Face the Nation: Baker, Houry

[0:03] welcome back to face the nation tomorrow the u.s national soccer team takes the field [0:08] against belgium in the round of 16 in the world cup and along with many diehard knicks fans i'm [0:13] still feeling the thrill of last month's nba championship and then there were those amazing [0:18] olympic gold medal wins of both women and men's u.s hockey teams i could go on but to take a look [0:23] at some of the big changes in college sports including new rules allowing athletes to earn [0:29] money and schools to directly share revenue we spoke with the president of the ncaa former [0:34] massachusetts governor charlie baker and asked him about those changes i think it's a good thing um [0:41] is it messy yes um could it have been less messy maybe um but when you go through something like [0:47] this on on this kind of scale where you're talking about a billion dollars uh potentially going out [0:52] to student athletes every year um it's going to be challenging and and as a result um it has been [0:58] uh you're you're supportive of the bipartisan protect college sports act because it establishes [1:04] national standards on the name image and likeness uh program for for for student athletes uh because [1:10] it limits player transfers and makes other changes that are designed to be equitable at least in the [1:16] legislation across college athletics but you know several of the largest athletic conferences take [1:22] issue with this legislation so as washington continues debating it why do you think it's necessary [1:27] why do you think it's worth passing if you were to say to me you know is the eligibility system [1:32] that we currently have working i mean if everybody would comply with it and stay out of the courts [1:36] maybe but they don't um there is no agent regular regulation which is a huge problem you talk to [1:42] any student athlete about that and any school about it they'll tell you that this provides some [1:46] regulatory structure around agents it also deals with all the state preemption issues what we're [1:51] really trying to achieve is some sort of national framework so that you can have national championships [1:58] and national competitions in which for all intents and purposes everybody's playing by the same set of [2:03] rules now i understand some of the concerns that the um the big ten and the and the sec in particular [2:09] raised with the bill we have some concerns with the bill too but to to simply walk away from something [2:14] that deals with a number of the most significant challenges that face college sports [2:19] um at that point in time in my view would be a mistake by allowing the nil and allowing schools [2:28] to directly share revenue you are seeing different division one programs in other sports other than [2:35] football and basketball which are the biggest get cut things like volleyball track and field a lot of [2:39] the olympic sports and there's been a lot of concern about that what does this legislation do what's [2:44] the ncaa doing to ensure that while all the money is going into football basketball lacrosse maybe to [2:51] some extent volleyball women's volleyball to some extent but all those other sports we're going to [2:55] protect those and ensure that athletes who want to participate in those will still be able to do so [3:01] the idea that that sports are being cut um only tells half the story because at the same time certain [3:07] sports may be being cut other sports are being introduced if you look at the number of kids who are playing [3:12] sports right now uh in division one and you look at the number that are playing in division two and [3:18] division three they're basically at pretty close to all-time highs no one ever writes about or talks [3:23] about or promotes the sports that get added they only talk about which i understand having come out of [3:28] politics myself about the sports that get cut we track all this stuff every quarter with respect to ads [3:34] and subtracts with regard to uh sports that are being made available um and sports that are being reduced [3:40] but i think the idea that somehow um there's a crisis here um i don't buy it first of all and secondly [3:48] um i think the i think the legislation does deal with this in a variety of ways i happen to think there [3:55] are better ways to deal with it and it's an important issue and we're going to continue to talk to folks [3:59] in the senate about that um but i think this notion that somehow um paying or providing revenue sharing [4:07] to kids in high revenue sports of which frankly there's really only two football and some basketball [4:12] programs um people need to remember that football and and men's basketball for the most part supports [4:19] all the other programs that schools make available um especially in division one and um and that is not [4:26] an insignificant issue when you think about this i believe that at the end of the day the best way to [4:30] deal with it is treat the sports that generate significant amounts of revenue um appropriately [4:37] right and make sure there is this opportunity to share revenue in recent days the u.s supreme court [4:41] decided to let states determine whether or not to allow transgender athletes to participate in sports [4:46] last year the ncaa changed its policy to align with the president's executive order threatening to [4:51] revoke federal funding for schools that permitted transgender athletes the ncaa changed its policy [4:56] in part saying it provides a clear national standard in light of the high court's ruling do you foresee [5:03] the ncaa having to tweak its transgender athletes policy i don't think so i mean generally speaking [5:09] we try to establish policies um from most of our programs that can hopefully have a national standard to [5:16] it um i had said to folks democrats and republicans in washington after i got this job that um we needed [5:23] some sort of clarity around what the national standard for this would be um and we adopted and comply [5:29] with the standard that was put forth by the trump administration um i think what happens at the [5:34] state level is a different question although i do think our national standard is going to be what we [5:39] expect our schools to use um with respect to eligibility issues for college sports there are a lot [5:45] of people who though who look at this and think you know i went to this university it can't compete with [5:51] some of these bigger ones are we are we essentially in an era now where the only the biggest brands [5:57] in the deepest pockets in college sports can expect to win basketball and football championships um [6:05] well i think football is a little different than some of the other sports i think in football [6:10] given the scale of what it takes to create a competitive program which was true even before the nil [6:16] era um that's probably um a reasonable assumption i think in most other sports um there's still plenty of [6:24] room for competition i mean if you look at baseball for example um troy and alabama made it to the [6:30] college world series if you look at um if you look at ice hockey denver won the national championship [6:36] there are plenty of sports where there's still a lot of competition um what's particularly interesting [6:41] i think on the women's side is um is the scale and significance of um of how much success the major [6:51] programs um and the power conference schools have had in growing and and winning in women's sports [6:59] the investments that they've made there have made an enormous difference in their ability [7:03] uh to out-compete just about everybody else there are leaders at the southeastern conference for [7:08] example i'm thinking of the head coach and the president of the university of georgia [7:11] who've talked openly about the sec breaking away from the ncaa if this legislation that's being [7:16] considered isn't considered favorable to the conference and once the tv contracts come up why don't they [7:21] just go their own separate way what would you say to those in the sec or other uh leagues that say [7:27] or conferences that say yeah let's just go out on our own well they'll have a hard time running [7:34] national championships if they do that because everybody won't have the same rules um i actually [7:39] like and respect a lot of the people at georgia in particular um and at all miss and at lsu and a [7:46] whole bunch of those schools who i deal with on a pretty regular basis i think the possibility of [7:51] trying to figure out some way to um to determine what really has to be a national standard to have [7:57] national championships um and what you probably could do at a conference level um because it [8:04] doesn't you know necessarily affect our ability to run national championships on a level playing field [8:09] could be one way to think about it we'll be right back on wednesday margaret sat down with former cdc [8:17] chief medical officer deborah howrey who left the agency in protest after then cdc director susan [8:22] monares was fired late last summer howie has provided a senate committee with hundreds of [8:27] emails documenting the challenges at the agency during this trump administration here's her story [8:33] of what happened just after president trump took office we started getting executive orders where we [8:39] took down hundreds of websites and i thought this is highly unusual you know science doesn't change [8:46] based on who is in office and so when these things were happening i knew this is different than before [8:52] i also um didn't brief the secretary which was very different than prior administrations so the [8:59] websites you're talking about being taken down this was because of the executive order to remove [9:03] references to gender ideology yes and that included the term gender and gender was in many of our data [9:11] sets um gender of animals you know we had transgender guidance around impacts all of that we were told to [9:20] take down so it included the cdc and fda pulling down how physicians should treat stds that seems [9:30] important information it's very important information but it referred to transgender and you couldn't just [9:36] do a word replace and said we highlighted things like this that you know and again as a doctor it was [9:42] very concerning to me that if you've got patients and doctors that need specific clinical guidance to not [9:47] be able to provide that information you also documented a scramble on the inside to get some of the sites [9:53] back up and this happened to be just a day after the secretary had finished his confirmation hearings [10:00] why we were told that there was a concern it could hurt the secretary's confirmation that if vaccine [10:06] related information was missing from the website that it could reflect poorly on him specifically information [10:13] about vaccines yes because there was a concern that the secretary had expressed anti-vaccine sentiments [10:20] and that if cdc as he was coming on board didn't have information on vaccines on the website that it had to do [10:28] with his hearing and his direction so all of these have been taken down because you're trying to comply [10:33] with what the president wanted correct but then realizing it might hurt votes to confirm the secretary you [10:40] had to scramble and put some of them back up that's our understanding and to be very clear [10:43] sounds very confusing when we took the websites down we flagged that many of these websites contained [10:49] information such as that um i don't think they understood the volume or the impact um till media [10:56] and others started noticing all the websites that were gone you know during the secretary's confirmation [11:03] hearing he said all decisions would be free of political influence and guided by science but you [11:11] received an email from his chief of staff telling you of the quote absolute need for political review [11:17] of major decisions at the cdc how different is that from typical management that has never happened [11:25] before usually you know certainly there would be political review of high level decisions but not [11:30] every decision and scientists careers would be at the table i can tell you through my eight months when [11:38] i was the transition lead and the only career in the office of the director i was not part of most of [11:43] the conversations with the political appointees at hhs and did most of those political appointees have [11:48] medical degrees i don't think any and hhs at that time had medical degrees we had one person at cdc who [11:56] was a political appointee who had a medical degree he didn't come for the first few months and in the [12:01] office of the director we had no one with a medical background or even a public health background [12:06] so the decisions being made were by individuals who had no medical background no medical background [12:13] and not only no medical background no science background and for many of them no background in [12:18] government and i want to be clear it's certainly okay to have different perspectives you know and [12:23] different expertise but then you want to make sure that the scientists and experts are also being heard [12:28] and part of those decisions and we weren't back in 2024 2025 this was a really intense flu season the [12:37] worst in more than 15 years nearly 300 kids died at that time hhs had this awareness campaign called wild [12:46] to mild and it encouraged everyone it said six months and older to get a flu shot so one day after [12:54] secretary kennedy is sworn in there are then a flurry of emails saying this is a direct request that [13:02] that was the language used from the secretary to pull down all of those ads why i first thought [13:10] there's a misunderstanding where children are dying it's an act of flu season it's not like flu is over [13:17] and we'd already paid for these for these ads so it didn't make any sense and so i brought it to our [13:23] political leaders and brought it back to our communication staff and asked them to please relay [13:28] back to the department surely this isn't what you want and then we got a note back it's a direct [13:34] request from the secretary a growing number of states 29 plus dc have announced they're no longer [13:40] following cdc recommendations as a benchmark for childhood vaccines they said this is too much [13:48] do you think that public health and faith in public health can be restored i think the secretary [13:55] has caused a lot of irreparable harm and when you look at many of the polls out there the trust in [14:00] public health specifically cdc has decreased dramatically over 20 points in many polls that's [14:07] really difficult to recover from and when states are removing links to the cdc website and following [14:14] other medical organizations i don't know how you build back that trust overnight autism and finding out [14:23] more about it is a real focus for the secretary before when he was running for president himself [14:29] he put this at the top of his agenda as well a lot of families are looking to him with a lot of hope [14:36] do you trust what is being conducted in terms of research into autism absolutely not and that's [14:43] unfortunate because autism is a significant issue in our country and worldwide but there's not a single [14:50] answer to it you know we know that 40 to 60 percent is linked to some sort of genetic etiology there's [14:58] environmental factors there's probably infectious disease factors so you need to really have a robust [15:04] field of study around autism versus again looking at a single question and what we saw was back in [15:11] february and march we were asked to look at autism and we proposed several different ideas including [15:18] a large study looking at autism and working with nih and what came back to us was no we want to look [15:27] at the vaccine safety data link data for autism so narrowing in on vaccines and autism versus what we [15:34] had proposed and even more concerning is when my staff reached out to nih scientists who did autism work [15:42] they weren't aware that the nih acting director and some of the other nih politicals had reached out to [15:48] us about looking at vaccine and autism and cdc data how is that possible i guess there wasn't [15:58] communication between the nih politicals and the nih experts on autism and after that there was no [16:04] more communication between our scientists and autism and the nih scientists on autism around that topic [16:10] the kennedy aids did not trust the professionals within the cdc and the nih is that fair i'd say that's [16:17] fair in your emails there's one from the director of the national center on birth defects and [16:22] developmental disabilities and she said they're looking in how to respond to questions about [16:26] vaccine safety and autism and that's when you said not until we're asked and don't go so narrow [16:32] whatever happened to that that was there ever a cdc study launched no uh well not on what i had [16:39] proposed what i proposed back to that center director was that autism was an important thing to study [16:45] and we should be looking broader and working with nih what came back instead was that nih [16:52] the acting director as well as the contractor john powers who's now an nih institute acting director [16:59] we're going to look at the vaccine safety data with a lens towards autism back in april the secretary [17:07] held a press conference on what he called the autism epidemic and he claimed that the media [17:13] has an ideology of epidemic denial that we are not asking enough questions about why there is an uptick [17:21] you wrote in one of your documents here that there was a bit of concern [17:25] that you heard after the secretary spoke what concerns were you hearing even you know president [17:30] trump's first surgeon general jerome adams put out on social media about how the secretary really focused [17:37] on profound autism and not really looking at the whole spectrum of autism and not looking at highly [17:44] functional yeah and just really demeaning you know in my mind anybody with autism versus recognizing the [17:52] struggle that individuals and families have and how we could support them and he you know really kind [17:58] of misrepresented the data like conflating information on states when a lot of it had to do with detection [18:04] and if we had been able to brief him like i had suggested you know since it was a cdc paper we [18:10] could have walked through that with him like what the statistical analyses meant what some of these [18:14] findings meant but we weren't given that opportunity and there is backlash from many in the autism [18:21] community including groups like autism speaks because of how the secretary spoke about autism and again [18:27] autism is impacting so many families in our nation we need to look at it seriously and [18:33] not with a conspiracy lens like the secretary is doing you say a conspiracy lens the secretary from [18:41] the podium said somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air our water our [18:47] medicines our food and it's to their benefit to say all that to normalize it to say oh this is all [18:55] normal it's always been here you believe he had already concluded this and that's what you were hearing [19:02] it was also that you know in my emails you'll see that he has requested data from 30 plus years ago [19:08] from studies that have been replicated that congress has found that there was no wrongdoing on because he [19:16] was convinced that cdc was hiding information on autism and vaccines again if we want to do studies [19:24] looking at all of autism you know and vaccines as a component of it maybe that's okay but looking at studies [19:31] from 30 years ago that have really been litigated over and over that's a waste of taxpayer money and [19:40] really in my mind a disservice to families that want to know what is causing autism in their children [19:45] and and how can you treat it but he seemed to believe that there was a cover-up yes within the cdc yes [19:53] and he had written about that in many of his books as well when i was transition lead i prepared for [19:59] his arrival by reading many of his books and taking notes and had really looked at what were some of [20:04] the falsehoods in those books and tried hopefully to have a discussion with him around what we had [20:09] found in data but that didn't happen in all of these documents there also seems to be a theme here of [20:16] the political leadership being completely out of sync with the medical professionals and also [20:23] disconnected from the trump administration's doge cuts yes one of the secretary's aides is emailing [20:30] asking why data crunching hadn't been done for weeks and you explained the chief data officer [20:35] and so many people on the it team had just been laid off yes did they not know about the riffs and [20:42] the layoffs it seems you know we had to um really emphasize that at multiple points you know once i got [20:49] asked around a firefighter program and what was the you know operating plan to make sure that program was [20:54] still in place and i explained uh we don't have one they've all been laid off you know you can't [21:01] replace firefighters with an infectious disease specialist when they've been laid off so similarly [21:07] when i got asked why is this taking so long i said you know our chief data officer our chief information [21:13] officer and the head of our forecasting group were all part of the group that was um riffed you know a [21:21] reduction in force and or transferred to the indian health service or put on administrative leave [21:26] these cuts when you lose 30 percent of your workforce and over time we ended up losing about [21:32] 80 percent of our senior leaders had a dramatic impact on the functioning of the agency we've reached [21:40] out to both hhs and the white house for comment and have not heard back we'll be back in a moment [21:46] that's it for us today thanks for watching margot will be back next sunday enjoy the rest of the [21:52] holiday weekend until then for face the nation i'm ed o'keefe