Return to Transcripts main page

CNN News Central

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Staff Ordered To Stop Work; 22 States File Lawsuit To Stop NIH From Cutting Funding For Indirect Research Costs; Sources: U.S. Spy Plane Surveillance Flights Surge Near Border; Global AI Concerns Front And Center At 2-Day Summit In Paris; J.D. Vance Making First Trip Abroad As Vice President. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired February 10, 2025 - 13:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:33:45]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Staffers at the government watchdog in charge of protecting your money are now being told to stop working altogether. Russell Vought, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, telling employees today, quote, "Do not perform any work tasks."

It comes a day after he announced the agency's headquarters in Washington would be closing this week.

CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich has more.

Vanessa, what's the latest?

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS & POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: Yes. So employees are learning that they are not supposed to be doing any work right now. And they're also not supposed to show up to the office this week through the end of the week. So you have folks staying home, not working.

This is all unfolding over the weekend as employees got many emails about exactly what their future looks like at this critical consumer protection bureau that oversees protecting American's finances.

And this is really stemming from something we saw on Friday, a tweet by Elon Musk that said, "CFPB, RIP". So that was on Friday.

And that was essentially foreshadowing that the CFPB was going to be the next agency that Elon Musk, DOGE, at the direction of Donald Trump, was going to be looking at and potentially unraveling in this -- (TECHNICAL PROBLEM) -- with employees that have filed lawsuits over this.

[13:35:08]

And we know that judges can move pretty quickly sometimes putting pauses on these different executive actions that the president has taken. We saw that with USAID. We'll see if this happens with CFPB. Whether or not these folks truly are out of a job, for how long, unclear. But the judge could move quickly on this -- Boris?

SANCHEZ: Vanessa, what does the CFPB actually do and how could this work stoppage impact Americans?

YURKEVICH: Yes, the CFPB is exactly sort of what its name says. It's the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and it's to protect Americans against banking institutions, those who have been able to take advantage of Americans.

This was started at the end of the financial crash in 2007, 2008, to have some supervisory authority over credit card companies, banking institutions, loan services and other different organizations that everyday Americans use.

Also, just by the numbers, about 200 million people are covered under the CFPB because they can receive funding and relief from this organization.

You have about $6.1 billion in annual savings on overdraft fees and about 22 million people have -- are estimated to have medical debt collection removed from their credit report. So these are actual tangible things that this organization does.

We know, at least till the end of the week, Boris, folks are not going to the office, but after that, who knows? We'll have to wait and see how this all works out -- Boris?

SANCHEZ: Vanessa Yurkevich, thank you so much for that update.

Brianna?

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: This just in. Twenty-two states are now suing over a new policy from the National Institutes of Health that cuts funding on what is known as indirect costs for researchers. Those are funds that cover things like equipment, support staff, facility maintenance and other overhead expenses.

But some researchers are warning the cuts could kneecap America's status as a global health leader.

CNN's Meg Tirrell is with us now.

Meg, tell us what is going on here.

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. So this lawsuit that just came out is from 22 Democratic state attorneys general challenging this order that came out from the NIH on Friday night.

And the amount of shock and panic that is running through the research community in the United States right now is higher than anything we've seen so far. And there have been a lot of things that have been coming to change things at the NIH.

So just to break down exactly what this is -- because it really sounds wonky, but it's tremendously impactful. This is something called indirect costs. And the NIH, in 2023, said it awarded about $35 billion in external research funding.

Of that, the majority were direct research costs going to specific researchers for specific projects, for example. $26 billion went to those direct research costs.

They say $9 billion were allocated to indirect costs. These are things that the research community refers to as facilities and administrative costs of research.

So these are things that help fund research labs and equipment that's shared among researchers and isn't dedicated to just one project at a time. Things like high-speed data processing, the support personnel who help make this work possible.

So the Trump administration's NIH, on Friday, put out this new policy that would cut the funding rate for those indirect costs to 15 percent. They say that's down from an average of about 27 percent or higher.

But there are some organizations, they say, like Harvard, whose rate is more than 65 percent. Altogether, they say this would reduce costs by $4 billion a year.

From the researcher perspective, that's $4 billion a year that suddenly, because that's supposed to take effect today, they have to find somewhere else. And people are warning this will have a huge impact.

KEILAR: All right Meg Tirrell, thank you so much for that.

[13:39:56]

Troops on the ground and in the sky. How the U.S. is ramping up its hunt for intel on Mexican drug cartels with surveillance missions using sophisticated spy planes, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:43:31]

SANCHEZ: Sources tell CNN the U.S. is ramping up spy plane surveillance of Mexican drug cartels. The aircraft are typically used to gather intel in places like Ukraine or they're on the hunt for Chinese subs.

But they're now flying with increasing frequency near the U.S. border with Mexico, as reflected by the purple lines in the map that mark flight paths.

KEILAR: Sources and public data show at least 18 flights of American spy planes over the southwestern U.S. and around the Baha Peninsula here in the last two weeks.

CNN's Katie Bo Lillis has been tracking this story for us. So what does this tell us about perhaps a shifting priority for the

Pentagon?

KATIE BO LILLIS, CNN REPORTER: Yes, Briannan, let's -- let's talk about the scope of the ramp up here. Eighteen flights in just a 10-day period, starting in the -- starting at the end of January.

Before this, the Pentagon might fly maybe one of these surveillance flights along the border in a month.

So important, really, to remember here that flight hours in this kind of surveillance plane, that's a finite resource for the U.S. military. And up until now, Pentagon leaders have really prioritized using this kind of aircraft to do things like gather intelligence on what's going on, on the ground in the war in Ukraine, look for Russian or Chinese submarines.

So really what this escalation underscores is the degree to which the Trump administration is really willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to wanting to use the military to go after cartels, specifically.

They are willing to shift finite national security resources away from overseas threats and towards the U.S. southern border, where Trump has declared a national emergency.

[13:45:04]

SANCHEZ: What are these planes capable of seeing?

LILLIS: Yes, so there's three kinds of military planes that are in use here, and they all do slightly different things.

But taken together, they are able to do everything from collect imagery intelligence that might enable them to, for example, identify a cartel logistics hub on the Mexican side of the border, for example, or to collect signals intelligence to sort of hoover up digital communications that are taking place on the ground.

They're all flying in U.S. airspace or in international airspace around the Baja Peninsula, but they can all see sideways effectively. So they can still collect intelligence deep inside of Mexico.

So the big question really is, what does the Trump administration intend to do with the information that it's gathering here, right?. Is this about acquiring a body of information to make a foreign terrorist designation on a cartel member?

Or at the far end of the spectrum, is this about identifying a potential target for the U.S. military to strike directly inside Mexico, something, obviously, that President Trump has publicly expressed an interest in doing?

SANCHEZ: Yes. Is that designation potentially a precursor to some kind of action?

Katie Bo Lillis, thank you so much.

LILLIS: Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Still to come on CNN NEWS CENTRAL, tech titans around the globe are racing to deliver powerful artificial intelligence tools. But are we ready for A.I.? World leaders are grappling with major questions right now in Paris. The story, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:51:07]

KEILAR: Artificial intelligence is developing at such a frantic speed, world leaders are struggling to strike a balance between keeping it in check without stifling innovation.

A two-day summit now underway in Paris is going to try to tackle that critical predicament.

To drum up interest in the agenda, French President Emmanuel Macron produced an A.I.-generated video of himself dancing and rapping. I think we all want that video.

The next -- something weird about the next Sara Fischer, our CNN media analyst, with us on this now.

Talk to us a little bit about some of the goals and the expectations for this summit, besides that video.

SARA FISCHER, CNN MEDIA ANALYST: An incredible video. This is meant to bring Europe into the conversation when we talk about A.I. For so many months, we've talked about this as being an arms race between the U.S. and China. And Europe has been relatively quiet throughout.

There have been no major efforts by the E.U. to announce major investments into A.I. One of the things that Macron will announce today is $100 billion investment into A.I. Infrastructure from the private sector.

But it's worth noting, Brianna, when we talk about these types of efforts in the U.S., they're largely being financed by U.S. companies. Donald Trump announced something called Stargate, which is a $500 billion effort between open A.I., Oracle and Softbank.

These types of ambitions from France are going to require a lot of outside capital. One of the big entities that's going to be committing money to them is the UAE, for example, a Canadian firm, Brookfield, also putting in money.

It just comes to show they're going to need to rely very heavily on foreign partners to get this jump started in the E.U.

KEILAR: And the vice president, J.D. Vance, is in Paris for the summit. It's actually his first trip abroad since the administration got started. What message does that send to world leaders?

FISCHER: Well, it shows that the United States wants to be involved in this conversation, no matter where it is around the globe.

You know, Mike Pence very famously said that the U.S. will lose its allies in the West if they become reliant on technology and investment from the east.

And so I think J.D. Vance heading over there is a clear signal that they do not want to cede the financing race for European A.I. technology to anybody, especially China or other players in the Middle East.

It's also a signifier that the U.S. wants to remain competitive. You know, them coming out and announcing a $500 billion investment the other day, they don't want to be upstaged by their friends over in France.

KEILAR: No. And you have, of course, DeepSeek, which is that Chinese A.I. startup that started up relatively inexpensively, completely shaking things up. That's really one of the backdrops of this whole event.

FISCHER: Absolutely. So, in the U.S., we have talked about funneling capital into A.I., because that's what you need to do to compete. When DeepSeek came out a few weeks ago, it sort of upended the way that we thought about A.I. and innovation.

Macron has touted a French company called Mistral, saying that they're very, very efficient. And that's sort of his answer to DeepSeek, that French companies can be just as efficient.

But, Brianna, nobody around the world has built something like DeepSeek to date, and it's going to be very hard for France to catch up if they're this far behind.

KEILAR: And you have organizers that are opening up this discussion to other topics, right, a wider range of A.I.-related topics. Can you talk a little bit about that and what they're hoping to establish when it comes to that?

FISCHER: The big thing here is infrastructure and energy. Now something that France has going for it. It's a huge exporter of nuclear energy. So that should help it when it comes to creating infrastructure data centers to support the development of A.I.

But the thing is, it doesn't matter how many chips you have or how great the tech is, if you can't figure out a way to cool these data centers, if you can't figure out a way to build them very quickly, you cannot scale any of your A.I. Investments.

And so energy is the big cottage industry around A.I. that everyone will be talking about at this summit.

KEILAR: All right, Sara Fischer, we'll be watching. Thank you so much.

FISCHER: Thank you.

[13:54:57] KEILAR: And minutes from now, a federal judge will be hearing arguments on President Trump's so-called buyout offer to federal employees. We'll be live with the latest. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:00:06]

SANCHEZ: Will the buyout be blocked? Right now, a federal judge is deciding whether the --