01
Sreenivasan, Jeffrey Brown, Judy Woodruff>
Sydney Lupkin, Craig Whitlock>
recently by attacking Boeing`s plans to build a new Air Force One. The
Pentagon hides a study that exposes $125 billion in wasteful spending,
fearing Congress would cut its defense budget. Two jazz greats discuss
their new album and staying in the moment. A bipartisan bill that funds
Joe Biden`s Cancer Moonshot is examined. Liberia experiments with
privatizing its education system. It`s not just children who are
distracted by their devices. A guide to creating a presidential
administration ready on day one is offered.>
Education; Music Industry; Art; Pentagon; Budget; Congress; Donald Trump;
Hillary Clinton; Government; Elections>
JUDY WOODRUFF: Good evening. I`m Judy Woodruff.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And I`m Hari Sreenivasan.
JUDY WOODRUFF: On the "NewsHour" tonight: From Trump Tower to Twitter, the president-elect continues to shake up tradition by attacking the Boeing company`s plans to build a new Air Force One.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Also ahead this Wednesday: The Pentagon hides a study that exposes $125 billion in wasteful spending, fearing Congress would cut its defense budget.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Plus: a passion for improvisation. Two jazz greats open up to Jeffrey Brown about their new album and staying in the moment.
JOSHUA REDMAN, Saxophonist: It`s an emotional, it`s an intuitive process. I mean, of course it`s happening in the brain, right, but if I`m thinking about responding in that way, then I`m overthinking it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All that and more on tonight`s "PBS NewsHour."
(BREAK)
JUDY WOODRUFF: He is spending most of his time out of public view, but, today, president-elect Trump was suddenly much more visible.
Items on his agenda: the cost of new presidential aircraft and prospects for new jobs in the telecommunications industry.
The day started with a surprise appearance in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York. Mr. Trump lit into the Boeing company over its contract to build two new versions of Air Force One.
DONALD TRUMP (R), President-Elect: It`s going to be over $4 billion for the Air Force One program. And I think it`s ridiculous. I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number. We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Earlier, on Twitter, he had gone further, saying the government should cancel the order with Boeing. Boeing`s initial contract was for roughly $3 billion, but costs have been rising. Still, the White House said today it has no idea where the president-elect got his $4 billion figure.
Boeing said in a statement that it hopes to deliver the best planes for the president at the best value for the American taxpayer.
Later, another sudden appearance, this time with Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese tech and telecom company.
DONALD TRUMP: And he`s just agreed to invest $50 billion in the United States and 50,000 jobs. And he`s one of the great men of industry, so I just want to thank you very much.
MASAYOSHI SON, CEO, SoftBank: Thank you. Thank you.
DONALD TRUMP: Thank you very much.
JUDY WOODRUFF: There was also news that the president-elect has divested himself of his entire stock portfolio. His transition team said he sold it off back in June. The statement gave no details, amounts or documentation for the stock sales, all of this as meetings with potential staff and Cabinet nominees continued, including the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, said to be a candidate for secretary of state, talk radio host Laura Ingraham, a possibility for White House press secretary, and Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who could be up for a diplomatic post.
Mr. Trump will visit Iowa later this week as part of a thank you tour that began last week in Ohio. The tour also carried him to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a rally this evening.
HARI SREENIVASAN: In the day`s other news: President Obama defended his record fighting terrorism in his last major national security speech before leaving office.
Mr. Obama traveled to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, home to the Special Operations and Central Commands. The president told the troops that he`s led a relentless assault on the Islamic State, but he also warned against targeting Muslims in the name of battling extremism.
BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: The United States of America is not a place where some citizens have to withstand greater scrutiny or carry a special I.D. card or prove that they are not an enemy from within.
We are a country that has bled and struggled and sacrificed against that kind of discrimination.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The president also denounced any use of torture, defended drone strikes and urged again that the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be closed.
JUDY WOODRUFF: In Iraq, army units made a new push toward the center of Mosul today. Islamic State fighters had tied up the Iraqi forces on the southeastern side of the city for nearly a month. But, this morning, an armored division launched a fresh assault. A senior commander says they moved within a mile of the Tigris River, backed up by U.S. airstrikes.
HARI SREENIVASAN: A human rights group is accusing China`s Communist Party of systematically using torture and coerced confessions against members accused of corruption. It`s part of President Xi Jinping`s sweeping anti- graft campaign, now in its fourth year.
Human Rights Watch says it found widespread abuse at interrogation and detention sites that are outside China`s official criminal justice system.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Back in this country, crews have now searched nearly all of the Oakland, California, warehouse that went up in flames during a music party, leaving at least 36 people dead. Officials say they do not expect to find more bodies.
Overnight, firefighters stabilized parts of the gutted building to continue the search today. They say they hope to finish the job tonight. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The U.S. Supreme Court sided today with Samsung, in a high-profile patent fight with Apple. All eight justices voted to throw out a $399 million judgment against Samsung for copying features of Apple`s iPhone. The high court said the award was too large, and ordered a federal appeals panel to come up with a new amount.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Wall Street edged higher again today, with telecom companies leading the way. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 35 points to close at 19251. The Nasdaq rose 24, and the S&P 500 added seven.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Still to come on the "NewsHour": the buried Pentagon report showing $125 billion in waste; a bipartisan bill that funds Joe Biden`s Cancer Moonshot; Liberia experiments with privatizing its education system; and much more.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Every few years, Pentagon leaders conduct efficiency reviews, looking for ways to save money.
Two years ago, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work commissioned a study that looked at how much the Defense Department spent on things like its supply chain, property management and health care. But according to The Washington Post, when the results came back that said an estimated $125 billion could be saved over five years, the report was buried by top Pentagon officials.
Reporter Craig Whitlock broke the story for The Post, and he is here now to tell us more.
Craig Whitlock, tell us how all this started. Why did -- why was the study ordered in the first place?
CRAIG WHITLOCK, The Washington Post: Well, a couple years ago, the Pentagon`s budget, the defense budget, was under a lot of pressure. It had been flat for a few years, and military leaders were worried that, under sequestration and the Budget Control Act, that they could actually be forced to stomach some pretty substantial cuts in the coming years.
So, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work ordered a federal advisory panel of private sector executives to start collecting a lot of data about how much the Pentagon spends on its back office functions as a way to find ways to save money.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And the work -- the study got under way. They asked them to do it in a relatively short period of time, just a few months. It wasn`t easy to do. I gather there wasn`t a great deal of cooperation across the board.
But they did come back with a report. And what did it find?
CRAIG WHITLOCK: Well, what they found was pretty striking.
This is kind of hard, I think, for most folks to understand. But the Pentagon actually up until then had no idea how many contractors actually worked for it. So they were trying to figure out how many people worked in its business operations. And they found that more than one million people worked in these core business operations, like you said, health care management, human resources, property management, things that any organization needs.
But, you know, even for the Pentagon, one million is a lot of people. These are essentially desk jobs. And that compares to only 1.3 million active-duty troops. So the backing of the Pentagon was almost as big as, you know, the tip of the spear, so to speak.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Secretary Work, number two man at the Pentagon, when he and others saw this report, what did they do?
CRAIG WHITLOCK: Well, they had touted this in advance, saying this was going to be really important, and that they had asked these private sector executives to help them make sure that the report didn`t gather dust and that they would, you know, pass all these -- or adopt these recommendations.
But when the numbers came back much bigger than they thought, and the recommendation that they could save $125 billion over five years, effectively, they buried and killed the study. The data that had been collected internally for the first time to pinpoint how many people worked in these jobs was kept secret.
It is still classified and confidential. We worked hard for months to get our hands on it. We were unable to. And I was working with Bob Woodward, my colleague here at The Post, who is pretty good at that stuff. To this day, they have kept that data confidential.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But the -- and you write the reason it seemed that they wanted this buried was that they were afraid that, if this information came out, that Congress wouldn`t appropriate what he and others thought the Pentagon needed to get in terms of future appropriations.
CRAIG WHITLOCK: That`s right.
There`s a political calculation. They were worried that members of Congress would say, look, you have been asking us for more money. You have been saying the troops need more money, you need more funds for ships and tanks and airplane, but, look, your own report, your own data show that you could save $125 billion. Why are you asking us for more?
So they were worried Congress would cut the budget, instead of them giving them more. So that`s when they decided this wasn`t something they wanted to act on and that they wanted to keep it quiet.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Craig Whitlock, what`s the fallout from this today? How is the Pentagon dealing with this disclosure?
CRAIG WHITLOCK: Well, I think the Pentagon is -- it`s very uncomfortable for them. They don`t dispute the numbers here. They don`t dispute that there`s a million people working in their back office jobs. They don`t dispute that the study found they could save that much money.
They do say it would take more time, that maybe it wasn`t practical to do this so quickly. But what they`re feeling today is some pressure from Congress, members of Congress, members of the Armed Services Committees. They`re saying at a minimum the Pentagon owes it to the American public to release this data showing how all this money could be saved.
And I think the Pentagon`s concerned. They want to see how president-elect Trump reacts. Here`s a guy who campaigned on a platform for a major military buildup, and he said he would pay for it by cutting waste and abuse in the military budget. He wasn`t very specific about how he would do that, but, you know, here`s a blueprint for how they could save a substantial amount of money.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of the president-elect and speaking of Pentagon spending, separately from all this, the president-elect today tweeted and then talked to the press -- and we showed this just a moment ago -- that he`s upset about how much he says it`s going to -- the Boeing company is going to be charging to build two new Air Force Ones.
We know there are two of these airplanes that carry the president around. Do we know for a fact from Boeing that that`s how much these planes are now supposed to cost?
CRAIG WHITLOCK: Well, you know, he`s actually pretty close on that, Donald Trump, when he says $4 billion.
Now, that`s over the whole program. That`s the cost of developing and designing these airplanes and to build and to buy them. Boeing doesn`t have all those contracts yet, but it really is the inside track. It`s the only company the Pentagon has been dealing with to work on this.
But over the next several years, the Pentagon has projected or set aside $3.9 billion for these two airplanes. Now, one reason it costs so much is that these aren`t just Boeing 747 passenger planes. They have to be equipped as essentially an airborne command center for the commander in chief.
He has to be able to issue orders in case of nuclear war. It has to have anti-missile defenses, electromagnetic defenses. So, these are pretty fancy essentially warplanes and command centers. That said, president- elect Trump is saying, do we need to be spending that much on them?
JUDY WOODRUFF: And very quickly, Craig Whitlock, is it believed that Boeing will now hold the costs down as a result of the president-elect`s comments?
CRAIG WHITLOCK: Well, I think it`s fair to say it`s making a lot of people at Boeing and the Air Force squirm a bit.
Now they`re going -- they have already had some scrutiny from Congress on this program. But they know now there is going to be a new commander in chief who, symbolically, one of the first things he`s done to point out alleged Pentagon waste is point at this program.
So, you know, I think they`re going to go back to the drawing board and they`re going to have to justify the projections.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Craig Whitlock, great reporting by you and Bob Woodward at The Washington Post. We thank you.
CRAIG WHITLOCK: Thank you.
HARI SREENIVASAN: While most attention has been focused on the action at Trump Tower in Manhattan, lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol are close to passing a major bill that would lead to big changes with drug approval, medical research and much more.
Lisa Desjardins kicks off our coverage with this report.
LISA DESJARDINS: Weeks from the end of its term, Congress is on the verge of passing a whopper of a bipartisan bill.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY), Majority Leader: This legislation promotes critical investments in research.
SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV), Minority Leader: We`re going to pass the Cures Act.
LISA DESJARDINS: A godsend to supporters, a spending spree or corporate giveaway to critics, here`s a look at the 21st century medical cures bill. It is a mammoth $6 billion measure, now four major pieces of legislation packed in one, starting with a giant nearly $5 billion shot of funding to the National Institutes of Health for research.
That includes almost $2 billion for the Moonshot effort led by Vice President Joe Biden to find a cure for cancer praised in a White House Web video today.
JOSEPH BIDEN, Vice President of the United States: A lot of lives will be affected by this bill, God willing.
LISA DESJARDINS: That`s one reason many Democrats are on board. Another? The bill now includes $1 billion to address the opioid epidemic. It`s a national crisis that`s been in funding limbo for months.
A third major piece? Mental health reform, including a new assistant secretary position for mental health and substance use.
Republican Tim Murphy, a psychologist, has pushed for this for years.
REP. TIM MURPHY (R), Pennsylvania: This doesn`t end the scourge of mental illness, but this puts us on a path to really make some substantial change and give people help.
LISA DESJARDINS: Now for what Republican leaders love, the bill`s core, reforming and speeding up the Food and Drug Administration`s drug approval process.
To some, that`s modernization that cuts red tape, but to others it`s a safety risk. And some lawmakers see it as a gift to drug companies.
Those voices are led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D), Massachusetts: I cannot vote for this bill. I will fight it, because I know the difference between compromise and extortion.
LISA DESJARDINS: But she is in the minority. The bill has received bipartisan support in Congress so far, and the president plans to sign it into law.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I`m Lisa Desjardins.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Let`s dive a little deeper now into this bill, what would change, and some of the criticisms around it.
For that, we`re joined by two reporters who have covered this field extensively, Sydney Lupkin of Kaiser Health News, and Ed Silverman, senior writer with STAT News, a site covering medicine and health care.
So, Sydney Lupkin, let`s start with what does or doesn`t happen to the FDA. There`s been a lot about that. What`s the biggest potential change?
SYDNEY LUPKIN, Kaiser Health News: Sure.
So, one of the things that happens for the FDA is, it gets another $500 million over 10 years. It also has more hiring power to fill the hundreds of vacancies that it has as a result of new initiatives, new laws other over the years. So, that`s one thing that does happen to it.
But the big thing is that it really sort of makes the approval standards a bit more flexible for drug and device manufacturers.
HARI SREENIVASAN: OK.
Ed Silverman, if this flexibility increases, is the FDA stick on the hook if something goes wrong?
ED SILVERMAN, STAT News: Yes, it`s a double-edged sword for the agency, because on the one hand there will be a new process that could be in place.
The agency will have to come up with a guidance, as it`s called, a program that will determine whether or not it can use different data to evaluate the approval process for new indications or new uses for existing medicines.
The catch with that could be that, if something goes awry, the agency is still on the hook. Let`s say there`s patient harm, for instance. So that`s the downside, because, at the end of the day, it`s the regulator who is typically blamed when something goes wrong.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And, Ed, this has already gotten pushback from the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
ED SILVERMAN: Right.
Well, the concern is that, in making the approval process more flexible for new uses for existing medicines, it`s actually lowering the standards, because of instead of using what is considered the gold standard, randomized control trial, the new approach would allow the agency possibly to look at other sorts of data, something like safety surveillance data, patient-reported outcomes, these observational studies.
These are the sorts of things that are legitimately useful and tell us real things, but they`re not the same as having a full-blown trial. And that`s the sort of tool that is used to determine the safety and effectiveness of any medicine. So, that`s a big potential difference.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And, Sydney Lupkin, that also affects the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies, because while the clinically approved double blind is the gold standard, it`s also pretty time- money-expensive.
SYDNEY LUPKIN: It`s more expensive.
So, this does stand to save them a lot of money, which is why they lobbied for it. There was a lot of lobbying activity on this bill, more than 1,400 registered lobbyists on it representing 400 different organizations, many of them pharma. Yes, it stands to save them a lot of money.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, a lot of people, whether it`s people who are dealing with the impacts of opioid abuse or hospitals that are focused on research, they have been for it. They stand to benefit from this.
SYDNEY LUPKIN: Right, because of the NIH funding in the bill.
The NIH is the National Institutes of Health, and, basically, a lot of that money will wind up going into grants that go to hospitals, that go to universities, that go to different labs to do research. Mostly -- you have all heard of Joe Biden`s Cancer Moonshot. There`s also a -- something called the brain initiative to sort of study the brain more, Alzheimer`s, understand more about how it works, that you can prevent things, and precision medicine, which is, to very much simplify it, a lot of genetics research.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Ed Silverman, how about the appropriations of this? If it`s not the Cancer Moonshot or brain research, and if it`s not one of those marquee things that people care about, what happens to the rest of these huge amounts of dollars, and is it a guarantee that it will happen year after year?
ED SILVERMAN: Well, it all sounds wonderful, but the money has to be appropriated.
So, from day one, we have that question hanging over the entire effort. Will that money actually go as intended to the right agencies, so it can do the work? Presumably, the FDA will get funds, so they can have more resources to take on things like different approval processes.
But the money`s got to be there. So, if it`s not appropriated, well, then where are we? The agency will end up having more work without the added resources. And I think that`s one of the struggles that has made the process over the past few weeks and months difficult to sort out and really feel comfortable that Congress is going to do what it says it will do.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Sydney Lupkin, there seems to be a shift away from preventative measures in parts of the bill.
SYDNEY LUPKIN: What the bill does is, is takes away, I believe, $3.5 billion in funding for preventative medicine, funds set up under Obamacare to study things like Alzheimer`s, chronic conditions, hospital-acquired infection.
And, of course, the goal of that fund is to study these things so that then it ultimately saves the health care system money. If you can prevent something, you don`t have to spend as much money treating it. And that had been mandatory funding.
So now it will get about 30 percent less than it had.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Ed Silverman, when it comes to big pharma companies, drug prices are something that consumers care about, something that even hospitals and different insurance companies are trying to figure out a way to decrease. Does this tackle that at all?
ED SILVERMAN: No, not really.
And I think that that`s one problem that Congress is going to have to face up to, whether it likes it or not. It may not be in this legislation, given that the Senate vote appears to be near, at this point anyway. So the bill doesn`t really address some of the fundamental challenges and issues that are inherently problematic right now in the pricing system in this country.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Is this just the general nature of such a large omnibus bill?
ED SILVERMAN: Yes. It`s almost the kitchen sink approach, but not quite, because Congress is trying to pick and choose a little bit of what`s easiest and what it`s most ideologically comfortable pursuing.
For all the detail -- and there are close to 1,000 pages in this bill -- it really doesn`t address everything. And, unfortunately, we discuss pricing. That`s not really mentioned here in a way that`s going to be meaningful for Americans. And while there may be portions that are helpful, there are portions that are also problematic, as I mentioned before, with concerns about the FDA approval process and what that means down the road for patient safety.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Ed Silverman of STAT News and Sydney Lupkin of Kaiser Health News, thanks so much.
SYDNEY LUPKIN: Thank you.
ED SILVERMAN: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Stay with us.
Coming up on the "NewsHour": when it`s not just children who are distracted by their devices; a guide to creating a presidential administration ready on day one; and two jazz greats improvise their live performance.
But first: how one for-profit school model is being tested to help revitalize a school system in West Africa.
Our story is in Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves with a history marked by suffering, including two recent civil wars and the Ebola epidemic.
Today, the government is trying to rebuild a shattered nation, but a move to employ a for-profit American education company has drawn controversy.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports as part of our weekly education series on Making the Grade.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It`s Friday morning, and the children at this public elementary school are singing patriotic songs that honor their country`s founding by freed American slaves.
And as the U.S.-inspired flag is being raised, so too are hopes about how public education can be quickly and dramatically improved. These students are part of a grand experiment to see if a private for-profit U.S.-based company can turn things around in a nation utterly destroyed by a 14-year long civil war and a recent battle with Ebola.
The president of Liberia has called the country`s education system a mess. What did she mean? Consider this statistic: In 2013, not one of 25,000 high school graduates in this country managed to pass the college entrance exam for the University of Liberia.
The experiment to bring in private partners was designed by Education Minister George Werner, who took office 15 months ago, hired by the president, he says, to act quickly.
GEORGE WERNER, Liberian Education Minister: If we stayed the course, followed the traditional ways of doing things, we wouldn`t catch up with our neighboring counterparts.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Werner had been impressed during a visit to Kenya, where the U.S. company Bridge International Academies operates more than 350 private schools.
In Liberia, where average annual household income is less than $500, Werner knew most families could not afford the monthly $6 fee that Bridge charges per child in those other countries. But he had an idea.
GEORGE WERNER: What if we had a hybrid for public and private? There are certain things that the private sector does better than the public sector. Government can come up with the policies, but management systems and service delivery, often, the private sector does better than the government.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Werner hired seven private organizations to run a total of 94 primary schools. Bridge, the only for-profit, runs 24 of them.
Josh Nathan is the company`s academic director.
JOSH NATHAN, Academic Director, Bridge International Academies: What the government has done in Liberia is quite courageous. They`ve said, we`re struggling with providing children this basic right, so what we want to do is look around, look inside Liberia and outside Liberia, at other people who are succeeding in providing children with an excellent education.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The government agreed to pay the companies directly, so education remains free for families. The companies also provide uniforms, which are required at public schools and whose cost keeps many from attending. When we visited the Bridge school in Kendaja, the semester was only two weeks underway, and many of the uniforms had not yet arrived.