House Budget Plan, DOGE Resignations, Battle Against Bird Flu

Up First from NPR

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🗓️ 26 February 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

House Republicans passed a sweeping new budget plan but disagree on spending cuts. A group of civil servants on Elon Musk's DOGE team resigned, and egg farmers on the front lines of the latest bird flu outbreaks say they are losing the battle with the disease.

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Today's episode of Up First was edited by Jason Breslow, Padmananda Rama, Carrie Feibel, Janaya Williams and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	House Republicans barely passed a budget plan making room for tax cuts and cuts to programs like Medicaid.
0:09.8	Some Republicans hope to avoid the spending cuts later and Democrats all voted no. So how do they work out the details?
0:15.8	I'm Layla Fawdit. That's Steven Skeep and this is up first from NPR News.
0:21.6	The president holds a cabinet meeting today and will bring along an aid.
0:26.0	The White House insists Elon Musk is not in charge of anything, and some departments
0:30.8	ignored his most recent order. So who is making decisions?
0:34.4	Also, egg farmers say they're losing the battle against bird flu. The mental
0:38.6	toll on our team of dealing with that many dead chickens is just, I mean, you can't imagine. Why is the
0:46.1	outbreak so hard to contain? Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.
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1:36.3	House Republicans last night began a long process of trying to reshape the government to their liking.
1:41.7	Republicans passed a budget plan without a single vote to spare. Speaker, Mike Johnson, had a problem with some lawmakers reluctant to sign on until they switched at the last moment.
1:47.1	We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the American First agenda.
1:51.5	We're going to deliver all of it, not just parts of it. And this was the first step in that process.
1:55.9	Now, the spending cuts in this budget blueprint are different from the ones announced so far by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
	...

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