Stacey Abrams
speaker
334 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 8 May
Stacey Abrams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.
OK, so what what is this organization? What is your relation to it and what does it do?
In 2023 and 2024, I led a program called Vitalizing DeSoto. We worked in a tiny town in South Georgia to demonstrate that by replacing energy inefficient appliances with efficient appliances, you can lower your cost. And in fact, we accomplished that. For 75% of the community, they got appliances that are lowering their bills right now.
We had one woman who saw her electric bill cut in half from $180 to $98. That's what we delivered. And based on that program, a coalition of organizations... Famous organizations came together and said to the EPA, if we can do this here, we can do this for millions more Americans. Let us invest the money of America in lowering the cost for Americans. And the EPA said, OK, great, go for it.
Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams. Since the election, we've been unpacking how the incoming administration and Project 2025 will actually work. What's possible and how can we respond? As a reminder, Project 2025 is the 900-page-long policy blueprint published by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
With a complicit Congress and a compromised Supreme Court, their to-do list could undermine everything we rely on for a just society, from civil rights protections and environmental defenses to public education, free speech, and today's topic, healthcare.
When we think about human rights, when we think about the core of what makes us who we are, there is nothing more relevant and more fundamental than healthcare. The ability to participate in society begins with good health. I grew up in a family without health insurance. I grew up knowing that if I got hurt, if it wasn't major, it was going to be treated as minor.
Not because my parents didn't care, but because they simply didn't have the resources to get access to health care. And in fact, since I grew up and got access to health care, since my parents finally have health insurance, I can see a night and day difference in the way our lives are lived.
And I also feel an incredible degree of privilege because I know what it means to not have health care and to have it now. I am also deeply annoyed and sometimes outraged because the fight over healthcare is a fight that the people stopping it don't have to have. Every elected official in Washington, D.C. has healthcare, and it's the height of hypocrisy to deny it to others.
And in the wake of COVID-19, now more than ever, we should understand how vital and essential healthcare as a human right is. So while fighting to protect and improve healthcare in this country is not new, here are some of the ways that healthcare may be impacted by the next administration.
One, there is an intent to dismantle or gut the Department of Health and Human Services, which is one of our nation's core agencies. And let's be clear, HHS, as it's called, has a very broad mandate.
It's in charge of Medicare, Medicaid, the healthcare marketplace, the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also cover the human services side. So TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Head Start, childcare and child support, and that's not an exhaustive list.
HHS is under attack. Number two, they want to split the CDC into two agencies, one for data collection and one for public policy recommendations. And this effectively takes away the already limited authority of the CDC to provide public health guidance.
It slows emergency response, and it could hurt state and local governments that rely on the CDC for public health guidance, for example, in the case of another pandemic. Number three, they want to tinker with the Food and Drug Administration's drug approval process. For example, take away the approval for mifeprestone.
And number four, at the state level, the goal is to turn Medicaid, the vital national health care program that covers the poor, the elderly,
the disabled, and some children to turn that program into block grants, which means that states would have further permission to deny access to healthcare to the most vulnerable in our society because states would have less money and limited federal accountability. Okay, so I've just done a very long list of what's at stake.
And it's not just about what's in the proposed policy papers from Project 2025. It's about who Trump wants to put in charge of that vast agency.
The incoming president's decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services is indeed a source of much anxiety in the medical and scientific communities. So much so that Nobel laureates, a group that usually tries to stay out of politics, felt compelled to speak up. But there are other nominees. As I mentioned, HHS is huge.
So among the list of people whose names are being put forward include Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Marty Makary as the head of the FDA, both of whom have been controversial, to say the least, in their respective medical practices. I've just given you a lot of information.
And right now, like almost every day, listening to what's to come can feel like daily doom scrolling. And unlike 2016, when people talked about resistance, this time people have responded by saying they need to protect themselves first. I totally get that. The rule is put your own mask on first. But we're not on this trip alone. So eventually we'll need to help our fellow travelers.
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