Roundup: Kash Patel confirmed as FBI chief; China sees opportunity as USAID gets cut
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
ASHLEY LOPEZ, HOST:
Hey there, it's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. We're recording this at 12:25 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, February 21, 2025. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
LOPEZ: Kash Patel was confirmed as the new FBI director yesterday, despite questions about his qualifications. Ryan, this was a pretty tight vote, even though it seemed like his confirmation was never really in doubt, right?
LUCAS: No. It wasn't really in doubt. Republicans did, for the most part, kind of unite in lockstep behind him. But this vote came out to 51 to 49. There are two Republican senators who voted against confirming Patel - that would be Maine's Susan Collins and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski. And if you look at the three directors immediately before Patel, they all received at least 92 votes in favor, so that gives you a sense of how controversial a nominee Patel is to lead the FBI, which, to remind people, is a really big job.
The FBI is responsible for investigating counterterrorism, bank robberies, cybersecurity - all sorts of things across the spectrum. And there's a lot of crime going on, and a lot of this comes down to the FBI to fight, so this is a very big job. And there are a lot of people, whether they be Democrats and also former national security officials, who have concerns about Patel, about his qualifications, about his experience, his temperament and whether he's really the right man for this job.
LOPEZ: Yeah. Can you talk to me more about what concerns people had going into his confirmation?
LUCAS: Well, there are a whole bunch of them. There's the fact that he's a very close ally of President Trump. There are concerns about whether he can be independent from the White House or whether he's somebody who's going to do exactly what President Trump wants him to do. Traditionally, the FBI is independent, and it's something that has been very important historically. There's also just the fact that he's made a lot of inflammatory comments over the years. He's talked about wanting to root out the deep state. He's called public servants - law enforcement officials who investigated Trump - gangsters. He says that people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 - who fought with police - he says that they are political prisoners. That's, of course, echoing the sort of comments that we've heard from the president.
And more broadly, he's just a very fierce critic of the FBI itself. He has said on a bunch of podcast appearances that he wants to shut down FBI headquarters on Day 1. He wants to turn it into a museum to the deep state. Lawmakers, certainly Democrats, asked him about a lot of these things during his confirmation hearing, and Patel tried to push back on them. He said that he would not politicize the FBI, that he wants to take politics out of the FBI. He wants to focus on traditional crime fighting. But those comments did little to assuage the concerns that Democrats have.
MONTANARO: And that just simply wasn't who Kash Patel was before he was at that Senate hearing. You know, this is somebody who was known for being provocative, who wrote a book not just about the "Government Gangsters," as he noted in the book title, but he wrote a children's book called "The Plot Against The King" that seemed to depict someone with blonde hair as the king - looked like maybe President Trump. And, you know, somebody who looked like Nancy Pelosi as one of the people who was engaging in the plot against, and someone who maybe looked like Kash Patel, who seemed to be the sorcerer behind the king.
So, you know, it's one thing when you're trying to sell books and get yourself on podcasts. It's another thing when you want to run the FBI, which is one of the most important structures in this country for fighting crime. And he says that he's not going to engage in political weaponization or try to go after enemies and all of that, but we saw people who said one thing at the hearing which defied what they believed before the hearing, seemingly, and then, when they got confirmed, did something else.
LUCAS: And really, one of the biggest concerns with Patel centers around things that he has said about wanting to go after his perceived enemies and Trump's perceived political enemies. And now you have Patel in charge of an organization, the FBI, which has these vast, vast investigative powers, and there are a lot of concerns that he will make good on those statements that he made when he was not at the FBI, about wanting to go after perceived enemies.
LOPEZ: Yeah. Given those concerns that were mentioned, what do we expect from him as director?
LUCAS: I will say that Patel takes over at the FBI at a tumultuous time for the organization. The new leadership at the Justice Department has pushed out at least eight senior leaders there, really top-level folks with a lot of experience. And more broadly, the new leadership at the Justice Department has demanded and now received a list of thousands - around 5,000 or so - FBI employees who worked on January 6 investigations. Remember, that was one of the largest investigations, if not the largest, in Justice Department history - touched every state in the U.S. They've demanded a list of everyone who worked on that, and that has led to concerns at the FBI - I've heard a lot of these concerns from folks who worked there - of potential mass firings there - essentially a purge.
And so the impact that something like that would have on the FBI's ability to do its job and to protect the American public is a significant concern, and how Patel's going to deal with that and how he's going to try to lead an organization as big and important as the FBI is something that we're just going to have to wait and see how that pans out.
LOPEZ: Yeah. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for being here today.
LUCAS: Thank you.
LOPEZ: OK. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, how China is responding to the cuts at USAID.
And we're back. And we're now joined by international correspondent Emily Feng. Hi, Emily.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Hey, Ashley.
LOPEZ: So Donald Trump is undertaking efforts to slash spending at the federal government level, which includes a lot of international pro-democracy and human rights groups. Emily, can you just start with the basics here? Why did the U.S. start funding these programs to begin with?
FENG: It began really in the early 1980s, in the middle of the Cold War under President Ronald Reagan. And at the time, the U.S. was competing with the Soviet Union both for political influence but also in the ideological sphere. And so Reagan gave a speech in 1982 where he spoke about funding what he called the infrastructure of democracy, and what resulted is billions of dollars in foreign assistance funding through agencies like USAID, through the State Department, and then the creation of other foundations like the National Endowment of Democracy. And when the Cold War ended, all that funding evolved into going to support humanitarian work abroad, civil society work around the world, especially in countries that are authoritarian or were devastated by war. So think countries like Iran or China, or now, Ukraine.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And why is it that the Trump administration is reversing this long-held position of the U.S. when it comes to diplomacy abroad?
FENG: It's been done under the umbrella of trying to shrink the federal government and its budget, and it's really been driven by Elon Musk and President Trump. Musk has also accused these agencies that I just mentioned - for example, USAID - of being behind what he called a hoax of Russian influence in the Trump administration. He also said the US aid agency spreads leftist propaganda without giving evidence. And then he's also been resharing posts on X - the social media site that he owns - that has implied the National Endowment for Democracy as a CIA front. Again, no evidence.
But what's interesting to me is this is exactly the same kind of criticism that authoritarian countries like China have long said about U.S. foreign assistance funding. And this reversal now on cutting - you know, cutting foreign assistance funding, is notable because this was actually kind of an issue that Republicans have long championed, especially Republicans like Marco Rubio, who is now the U.S. secretary of state. He's now in charge of defending and implementing these foreign assistance cuts, but when he was a U.S. Senator, he was a big proponent of foreign aid. He saw it as essential to U.S. national security by promoting U.S. democratic values abroad and he said that cutting it would not bring us to balance, but now he's been a big defender of these cuts.
LOPEZ: And, Domenico, I wonder what you think this means for sort of having the end of, quote-unquote, "soft power" in U.S. foreign policy - what this sort of means going forward?
MONTANARO: Well, I mean, the idea that the U.S. would walk back from the idea of soft power really kind of flies in the face of decades of what was American foreign policy following World War II and then the ascent in the 1960s and into the '80s and early '90s of the Cold War against Russia. Really, the idea was to counter communism and what Russia was trying to do around the world. And now the U.S. has a different sort of calculation to make, which is China, because China is in places like Africa, trying to, you know, build infrastructure projects, you know, and try to, by the way, also mine in places where they're helping those countries out, to try to take some of those natural resources from those places, but also try to win over some of those populations in some of those countries to try to win allies. And it's a really America First sort of approach, but one that a lot of critics believe is really short-sighted and not - and something that's too transactional for the long-term success and power of the United States.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And, Emily, I think it's worth mentioning, like, a good portion of this funding has actually supported Chinese dissidents. I wonder how China is seeing this. Is this welcome to them?
FENG: Yeah. U.S. funding was supporting basically the last remaining traces of Chinese civil society, and with the cuts, China has not said very much publicly. Because honestly, they could just sit back and do nothing to reap the benefits of this U.S. retreat and funding soft power, because the groups that are seeing their funding cut are the ones that really were a long-term nuisance to China. I'm talking about labor rights organizations, civil society groups, human rights investigation organizations. A lot of them had been forced to flee from China given the political controls there, and that's why they needed funding from the U.S. And I talked to seven of these groups focused on China but now based in the U.S. Because they don't have funding anymore, they are already furloughing or laying off their employees, and a lot of them have paused their programs.
Now, there's evidence that China's moving in already to fill this U.S. funding gap in just the last few weeks. Big caveat - funding soft power is not China's strong suit. They're often really heavy-handed about it or inefficient, but they're making an effort. And I actually managed to talk directly with a Chinese state representative here in D.C. who answers to the government in China. They requested anonymity when meeting because they're not authorized to speak publicly. But they're here in the U.S. because they reached out to at least one China-focused group who is at risk of losing their funding and proposed to this group, you know, instead of criticizing people and organizations in China publicly, perhaps they, as a Chinese government representative, could facilitate private conversations with China to achieve the social change that the organization wants. And one of the groups that this representative was in contact with said they kind of felt like this was a tactic to buy their silence, but the Chinese representative argued it was a more effective way for organizations to work. So you're already seeing this competition between the U.S. and China, given the risk of losing all the civil society funding.
LOPEZ: And, Domenico, I wonder if you have a sense of how this would, like, actually affect Americans. 'Cause this all does seem a little bit abstract, but I'm wondering if there's a way in which, like, Americans could actually feel the end of this funding, you know, back home.
MONTANARO: Well, you know, morality, you know, and humanitarianism is something that a lot of Americans believe in, although it's not always a great argument for a broad swath of Americans because, of course, they're concerned about kitchen table issues and how it affects their pockets. You know, and one area that maybe a lot of people don't think about is farming and how American farmers could be affected by cuts in USAID because a lot of the food that USAID uses to feed others in the world and the developing world comes from places like Kansas, where grain sorghum farmers, you know, are supplying USAID. As that's cut, you're going to see those American farmers hurt as well.
FENG: I would argue this matters because the U.S. and China have been competing on technology, on political influence, on industrial standards, and definitely in soft power, and the U.S. is cutting back its foreign presence and its foreign assistance funding at the very moment that China has stepped up and pledged tens of billions of dollars more in places like Africa. And so the potential trade-offs have never been bigger.
LOPEZ: All right. Emily, thank you so much for bringing your reporting to the pod.
FENG: Thanks so much for having me on.
LOPEZ: It's time for one quick break, and when we get back, Can't Let It Go.
And we're back. And it's time for everyone's favorite Friday segment, Can't Let It Go. That's the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. And we have with us a political correspondent, Sue Davis. Hey, Sue. Thanks for joining us.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Oh, I am so happy to be here today.
LOPEZ: All right. Well, we're going to start with you. What can't you let go of this week?
DAVIS: You know, I was going to talk about something else this week, but then, before the podcast, I saw a hot take that got me literally so hot. It is now the thing that I can't let go. And it is a column in Time magazine in which someone defends voice notes in a column entitled "We Should All Send More Voice Notes." Now, if you don't know what that is, it's when someone will literally, on their phone, like, record themselves talking to you and then, like, text it to you. And I cannot tell you how much I disagree with this sentiment.
MONTANARO: (Laughter).
DAVIS: I'm sorry if either of you are voice note people...
LOPEZ: No.
DAVIS: ...But please don't send voice notes. This is not something that - this is a social contagion I need to stop here, at this podcast.
MONTANARO: (Laughter).
LOPEZ: I think I only get them from younger, maybe Gen Z folks, but also just some people who have, like - like, this is - they're really bought into it. Like, they refuse to text any other way. And I do talk to those folks less because it is - it's too much for me to - it takes too much of your time.
MONTANARO: I think it's super annoying. I agree with you. I mean - and I've always been a little confused by it because this is kind of like going backwards in time. I don't know. I can't understand anything anymore, frankly. I get a voice note, and I'm like, now I have to listen to this. I got to make my phone quieter. Just - you know, just text me what you want to say. Also, you know, it helps you think about what you want to say first before you, you know, just spit it out.
DAVIS: Also, like, if you want to leave a message, just do a voicemail, because the thing I appreciate - and also don't leave a voicemail. Just text me. But if you do leave a voicemail, at least your phone now will transcribe the voicemail so you can, like, look at what they said really quickly. Like...
LOPEZ: Yeah.
DAVIS: ...A voice note sent to you is diabolical. And anytime someone sends me a voice note - I'm not lying - I delete it and text them and say, what do you want to tell me (laughter)?
MONTANARO: That's a confusing thing 'cause I thought that voicemail was going out of style. I'm so confused. I don't know anything anymore.
DAVIS: What's old is new again.
LOPEZ: I will say, I think we're the wrong audience for this...
MONTANARO: Yeah.
LOPEZ: ...Because we have to deal with...
MONTANARO: Totally.
LOPEZ: ...Audio forms of people's voices all day, and other people maybe just want to hear, like, actual people's voices, but not us, clearly.
MONTANARO: Yeah.
DAVIS: Just text me, girl.
LOPEZ: (Laughter).
DAVIS: Just text me.
MONTANARO: Or call. We can call...
DAVIS: Or call me, yeah.
MONTANARO: ...And have a conversation.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
MONTANARO: I'd rather do that.
LOPEZ: I love a phone call.
MONTANARO: Yeah.
DAVIS: Text me first and say, can you chat? And then when I say, yeah, give me a call. Ashley, what about you? What can't you let go of?
LOPEZ: So what I can't let go of this week is - for those who didn't catch it, there was a concert - a concert event, basically, to celebrate "Saturday Night Live's" 50th anniversary. I didn't watch the whole thing. It was three hours long, which - this is the same reason I haven't watched "The Brutalist" yet. I cannot commit to something that long. But I was really happy to catch parts of it, because the thing that I can't let go of is I saw the - like, a mash-up of all The Lonely Island songs, like, some of the hits. Do you guys know what I'm talking about?
DAVIS: No.
MONTANARO: No.
LOPEZ: OK. Like, some of the titles are not suitable for a podcast, but there were all these music videos that came out in the aughts with Andy Samberg, and then Akiva and Jorma were, like, part of his comedy group. And they had - remember, like, that video about getting cupcakes and "Chronicles Of Narnia" and, like...
DAVIS: Oh, yeah.
LOPEZ: ...All of those...
DAVIS: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
LOPEZ: ...Little segments...
DAVIS: OK.
LOPEZ: ...With Justin Timberlake? This was, like, such a specific time in "SNL" history, but it was, like, every time these videos came out, they were such a big cultural moment when I was in college, that seeing all that stuff played again just reminded me how, like, older millennials have gotten because Andy Samberg looks like such a dad now and it's just so - it - I just cannot stop thinking about, like, how big of a deal those "SNL" - they were called, I think, SNL Shorts or something...
MONTANARO: Yeah.
LOPEZ: ...That came out. It was, like - they were moments and they had, like, some pretty big stars to come on...
DAVIS: I'm remembering.
LOPEZ: ...For those, too.
DAVIS: I'm remembering this now, because I remember - as when you said Andy Samberg, and they did - the one I remember the most is "Lazy Sunday." Is that right?
LOPEZ: Yeah.
DAVIS: Is this the thing we're talking about?
LOPEZ: That's the one...
DAVIS: Yeah, yeah. yeah.
LOPEZ: ...You're talking about, yeah. That was, like, one of the first big digital sketches to come out of "SNL." It was a big moment.
DAVIS: They also did a really hilarious one with Natalie Portman in which she, like, is this, like, demure actress, but in the skit, she's, like, this hardcore gangster rapper, and it was really funny.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
MONTANARO: Well, they - you know, "Iran So Far Away" - you know, you look like a very hairy Jake Gyllenhaal to me, was always a funny line...
(LAUGHTER)
MONTANARO: I always thought about Ahmadinejad (laughter). Who could make that joke, right? I mean, it's just so crazy. I love "SNL" because it's always been so countercultural and, you know, has lasted as long as it has. And especially when - at a time when music videos were going out of style.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
DAVIS: I loved this, too, because it allowed us to work in an Ahmadinejad reference into the Can't Let It Go segment, so congrats.
LOPEZ: All right. Domenico, what can't you let go of this week?
MONTANARO: Well, what I can't let go of - and I'm sorry if you're eating anything - is boogers.
DAVIS: (Laughter).
LOPEZ: Oh.
DAVIS: I'm a mom. Say more.
MONTANARO: Not my own, OK? I have to clarify that. This has to do with Elon Musk's very young son.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
DAVIS: Oh, yeah.
MONTANARO: He was in the White House this week, and he picked and wiped - something...
LOPEZ: Yeah.
MONTANARO: ...That you're not supposed to do. We tell our kids all the time. But he did it on the Resolute desk at the White House, where Donald Trump was sitting - the President of the United States. And if that's not funny enough, word then came out this week that the Resolute desk, Donald Trump reports on Truth Social, is being lightly refinished - a very important job. This is a beautiful but temporary replacement (laughter).
LOPEZ: Oh, my gosh. Well, he is kind of a germophobe, right?
DAVIS: Yeah.
MONTANARO: Yeah, known germophobe. And, you know, whether or not - it's not clear that it's related to that exactly, but that didn't stop places like the New York Post, which...
LOPEZ: Yeah.
MONTANARO: ...Are generally pretty friendly toward Trump, from jumping to that conclusion, saying in their lead - which I love - the White House has assured the public it's snot a permanent change.
LOPEZ: (Laughter).
DAVIS: Oh.
LOPEZ: All right, that's all from us today. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Casey Morell edits the podcast. Our producers are Bria Suggs and Kelli Wessinger. Special thanks to Krishnadev Calamur.
I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
DAVIS: I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.
MONTANARO: And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
LOPEZ: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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