It's Wednesday, May 13th. I'm Achila Hughes.

And I'm Gideon Ressick and this is what a day where we're currently in the early stages of a plan to bake some bread.

Yeah, we're definitely in the ideation phase. I'm thinking pumpernickle, but maybe that's too ambitious.

My outside consultant, Sash, should stick to rye. I don't know why.

On today's show, top health officials testify about the pandemic to Congress, then some headlines.

But first, the latest. House Democrats put out a draft of their new economic relief bill called the Heroes Act. Cool name.

It's a $3 trillion package and they are expected to vote on it on Friday. Republicans rejected the bill outright before even seeing it.

Not cool. The GOP argument and the White House one has been that not enough time has passed to see whether another relief bill is necessary.

After the last one and they want to see if re-opening will boost the economy.

But that's a difficult argument to make when all the data says that the economy is clearly the worst it's ever been, or at least since the Great Depression, and that over 80,000 people in the US have died due to COVID-19.

Yeah, that's exactly right. But here are some of the things that Democrats have included in this new bill.

Almost a trillion dollars for states, local governments, tribal nations, and US territories.

Another round of those $1,200 checks for some households plus an extension of unemployment benefits, hazard pay for essential workers, mortgage relief and rental assistance, additional funding for coronavirus testing and contact tracing, and money for the postal service.

So we're going to do more on this bill and where negotiations go from here later on in the week.

All right. Well, the other big news from yesterday was a testimony of top US health officials, CDC director Robert Redfield, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn, and Dr. Anthony Fauci from the NIH and Admiral Brett Jurwa, all took questions from the Senate Health Committee about the country's coronavirus response.

It was partially over video conference. There were weird background filters, some quarantine beards, one notable red hot chili peppers poster, but Gideon, take us through some of the other highlights.

Yeah, so one of the top line takeaways from all these folks was that the United States is far from success in the fight against COVID-19.

And that's despite the rosy picture that President Trump has tried to present for quite some time as he pushes for the economy to get up and running again, these health officials were saying there's still a lot of catching up to do.

First off, Fauci of the NIH warned against reopening too quickly.

And what's certain is that a state or cities or regions, their attempt understandable to get back to some form of normality, disregard to a greater less of a degree, the checkpoints that we put in our guidelines about when it is safe to proceed and pulling back on mitigation.

But I feel if that occurs, there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control, which in in fact, have redoxically will set you back.

Yeah, part of what he's saying there is that there were guidelines put out about the reopening process from the federal government, including things like having adequate testing and declining cases, which have not been met by all the states that are currently in the process of reopening.

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