your time worth? And imagine spending that on something that matters and keeping those 12 hours. Supporting public media is a public good, especially right now. Information matters.

Facts matter. Context and perspective matter. We know you know this. So please take a few minutes to save hours of time in the coming year. A warning, there is some cursing in Spanish in this episode. It involves a man and a shrub.

At that time, those goosebumps did help keep the CPB's funding intact. But when President Nixon was reelected in 1972, he again targeted the CPB and vetoed a measure that would have given it more funding. So in the next administration, in an attempt to protect CPB's funding, The Public Broadcasting Financing Act of 1975 gets passed. And this is important.

In that act, there is a guarantee that the CPB would have this kind of unique budget.

That means that this year's CPB budget was already set and appropriated two years ago.

So a rescission means taking back money that has already been appropriated but has not been spent yet. This is something the president can ask Congress to do to avoid spending funds on things like the CPB. Brooks says, yes, having Mr. Rogers or Big Bird show up on Capitol Hill, that's fun and helpful.

But really, the funding for CBB has survived because a bipartisan majority of representatives in the House have supported public broadcasting. Their constituents wanted it. That is because 70% of this government money goes to the 1,500 locally owned public radio and TV stations. These are all across the country. And they take that money from the CPB and they spend it in a bunch of different ways.

Some of that money might go to pay NPR for programming. A lot goes to pay local reporters and to pay the cost of running a station. So, Brooke says that cutting CPB funding would hurt NPR, yes, but it would hurt these local stations a lot more. Stations that act as a service and might be the only source of local news.

The station Brooke is referring to is KYUK in Bethel, Alaska. And their aptly named show, River Watch, which is people keeping a close eye on their river. In the winter, they want to make sure it's really frozen if they are going to drive on it.

Literally, Riverwatch. So to our listeners' question, yes, it is very likely that the Trump administration will try to cut funding to NPR. Trump has called to cut funding for NPR in the past, and he tried last time he was president. But it didn't work, because really, the decision over the future of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's funding, that lies with Congress. All right.

And can Trump use it to do the things he has promised to do? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Aronchik. Today on the show, your questions about the next four years with answers. Questions about tariffs, oil, grocery prices, and the future of NPR. That's all coming up.

Now on to our final listener question. To answer it, I have invited on Planet Money producer Willa Rubin.

There's got to be like a tech show out there for him. OK, now tell him what is his planet money-ish question.

Oh, good question. By the way, we should say Apple is an NPR sponsor. OK, so... Let me summarize. Brian is wondering, should he buy himself a new iPhone now and avoid the price potentially going up because of a future tariff, which, as we know, is basically an import tax? Is that right?

Oh, interesting. So Apple avoided tariffs on their iPhones.

Ah, yes. OK. So maybe Brian doesn't need to get a new iPhone yet because if iPhones didn't get a tariff last time, possibly they won't get one this time.

OK. And that may include products made by Apple. But I know that since the pandemic, a lot of companies have been diversifying where they manufacture and assemble their products. Is Apple, in fact, making all of their iPhones in China?

Got it. OK. India and Vietnam. But who knows? Maybe Trump will put tariffs on products coming from Vietnam or India or from anywhere or from everywhere. So what is a listener like Brian supposed to do? Could he just like wait a little bit longer? He didn't really need that new iPhone. I mean, how different is the new iPhone really? Come on, let's be honest here.

OK, so what are we what are we going to tell Brian? Should he get a new iPhone? Yes or no?

OK, so today we are doing questions from you, our listeners, all about President-elect Donald Trump and the next four years. To answer your questions, I will be bringing in different people from the Planet Money team. First up, Jeff Guo. Hello, Jeff. Hey, Amanda.

Oh, wow, Brian. Maybe you could have emailed us a little earlier, just teasing. We did make Brian wait for this answer. What did Amit think of Brian's choice?

Okay, great. I guess all's well that ends well.

That's a problem, yeah.

Oh, no. Brian's going to have to buy a new dryer. Will he or won't he? So many decisions to make. So much uncertainty. Willa, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Amanda. Feel free to always send us your questions. We love to hear from you. Our inbox is my playground. I love going in there and seeing what you guys are asking. It's planetmoneyatnpr.org.

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Meg Kramer. It was engineered by Neil Tewalt and fact-checked by Sarah Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Amanda Aronchik. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

Ah, drill, baby, drill. That one's a classic.

Yeah, this seems like a big, important international question because the U.S. is the largest producer of oil in the world.

Yes, right. There have been, I remember, it's all coming back to me, a lot of political fights over this, right? Whether the president was going to allow for drilling in the Arctic or drilling in the Gulf Coast.

But what we realized as we started to sift through this giant metaphoric pile was that our inbox was filled with, yes, with letters, but also with uncertainty and excitement and shock. This was not an ordinary bunch of questions. Like, take this one from an academic historian.

OK, but if President Trump just threw open the doors and was like, yeah, come on in oil companies, you can drill on federal land. No problem. Like, I have to assume that that would be enough oil production that it would bring down the price of oil at least some.

Right.

Oh, interesting. So it sounds like no matter how much federal land the president just opens up, he can't make companies go drill on that land.

Up to the market. Right. OK, so, Jeff, you also mentioned that there is a second big thing that the president can do to affect the price of oil.

God, I love all the caves that we just store things in. So great.

I guess that is a lot. That is a lot of oil.

But it sounds like you couldn't actually bring down oil prices this way in the long term if it's only lasting for a week.

Okay. So back to our listener Michael's question, can the president bring down the price of oil so that, you know, help fight inflation? And it sounds like the answer is not really. The oil market is simply too big for the limited tools that the president has access to.

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, we got to move on. We got to move on. Although, honestly, that does sound very interesting.

Thank you so much.

Okay. Amanda, what a pleasure. Wait just a second.

No, no. I introduce you. You're coming to my show, dude. Oh, dang it. Okay. So I want to let you know we have another question from a listener. This one is from Jen Penzis. So here's a question.

OK, so we looked this up and between 2019 and 2023, grocery prices did increase by 25 percent, as Jen said. And broadly, overall inflation was less. It increased by nearly 18 percent. Now, of course, inflation was a huge issue in this past election. And Trump has promised to bring down the cost of groceries. Right. So Greg Roselski, our newsletter writer, a little bit about Jen.

Jen watches grocery prices closely. She even made a spreadsheet where she tracked how much she was spending on things like eggs and ground turkey and milk, I think. Love spreadsheets. Love a spreadsheet. So what do you think is the answer to her question? Why are groceries still so expensive, even though inflation overall has slowed?

So first of all, I got to say, Jen, I feel you. Grocery prices do seem really high. But, you know, to answer this question, the first thing I want to do is just sort of like sort out this difference between the price level and inflation. So to clarify, the price level is like, you know, the general or average level of prices of goods and services in the economy. Inflation is different, though.

Right after Donald Trump was reelected, we turned to you, our listeners, and asked, what do you want to know? What do you want us to cover? Do you have questions about tariffs or immigration or presidential control of the Federal Reserve or tax cuts or, I don't know, any number of things? And we got a really, like, large number of questions.

It's an increase in the price level. It's the change, not the level. So how about this? So think of an inflatable pool. An inflatable swimming pool, like one of those kiddie pools? Maybe a big one so I could get in and swim around. Okay. The height of the water is kind of like the price level. And now imagine there's a hose going into this pool. Okay, we're filling up the inflatable pool here.

You turn it on, you're filling it up. So the water going into the pool, that's inflation, right? So when the pool is filling quickly, the rate of inflation is high. But when you close the spigot a little bit, the water then slows to a trickle. And now the pool is filling up less quickly. That's the rate of inflation slowing down.

Okay, so that's pretty much the situation that we are in now, right? The inflation hose is slower than it was, but that does not mean that the water level or the price level is lower. Price of groceries is still really high.

Yeah, so as you said earlier, Amanda, grocery prices have actually outpaced overall inflation over the last five or so years. And mind you, groceries are something we buy all the time. So we've all really noticed these high prices, right? Like every time you go to the grocery store, you're like, dang it, these eggs are, I don't know, like a million dollars.

Like a billion dollars for eggs.

What, am I going to have to get a mortgage on this freaking omelet? Yeah. However, since late 2023, the rate of inflation for groceries has significantly slowed down. In fact, between August, 2023 and November, 2024, it was significantly lower than the overall rate of inflation. Now, I don't know what Jen is exactly buying at the grocery store. It sounds like she's a big fan of poultry products.

Eggs in particular have spiked quite a bit in recent months because of bird flu. There goes my omelets. I don't know about you, Amanda. But yeah, this increase in the price of eggs, it actually drove an increase in the overall grocery inflation rate more recently.

Okay, so you've explained what's going on now, but I think what Jen really wants to know is will grocery prices ever go down again? Will things get cheaper at the supermarket?

Yeah, so I hate to be the bearer of bad news here. Grocery prices tend not to go down. There was one big exception, though. In 2016, American grocery prices fell a little bit for the first time in nearly 50 years. No kidding.

But I think the fact that this was the first time it happened in nearly 50 years and it wasn't that big of a fall in prices, it suggests that we're probably not going to see a big drop of grocery prices anytime soon. These things tend to go up over time, not go down.

Okay, so if grocery prices are unlikely to go down... How is Jen or anyone really supposed to keep up? Like, how are we supposed to be able to afford to buy this very expensive food?

Yeah. And also, I mean, like I should say that she should hope to get a raise and, you know, like hope her household income goes up because that's generally what happens over time. You'll see this spike in the price level and people start demanding raises and we'll get used to higher sticker prices at grocery stores. Okay.

And actually over the last year or so, the wages of Americans have been going up and they've been growing faster than overall grocery prices.

Okay, so Jen, you thought you were calling about groceries, but really we are suggesting you go ask for a raise. Thank you, Greg. This has been super helpful.

It's always a good call.

We have more questions and answers coming up. Questions about the potential impact of Trump's tariffs on our purchases, like, for example, when we buy an iPhone. And will President-elect Donald Trump find a way to cut NPR's funding? That's all after the break. Oh, whoa. I want to hear that segment.

Exactly. Exactly.

So our next question is from a listener named Jane Gray. This one is about the media. It impacts us. We get this question a lot. And I decided to bring it to Brooke Gladstone. She is the co-host of the public radio show On the Media. And she's just finished reporting an episode about public broadcasting funding. I read her the listener question.

What is the likelihood that Trump's administration will cut funding for NPR?

One of Brooke's first media gigs back in the 1980s was writing for Current, which is like this industry trade magazine. So since the very beginning of her media career, Brooke has seen many attempts to cut funding to public broadcasting.

So first a little context. NPR and PBS get some of their funding from the government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, which was established by President Lyndon Johnson back in 1967 as part of his Great Society programs. A couple of years later, PBS was founded, then NPR.

But almost immediately after Richard Nixon took office in 1969, Nixon tried to cut its proposed funding. He did not like being criticized, and he saw the media as his adversary. So that year, Mr. Rogers, who is still establishing himself and his neighborhood as this educational place on television for children, he goes to testify before a Senate committee about the value of public television.

Decades. Even Aaron, who wrote in with a question, acknowledges we just can't know yet. We have no crystal ball. There's no way to know exactly what will happen. And yeah, a lot of your questions, it's just impossible to answer now. But what we can do is look at how much power the president really has to shape the economy. Where does that power come from?

As U.S. trade with China exploded, American manufacturing shriveled, and workers struggled.

In a recent Planet Money bonus episode, we hear from the economists who helped tell that story and changed the way economics thinks about the costs of free trade. To hear it, sign up for NPR+. Just go to plus.npr.org.