Roundup: DOGE's Power Checked; Vance's Role Evolves
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.5 • 24.9K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Then, a look at how Vice President JD Vance has started to reshape the role of the vice presidency.
This episode: political correspondent Sarah McCammon, political reporter Stephen Fowler, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.
The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's A. Martinez. I work on a news show. And yeah, the news can feel like a lot on any given day. But I just can't ignore the news when important world-changing events are happening. So that is where the up-first podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories. You can keep up without feeling stressed out. |
| 0:21.5 | Listen to the Up First podcast from NPR. |
| 0:24.5 | Hi, this is Allison, and I am making a pumpkin apple sauce cake for my dog Snow Cone's fifth birthday. |
| 0:31.3 | This podcast was recorded at 12.24 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, March 7th, 2025. |
| 0:38.2 | Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'm pretty sure my dog is going to be hungry again. |
| 0:43.4 | All right. Here's the show. |
| 0:48.5 | That's a well-treated pop right there. |
| 0:51.2 | Maybe she can make a snow cone for her dog pumpkin apple. |
| 0:55.8 | You never know. It's a Friday. |
| 1:03.2 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics. |
| 1:05.9 | And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. |
| 1:15.3 | It's time for the weekly roundup. We're starting with the Trump administration's continuing efforts to reshape the federal government through the entity known as Doge. |
| 1:23.1 | Stephen, you've been covering Doge very closely. Doge is claiming to have saved taxpayers billions upon billions of dollars already. |
| 1:27.8 | But your analysis shows it's less than what they're claiming. Just walk us through that. Right. So the doge.gov savings page lists a wall of receipts that's only a few of the things that they've done to save money. |
| 1:38.3 | They have this top line number that they claim. As of right now, it's about $105 billion that they say that they've saved through things like |
| 1:45.8 | firing workers and terminating contracts and decreasing regulations and other things. We can't |
| 1:52.4 | verify that number, but we can look at these receipts. And I've been tracking the contracts that Doge says |
| 1:58.0 | agencies have canceled and terminated and saved a bunch of money for. |
| 2:02.1 | It turns out that number is also inflated because Doge is doing things like counting things that are |
| 2:08.9 | known as blanket purchase agreements, which act as a line of credit. |
| 2:12.0 | So like canceling it doesn't actually save you any money. |
| 2:14.6 | They've done things like double and triple count things. |
... |
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