On today’s show: Aaron Wiener of the Washington Post joins to discuss the confusion among federal workers as some returned to offices with canceled leases. ProPublica’s Joshua Kaplan explains how an evangelical pastor and House Speaker Mike Johnson came to share a home in Washington, D.C. Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins joins this week’s Apple News In Conversation to talk about a bitter succession drama in the Murdoch family. Plus, Trump backs off certain tariffs, the first execution by firing squad in South Carolina is scheduled for tonight, and how daylight saving time impacts health. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Full Episode
Good morning. It's Friday, March 7th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, house speaker Mike Johnson's pastor roommate, Rupert Murdoch's youngest son addresses the family's succession drama for the first time, and how daylight saving time affects your health.
But first, since President Trump took office, he and Elon Musk have been working to dramatically reshape and shrink the federal workforce. In less than two months, they've fired over 60,000 employees across at least 17 different agencies. The speed of the firings has led to some confusion and mistakes.
Politico reported yesterday that Trump convened his cabinet to make clear that they should make the final calls on hiring and firing within their departments, not Musk. But he also said if cabinet secretaries aren't willing to make cuts, Musk will do the cutting. The meeting came after a flood of concerns from lawmakers and cabinet secretaries over who has final firing power.
Musk was also in the room for the cabinet meeting, according to Politico's reporting, and acknowledged that the Doge team has made some missteps, something he also said to members of Congress this week. Some of those missteps have led to rehiring workers who were let go.
At the Department of Agriculture, for example, scientists trying to fight the spread of bird flu were laid off as part of the mass firings, and the administration struggled to rehire key employees working on the virus outbreak. The Department of Veterans Affairs fired 1,000 probationary employees one week, then sought to rehire employees who worked on the veterans' crisis line.
Similar reversals have happened at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy, and other agencies. Some of the firings are being challenged in federal courts. And Washington Post reporter Aaron Wiener told us they reveal some of the flaws in Musk's thinking, applying private sector strategies to the federal bureaucracy.
The sort of move fast and break things ethos that may or may not work at a private company runs into a lot more trouble when you're trying to do it with hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
Federal workers Weiner spoke to say the whiplash has been difficult to navigate. In some cases, they've been ordered to return to work in the office, only to find that their agencies will no longer occupy the buildings they were reporting to. Musk's team has canceled hundreds of leases.
In one case at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Weiner reports managers were directed to flip a coin to determine who should use the limited available workspaces. Other workers said they've been instructed to kill time in hallways while they wait for desks to open up.
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