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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's off to the races. I think our automobile business will flourish like it's never flourished before.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Trump this week at the White House signing an executive order, imposing 25% tariffs on imported cars and parts that go into effect April 2, which the president's calling liberation day. Stocks tumbled sharply Friday, drawing headlines like, stocks dive as investors fret over trade and inflation. NPR senior contributor Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: How do these tariffs figure into the president's economic policy?
ELVING: To hear the president himself tell it, tariffs are the linchpin of his economic policy. They're the key to establishing American dominance over our trading partners. And Trump says tariffs will yield so much revenue, they will replace the income tax. Now, Trump says it worked just like that for President McKinley back in the 1890s. He says it made America wealthy. So it can work that way again and make global industrial corporations make their products in the U.S. rather than elsewhere.
Now, Trump has threatened a lot more tariffs than he has imposed, so far, and some people still think it's all a bluff, a negotiating tactic. That debate has kept the financial marks bouncing around for weeks. But on Friday, the consensus seemed to be that Trump is serious - daring trading partners not to retaliate, warning U.S. companies not to raise prices when their costs go up. And you saw how the markets took that. Along with some other bad news about inflation and growth and consumer confidence, that drove the Dow down more than 700 points, and other indexes lost even more in percentage terms.
SIMON: And, of course, this economic news comes during a week - been dominated by the revelation that top U.S. officials - administration officials using an unsecured chat group discussed plans to attack Houthi forces in Yemen.
ELVING: So here we have a story no one could have possibly predicted. No one expected to see the contents of a chat room for top-level national security officials discussing these plans. That has been stunning enough, but after nearly a week, what really stands out is not the breach of basic security. It's the total refusal of all those involved to acknowledge the nature and the seriousness of that breach. They all just want to brush it off, despite the public outcry and, again, strong signs of disapproval in public polling.
SIMON: News last night, top vaccine official resigned from the FDA, appears under pressure. People may remember Dr. Peter Marks from Operation Warp Speed and the efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. What happened?
ELVING: Dr. Marks was a key figure in the Operation Warp Speed program that developed that vaccine and saved lives in a pandemic that killed more than a million people in the U.S. Let's remember Trump's choice as secretary of Health and Human Services is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine skeptic and a scourge of many in the medical community. Now Marks, in his blunt resignation letter, wrote this about RFK Jr., quote, "it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather, he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies." And in response, an HHS official said that if Marks, quote, "does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy."
SIMON: Ron, I want to take note this week of a bipartisan letter from Senators Patty Murray and Susan Collins addressed to Russell Vought, President Trump's head of the Office of Management and Budget. They include the sentence, quote, "just as the president does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate."
ELVING: We have here the two most senior senators on the Appropriations Committee, which is the hub of the Congressional spending process. A Republican and a Democrat - they have both been chair at one time and ranking member of the opposition at times, but they agree that there are constitutional and statutory limits on what the president does with federal money. Now, this is the renewal of a very old argument that seemed to have been settled 50 years ago in the waning days of Richard Nixon's ill-starred presidency. Nixon said he could cut spending he didn't like, even if Congress had already approved it by law. Congress said he could not, and that's been the law of the land since upheld by the Supreme Court. The president takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws, meaning the legislation passed by Congress, and that means laws that spend money approved by Congress.
SIMON: Ron Elving, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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