Hello, everyone. My name is Kimberly Adams, and welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today makes sense. It's Wednesday, April 23rd.

I'm Kyle Rosdahl. Thanks for joining us on the pod. Today we're going to do our usual thing, news, smiles, and then get out of your hair.

Kimberly, let's start with, I'll try that

again. Kimberly, let's start with news. I screwed it up on the retake, too. Go ahead. It's okay. It's,

it's one of those days. It's Wednesday. You know, we've been paying so much attention to tariffs,

rightfully so. It's affecting so many of us, But like it's, I just saw a couple of stories today that

were a reminder that in terms of what the federal government is doing, the reach of some of the

Trump administration policies is just so widespread throughout various sectors of the economy.

And many of those effects we haven't felt yet. And so, like, there was a story in the Hill about

the Trump administration making cuts to the FDA, and in particular, the milk quality testing

program. And that program was suspended effective Monday. And this was one of the early concerns

that people had about cuts at USDA and the FDA and some of these other oversight

agencies that the people responsible for ensuring the safety of America's food supply were

potentially being cut, leaving it to private industry alone to regulate itself. Now, that's not to

say that private industry will not, you know, regulate itself at all.

But the incentive model there is not exactly ideal, and we have history showing us that that doesn't always work so hot.

And now we've got contractors hired by the FDA to support staff in lieu of the actual people who were doing it full time. And there's not

great evidence about the price efficiencies within the federal government of hiring private contractors

to replace federal workers, like that it actually saves money. There's not too much data to support that that is

default. So it would be very interesting to see if there's actually any savings there. And then

there was a Politico story about cuts to the U.S. Forest Service that have been happening.

And the headline is crazy. Forest Service cuts ignite fear, fury over wildfire risk.

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