Catching up with a fired federal worker, a shrimper and a fraudster
The Indicator from Planet Money
NPR
4.7 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After a firehose of economic news in 2025, we wanted to check back on some of the people we’ve heard from on our show. Today, we check in with a former federal employee caught in the Trump administration's wood chipper, a Louisiana shrimper on Trump’s tariffs and an update on a financial aid scam.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darym Woods here with Waylon Wong and |
| 0:15.5 | Stephen Besaha. And we've been reflecting on how 2025 has been a little unusual for us at the podcast. |
| 0:24.3 | There has been such a firehose of economics news every single day that we've just been racing from government cuts to historic tariff announcements to unprecedented AI deals. |
| 0:36.3 | Yeah, we don't need to pitch new story ideas anymore. |
| 0:38.3 | It's always just tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. |
| 0:40.3 | Tariffs all the way down. |
| 0:42.3 | I know. |
| 0:43.3 | And just explaining what just happened, how this fits into the economy, what a 50-year mortgages. |
| 0:48.3 | That's basically what we've been doing. |
| 0:50.3 | And because events have been moving so fast, we wanted to check in with some people we've met |
| 0:55.5 | through this wild ride through the economy. |
| 0:58.3 | Like, after we got off the phone with them, how have they been doing? |
| 1:03.2 | Yeah, so today's show, it is a special one. |
| 1:05.8 | It's rest of the story from The Indicator. |
| 1:08.9 | We meet up again with a woman fired by Doge, see how a pro-tariff Shrimper's business |
| 1:14.2 | has been going, and learn about the consequences of a pretty brazen tech startup's fraud. |
| 1:23.1 | Back at the start of the year, Doge was the huge story. |
| 1:27.3 | Elon Musk's chainsaw was ripping into government agencies, firing people en masse. |
| 1:33.2 | One of those people was Elizabeth Anaskevich at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB. |
| 1:39.5 | My work phone and computer sort of make a doo-do type of sound and says, oh, you've been kicked out. |
| 1:44.6 | You need to log back in. So I'm thinking, oh, no, something bad has happened. |
| 1:48.8 | This is from our story back in February, where we learned about how Elizabeth was fired from |
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