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Trump Threatens to Cut Off Funding for Sanctuary Cities; Trump's Immigration Plans Bring Refugee Programs to a Halt; Scientists Sound the Alarm After Trump Administration Halts NIH Meetings; Elon Musk Bashes Trump's $500 Billion A.I. Project; Trump Criticizes FEMA, Questions if Disaster Agency is Needed. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired January 23, 2025 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), U.S. PRESIDENT: You know, California is a big example.

SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Would you cut off their money?

TRUMP: I might have to do that. Sometimes that's the only thing you can do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Now, he made a similar threat during his first term, this could be detrimental to cities and states particularly in moments of natural disaster, see, California as an example of that as they have fought these fires. But this effort is already underway perhaps in other ways which is to say the Justice Department sending out a memo yesterday saying that they would threaten, or rather, the plans to crack down on immigration if state and local officials do not help in those plans, if they get in the way of those plans, they threaten to prosecute those state and local officials.

So you can start to see how their plans are coming together to go after these cities, which they have said get in the way of their immigration enforcement goals.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Let's see. Thank you so much for your reporting, Priscilla.

Sara?

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. President Trump's actions on immigration are also bringing refugee programs to a halt. It means thousands of refugees who fled war and persecution and went through a years-long vetting process in order to come to America are now in limbo, stranded, because the U.S. had their flights canceled after the president's executive order.

Joining me now is Kathie O'Callaghan. She is the President of the nonprofit organization "Hearts & Homes for Refugees." What have you been hearing, if anything, from people who are caught in this who, we should make clear, have already been vetted? These are not people the United States are unfamiliar with their background, who had already been approved and are now stranded.

KATHIE O'CALLAGHAN, PRESIDENT, HEARTS & HOMES FOR REFUGEES: It's devastating. It's devastating, and it's putting their lives at risk. Thousands of refugees, as you say, who have been extremely vetted, who were prepared, who have been waiting years to be resettled.

And for many of them, this is their last hope. Hearts and Homes for Refugees has resettled many of the family members that are here. So for them, it is also just devastating news.

And for the volunteers that work in this space, the people who have raised their hands to be resettling refugees for the last nine years with Hearts & Homes for Refugees and across the country, this is devastating and deflating.

SIDNER: What is this going to do to organizations like yours and to regular citizens who do sponsor some of these refugees? I mean, does this mean to you that immigration in this country, as we have known it, is over?

O'CALLAGHAN: You know, I think it's important to focus on the fact that this call is called a pause. And maybe there's some hope here. The administration, as I understand it, is looking to review and assess the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. They haven't said it's not going to happen. And we've been here before. So I believe that if this is a good faith pause, that it is not the end of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. It's a program that's been around for 45 years. We have resettled more than 3 million refugees in this country, many of whom are probably watching today. And they have been resettled in safety and with dignity and with the support of communities and the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program resettlement agencies.

SIDNER: I want to talk to you about some of those agencies, because the Justice Department told legal service providers to stop work intended to help support immigrants, sort of stripping them of sort of this critical access for people trying to navigate detention and trying to deal with the vast U.S. immigration system. I mean, Donald Trump has said he is going to crack down and he is. Have you heard anything from the DOJ? Has your organization been contacted?

O'CALLAGHAN: We are not in direct contact with DOJ, but I know that when we talk about refugees and migrants, you know, there's been some conflated about who's who. And the refugees are not part of the asylum-seeking population. And while it is awful what is happening and the tone is taking a toll on the families and the people who have been working with asylum-seekers, we are more hopeful for refugees because this program does bring in, you know, refugees who have been resettled, who have been extremely vetted, who are here through with documentation, employment authorization.

SIDNER: Where are they now? Last question, of these, you know, there are 10,000 that were literally about to get on flights, those flights being canceled. Where are they?

O'CALLAGHAN: Well, in order to be a refugee, you have to be outside your country of origin. So they are not in their country. And many of them are in countries that are not hospitable to refugees.

For instance, Afghan refugees are in Pakistan waiting. And that is going to be an untenable situation. Many of the Afghans who we are waiting for are family members, mothers, children who don't have other options. And they're living in a country where women traveling alone is not safe.

[08:35:03]

SIDNER: So they are sort of stuck in this limbo outside of their countries, waiting and wondering if they're ever going to be able to come here, even though they had been vetted over years --

O'CALLAGHAN: Yes.

SIDNER: -- in some cases.

O'CALLAGHAN: And what we saw last time is this happened, is that those refugees were pushed to the back of the pipeline, out of the pipeline. And it took years. And many of them still are not here.

SIDNER: Kathie O'Callaghan, thank you for walking us through that and explaining sort of your role in all this and what you see happening in the future. Really appreciate it.

O'CALLAGHAN: Thank you so much for having me, Sara.

SIDNER: John.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. This morning, trouble in billionaire paradise. The first quarrel between President Trump and first buddy Elon Musk. New details on the announcement that triggered something of an A.I. slap fight.

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[08:40:18]

SIDNER: New this morning, scientists sounding the alarm after President Trump abruptly canceled meetings that were scheduled to review grant proposals. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, received an email Wednesday halting all federal advisory committee meetings.

CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell is joining us with more. Can you explain why scientists are so concerned about the cancellation of these meetings?

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Sara, I mean, canceling these meetings essentially grinds to a halt the process through which the NIH awards funding to scientists all over the country and sometimes outside the country. They have a budget of $48 billion, as you noted, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. This goes out to a lot of external scientists working at universities, doing things like cancer research, research on diabetes, infectious disease threats, working on basic research that can lead to breakthroughs we can't even predict. So it's an incredibly important part of our ecosystem of improving medicine.

And so what we learned this week is that on Tuesday, the Health and Human Services Department put a broad moratorium on external communications at all of the health agencies, including FDA, CDC and NIH. And then on Wednesday, we started to hear reports from scientists and academics who have meetings at the NIH to review these grant proposals. They were abruptly told that those meetings had been canceled.

We obtained information that said essentially some advisory meetings had been canceled until February 1st, but that all other NIH-sponsored meetings have been canceled until further notice. And so that really grinds to a halt this process of reviewing grant proposals and means essentially that the funding process can't happen at NIH.

And that has put a lot of people in a lot of fear about what's going on because they don't know how long this will last, Sara. And I'm hearing if it's more than a couple days, it's going to be tremendously disruptive to research.

SIDNER: Wow. What is HHS saying about this as we are sort of on the cusp of potentially seeing Trump's nominee for the secretary of HHS to be put in place?

TIRRELL: Yeah. So HHS essentially calls this a short pause to allow what they say is the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization. They do note that there are exceptions for announcements that can come out of HHS divisions that are deemed mission critical, but they say they'll be made on a case-by-case basis.

And Sara, maybe we'll learn more about this next week because just yesterday, we learned that the Senate Finance Committee has scheduled Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s confirmation hearing for Wednesday of next week. He, of course, is Trump's pick to lead the health agencies.

We've also learned that the Senate Health Committee, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions plans to schedule theirs for Thursday. So a lot of eyes will be on those meetings, especially from academic researchers working on science all over the country.

SIDNER: Yeah. There's a lot of consternation about whether or not he is going to largely disrupt the organization as well. Thank you much, Meg Tirrell, for your reporting on this.

And over to you, Kate.

BOLDUAN: Thank you, dear. President Donald Trump announced with big fanfare a massive AI infrastructure investment. Then that investment was hit with almost immediate criticism from essentially within his own house, Elon Musk, slamming the $500 billion AI project, claiming that the companies involved, he says they don't have the cash to back up their promised commitments. The White House then having to push back against the President's newest and closest friend.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAROLINE LEAVITT, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: So the American people should take President Trump and those CEOs words for it. These investments are coming to our great country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: CNN's Hadas Gold has much more on this. What's going on here?

HADAS GOLD, CNN MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk has called himself first buddy. He was in the Oval Office the same day as this announcement. So it is notable to see him pushing back so publicly against this.

Shortly after the announcement, Musk tweeted, they don't actually have the money. And he also tweeted SoftBank, which is one of the partners in this, whose CEO was standing next to Trump during this announcement, has well under $10 billion security, have that on good authority, which obviously, you know, that's just one part of the $100 billion that they have. SoftBank would need to obviously put up more than that.

But as you heard, the White House pushed back quite strenuously on this not talking about Elon Musk directly. And I've also actually spoken to sources involved in Stargate. And they say, just look at the earnings report from SoftBank, the cash on hand. And they tell me that SoftBank is willing to put on what they called a boatload of debt to also help this.

We also heard from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talking at Davos saying, you know, I'm good for my $80 billion. So --

[08:45:00]

BOLDUAN: So kind of responding to Musk in this, yeah, yeah.

GOLD: Responding, he was asked directly about Musk. And Altman has also -- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, he's responded directly to Musk saying this is not true.

So why is this happening? There's, you know, a few reasons you can think about why this is happening. Elon Musk has his own AI company, but you cannot ignore the personal here. Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, who was standing next to President Trump and Elon Musk have a history of personal animosity.

Elon Musk is an open litigation against Sam Altman over OpenAI, which he helped co-found because OpenAI, he says, was initially supposed to be non-profit. It's now for profit. Elon Musk has called Sam Altman somebody that he just does not trust. And ever since he pushed back against this Stargate announcement, he has shifted his post on X about Stargate to being just about Sam Altman himself personally calling him a liar, posting several times what I think could be sort of bait for President Trump about how Sam Altman used to be against Donald Trump in 2016, in 2020, in the 2020 election, in 2021, posting these screen grabs from old Sam Altman posts talking about President Trump.

Why would he be doing that? Perhaps it's a way to show his first, you know, his best buddy, President Trump, about this man saying this guy is not somebody that, you know, that we can trust. So I think there's a lot of questions here, of course.

What is this about Stargate? Or is this about Altman himself? Will President Trump himself respond to this and defend this massive big project that's sort of an AI moonshot? And what does this pretend for the future relationship between Elon Musk and President Trump?

BOLDUAN: Add another question. Why is this being -- why is this playing out so publicly? Why not have these -- why are these conversations if maybe they already -- they were and Elon Musk didn't like the outcome of them, why didn't -- wasn't this advice given behind closed doors? Like there are a lot of questions surrounding this. It's really interesting.

Good to see you, Hadas Gold.

GOLD: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: John?

BERMAN: All right. New this morning, President Trump threatening to withhold aid for the California wildfires. He also attacked FEMA saying he would rather see states take care of their own problems.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: What they've done with FEMA is so bad. FEMA is a whole another discussion because all it does is complicate everything. FEMA has not done their job for the last four years.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right, with us now is Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas, a Democrat who's on the House Ways and Means Committee, which means you deal with funding among other things. What did you make of the President's comments about FEMA suggesting maybe the United States would be better off without it?

REP. LLOYD DOGGETT (D-TX): You know, when we were hit by a hurricane in Texas, the same in Florida, the recent tragedy in North Carolina, we weren't asking about conditions. We were trying to reach out and provide aid. It's amazing, his comments.

As are -- his executive orders this week, he has acted like an emperor, Trump the Great, issuing one executive order after another, ignoring the needs of the people of California and elsewhere, but believing that he is unrestrained by a compliant Congress, by a court that poses in the Supreme Court no real restraint, probably issuing more of these emperor's edicts than all the presidents in our history put together during his first week.

BERMAN: What would happen inside Congress if he did try to condition aid to California on, you know, decisions about water resources or about state government there?

DOGGETT: Well, I think there'll be strong opposition. There ought to be bipartisan opposition. There are some Republicans in California also, but I think what Speaker Johnson has been looking at since he can't pass the debt limit increase with Republican votes, even though that limit needs to be changed in large measure to accommodate the huge tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk that Trump and the Republicans are promoting, he wants to attach that to get some Democratic votes in order to do what Republicans cannot do by themselves.

BERMAN: Would you vote on a measure that raised the debt ceiling and provided aid to California?

DOGGETT: Well, I want to do everything I can to discourage the two being connected to take this position we've always done in that regard, and that is provide the relief to the people without regard to political party, work together to try to relieve what we see is a tremendous amount of pain and anguish from homeowners who've lost everything and small businesses in California.

BERMAN: And do you think FEMA is necessary?

DOGGETT: Well, I think FEMA is vital. I think I'm all for making it more efficient, more responsive, but it's done an amazing job. We had much smaller fires near my hometown in Austin a few years ago, and they were on the spot. We had floods nearby. They came through. We had the great winter storm there that shut down everything. They came through. And so there are a lot of dedicated employees there trying to do their job and work with state officials. It needs to be state, local, and federal cooperation.

[08:50:04]

BERMAN: I want to play you what President Trump said about his decision to pardon some 1,600 people involved with the attack on the Capitol on January 6, including those who committed acts of violence against police. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: They were in there for three and a half years, a long time. And in many solitary confinement, treated like nobody's ever been treated so badly. They were treated like the worst criminals in history.

And you know what they were there for? They were protesting the vote because they knew the election was rigged, and they were protesting the vote. Some of those people with the police, true, but they were very minor incidents, OK?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Very minor incidents, he says. Your view?

DOGGETT: You know, to the police officer, John, who was crushed in that door and had people trying to punch out his eye, to the police officer who later died, this was death and destruction, 140 police officers assaulted. I find this truly amazing.

We were told by Vice President Vance, even by Speaker Johnson, that violent criminals would not be released. Now we have them released after serving a fraction of their sentences, returning to communities, violent people. One said, ready now to get a gun. Another talking about more revenge.

My concern is not only about the message that is sent to encourage other white extremists to go out and do this kind of thing, but what it does to the safety of our communities when you have people who feel they have received the blessing of the President of the United States to keep on doing what they're doing and endanger our families and our hometowns.

BERMAN: All right, Congressman Lloyd Doggett from Texas, we appreciate your time this morning. Thank you for being with us.

DOGGETT: Thank you.

BERMAN: Sara?

SIDNER: All right, ahead, the Trump administration working quickly to dismantle DEI efforts. So, how do Americans feel about that move? We have Harry Enten here. He's going to run the numbers for us. That's ahead.

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[08:56:15]

BOLDUAN: The Trump administration targeting federal workers who focus on Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion, DEI programs. A new memo out warning of, quote, "adverse consequences if employees fail to report personnel working on those initiatives." We know that there is the memo of DEI programs across the federal government were shut down as of 5 p.m. yesterday.

CNN's Harry Enten running the numbers on this issue and this focus for us. Overall, what are the numbers and where do you see it in terms of how the public feels about DEI in federal government?

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: Yeah, so we've been -- I've been waiting for this poll question because the bottom line is we haven't actually had good DEI poll questions, but this I think really gets at it. DEI in schools and government agencies, this is a poll just out from the New York Times and Ipsos, and you can see a very split country right here. 47% want to keep DEI. The slight plurality, though well within the margin of error, 48%. But I'll tell you what this really looks like, Kate Bolduan, when this looks a heck of a lot like the election results, right, where you have slightly more saying they want to end DEI than people who want to keep it.

But really what we're dealing with here is a split country, but I don't think there's going to be major backlash against Trump because you can see, again, slightly more want to end DEI than keep it.

BOLDUAN: If broad strokes, you're talking about these are public institutions, what about private business?

ENTEN: Yeah, so I find this question to be interesting because, you know, it has a timeline associated with it. There aren't a lot of questions that have timelines associated with DEI. So businesses DEI stance.

Important to know back in 2021, look at this, it was 68% -- 68%, more than two-thirds of the country. Where were we by 2024? Look at how much lower it is. It's just 53%. So folks in the public at large when it comes to businesses and DEI stance are actually becoming a little sick of public, of these businesses actually taking a public DEI stance, which I think sort of matches with the general perception that DEI has kind of fallen back from the sort of public perception.

BOLDUAN: Where is the -- where are you seeing the shift is?

ENTEN: Yeah, where is this 15-point decline coming from? It's really coming from Republicans. So important to know, should know the businesses DEI stance.

Look at this in 2021, Republicans were at 50%. Look at where it fell to in 2024, right? It's all the way down at 22%. And you see among Democrats a slight shift, but not really one from 86 to 79. It's really Republicans who become sick of DEI. It's not much of a surprise that Donald Trump has made this move with the federal government because DEI has become quite unpopular with Republicans.

Support for it, at least when it comes to businesses taking a stance, has fallen by more than half in just the last four years, Kate Bolduan.

BOLDUAN: So interesting. Harry, thank you --

ENTEN: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: -- as always.

Sara?

SIDNER: All right. On our radar, new accusations flying in a nasty battle between actress Blake Lively and director-actor Justin Baldoni. Lively's legal team now asking a judge for a hearing following public remarks by Justin Baldoni's attorney. The actress' lawyers are accusing Brian Friedman of making misleading and selective statements about Lively and her ongoing legal battle with Baldoni.

Lively's team filed the letter the same day the actor and director's team released footage from the set of "It Ends With Us" in an attempt to refute sexual harassment claims by Lively. Baldoni has denied her accusations and countersuit, saying Lively is trying to destroy his reputation.

All right. Hundreds of same-sex couples were married in Bangkok, Thailand, as a landmark marriage bill took effect. Thailand made history as the first country in Southeast Asia to recognize the rights of same-sex couples. The law grants same-sex couples not only legal rights but also financial, adoption, inheritance and medical rights there.

And the world's tallest peak is going to cost you a bit more if you want to try to scale it. Nepal admits it will increase the permit fee to climb Mount Everest to 15,000 bucks during its busy season. Mountain climbing generates huge amounts of money for that country's economy. This is the first price hike in nearly a decade.

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