DOGE staffers resign; House budget; Bird flu : NPR

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Today’s top stories

House Republicans overcame internal divides yesterday to pass a framework for a multitrillion-dollar plan to address defense, energy, immigration and tax policy in a push to advance President Trump’s domestic policy agenda. The measure passed 217 to 215with just one Republican voting against it. The plan calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, which includes renewing the 2017 Trump tax cuts and no taxes on tips, overtime or Social Security.

• 🎧 Some in the GOP were majorly concerned over the plan’s impact on the country’s debt. However, party leaders were able to relieve most of their worries with a commitment to $2 trillion in spending cuts, NPR’s Claudia Grisales tells Up First. House members are also worried that cuts will come from Medicaid, which over 70 million Americans rely on for their health insurance. Next, Republicans can kickstart reconciliation, an obscure budget tool that allows the GOP to avoid a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

Today, Trump will hold his first meeting with his cabinet secretaries since taking office. Special government employee Elon Musk is expected to show up. Musk has been busy telling federal employees what to do this week, though the White House denies he is in charge of anything.

• 🎧 The White House says everyone is working as a team. However, a few people are vying for the captain roleNPR’s Stephen Fowler says. Very little of what Musk says, what the government has said in court cases challenging many of his decrees, and what federal agencies have actually done overlap. Fowler says an example of this is Musk’s emails and social media posts threatening to fire people if they don’t report what they’ve worked on in the past week. Musk is not the boss of anyone within the federal government, so he does not have the agency to make that demand.
• ➡️ Yesterday, 21 staffers resigned from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in a joint letter.

Bird flu cases have been increasing in the U.S. Recently, the first human death from the virus was reported, and two individuals were hospitalized in Wyoming and Ohio. The CDC continues to state that the risk to humans remains low. However, within the poultry industry, there is growing debate on how to escalate efforts in the fight against bird flu.

• 🎧 This strain of bird flu has gotten good at infecting new species, including wild birds that migrate and over 40 species of mammals, Kate Wells of NPR’s network station Michigan Public and KFF Health News says. David Swayne, former USDA official and a leading avian influenza expert, tells Wells he believes it is time for the U.S. to try vaccinating poultry for bird flu. Swayne believes it will reduce the virus in animals and the chances of human infection. Egg producers are interested in trying this method, but poultry farmers are raising concern saying they could lose billions a year in trade deals. They say many countries don’t want to buy meat from a country that’s vaccinating chickens.

Picture show

This April marks 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War. In 1975, North Vietnamese Army tanks captured Saigon, ending the U.S. military involvement and leading to a refugee crisis that forced hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families to flee the country. To honor this anniversary and look ahead to the next five decades of what it means to be Vietnamese Americans, a collective of artists has come together to present an art exhibit titled “50 Years of Hope and HA-HAs.” This exhibit featured visual art, poetry, video art and more. Take a look at some of the artwork here.

Behind the story

This essay was written by Chiara EisnerNPR investigative producer

Data and investigations producer Nick McMillan and I have been talking about how to creatively use audio as evidence in our stories since we started on NPR’s investigations team. We had already used radio communications to illuminate what happened the night after the Baltimore bridge collapsed last year. When the fires in LA broke out in January, we wanted to see if we could use the radio traffic in a different way.

This time, Nick gained programmatic access to Broadcastify.comwhich allowed him to download approximately 2,000 hours of LA city and county first responder feeds from January 7 to 13. Using OpenAI’s open-source Whisper model, he transcribed the audio. Then we filtered the audio by location and searched for key terms. After listening to the audio from our filtered data set, we confirmed information by cross-referencing with firefighter maps, weather reports and interviews with experts.

We published two stories with that method. The first one revealed new details about the moments when firefighters realized fire hydrants lacked water. The second one, published last week, was the first reporting we’ve seen that showed firefighters said they were repeatedly running into problems with Southern California Edisonthe power company operating in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, where the Eaton Fire broke out. We found that firefighters said Edison didn’t respond quickly to requests to shut power off. Two and a half days after the Eaton Fire first started, firefighters said power was still on and causing new fires to start.

3 things to know before you go

1. In March 2014, newly pregnant Caitlin Shetterly was feeling vulnerable and anxious while on a cross-country flight home. After 9/11, flying made her nervous. When she asked the man sitting next to her if he ever gets nervous, his answer made her body relax. The phrase her unsung hero used became a family touchstone.
2. Fabric giant Joann is going out of business and closing all of its roughly 800 stores across the U.S. after more than 80 years as a major national retailer.
3. Diana Taurasi, a guard for the Phoenix Mercury, has retired. She leaves her basketball career with three WNBA titles, three NCAA titles and six Olympic gold medals.

This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.