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EPA Guts Climate Policies In Rapid-Fire Deregulation; Federal Judge Orders Trump Admin To Reinstate Thousands Of Fired Employees; Buttigieg To Pass On Senate Bid, Signals Potential 2028 Run. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired March 13, 2025 - 12:30   ET

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

[12:30:00]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: -- nor will there be.

CARL HULSE, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, THE WASHINGTON TIMES: Well, I mean at some point --

BASH: Do you think so?

HULSE: I don't know, but that's what I'm saying. What is the --

BASH: Yes.

HULSE: -- pressure point where -- I think Social Security honestly is the pressure point, right?

BASH: Maybe. Yes.

HULSE: So when you have something -- some sort of disruption there, they've already pulled back from a plan to cut back on the telephone. You know, a lot of Social Security recipients aren't, you know, (INAUDIBLE).

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: I believe by definition they're old.

BASH: Yes, exactly.

MATTINGLY: Not online (ph) so much.

BASH: I want to drill down on -- this is sort of DOGE adjacent, and that is the environment and the EPA and what the EPA announced. They announced a slew, Lee Zeldin, in particular, the administrator, announced a slew of changes that he plans to put in effect.

I just want to show a few examples. Undo clean power plant and car -- clean car rules. Remove smoke, coal ash, toxic pollution standards. Eliminate programs monitoring pollution in poor communities. Plans to reconsider science that global warming is dangerous.

We'll put a pin in that last one because that's, you know, kind of the underpinning of all of these changes. I want to listen to what Zeldin himself said on Fox last night. (BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

LEE ZELDIN, EPA ADMINISTRATOR: Engagement fund and clean power plant 2.0. The mercury and toxic standards. Particular matter 2.5. Social cost of carbon.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So we're going to have bad air now and bad water.

ZELDIN: No, absolutely not.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Because you're going to go --

ZELDIN: Here's the thing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: -- on the beaches.

ZELDIN: We can protect the environment. We can make sure all Americans have access to clean air, land and water while also not bankrupting our country.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: Can we, though? We don't know the answer to that. But -- and if you didn't catch the sarcasm in Laura Ingraham's voice, that was not an actual didn't -- it wasn't clearly meant to be a straightforward question.

KAYLA TAUSCHE, CNN SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: No. And I think it -- there's still a matter of time before we see how the rubber meets the road from these proposals to actually how they impact policy in practice. One of the headlines that you read a few minutes ago was about the education department and the cuts to federal student aid and the FAFSA form, which is the form that parents and students used to apply for financial aid being down yesterday.

And I think that there's a direct cause and effect there, because I reported last week that of the 21 staffers from the U.S. Digital Service that resigned in protest over DOGE's access to sensitive data, five of those employees were detailed to the education department where they specifically worked on technical issues related to that form.

If they had been there yesterday, many employees say that wouldn't have happened or wouldn't have lasted so long. And as for the pressure point, I spoke to a Republican senator earlier this week and asked how their constituents were feeling. And they said every weekend when I go home, it gets worse. I'm now sending my spouse to the grocery store.

BASH: Well, that's a -- so you talked a little bit about education. I want to return to the question of the EPA, because just like tariffs, if you listened to Donald Trump on the campaign trail, education department, particularly EPA regulations, this is not a surprise. He was saying he was going to do this immediately and they're doing it.

MATTINGLY: And I think connecting both EPA and Ed (ph), excuse me, is important, not just to what Trump campaigned on or what Trump did in his first term. I think it's a great window into the bigger picture right now of DOGE and where Republicans are on this issue.

What's happening right now, what DOGE is doing agency by agency, all the offices that are being cut, the personnel that are being cut, that's what Republicans have long talked about doing.

BASH: Yes.

MATTINGLY: Some of them on the more conservative side. And guess what? Those more conservative side Republicans are now running the Office of Management and Budget are now on the Domestic Policy Council at the White House.

The agency heads are implementing what Trump campaigned on, but also what Republicans have long kind of dreamed about, but never thought they could actually put into practice. And I think on the EPA front, what it actually underscores is a piece of the Trump economic issue that kind of strangely is not being talked about as much by administration officials because they're so focused on tariffs.

Anti-deregulatory efforts were going to be dramatic coming into this administration, no matter what, across all agencies. EPA was going to be top among them.

BASH: Definitely,

MATTINGLY: It is critical to their fulsome economic plan, of which tariffs is only a piece. And I think part of the frustration you hear from Trump administration officials right now is there's actually a bigger part of our economic plan. You guys are all focused on tariffs. And my response has long been the president keeps doing them.

BASH: Yes.

MATTINGLY: And so it's hard to talk about the other stuff --

BASH: Yes, that's right.

MATTINGLY: -- when he's thinking about it all the time. But the deregulation, what they're doing at agencies, what DOGE is doing writ large is what Republicans have wanted for a long time. Now we're actually going to see it happen. What happens after that, I think, is the big question as we talk about pain thresholds.

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'll just say quickly, to your point, Carl, about recovery. I think that's been a theme over the course of all of this. It's slash and then let's recover the employees that we actually needed to let's hire them back. Let's try to get that up and running again. That still causes disruption all the same, as we have seen.

And it's not a guarantee that over time these people are going to come back. And that's what I hear a lot of is the retention. I've been talking to federal officials across agencies for so long about can they keep their employees? That's always been hard.

Can they hire more people? That's been hard. Now I'm getting messages daily that are like, let's talk today. I might be fired tomorrow.

[12:35:07]

TAUSCHE: And there's some gallows humor too about a shutdown.

BASH: Yes.

TAUSCHE: Shutdown the government. We'll see if we can just run on essential workers and not bring anyone else.

BASH: Yes. Well, that's part of the political challenge for Democrats too.

OK, you can call him Mayor Pete, you can call him Secretary Pete, but you are not going to call him Senator Pete. Not at least after 2026. Pete Buttigieg says he won't run for Senate next year. Now, is he going to run for president in 2028? Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:40:05]

BASH: We're following breaking news. A federal judge is ordering the Trump administration to reinstate the jobs of thousands of probationary employees that they fired just last month. Now, this preliminary injunction applies to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury.

CNN's Paula Reid is on this story. Paula, I mean, that's a lot.

PAULA REID, CNN CHIEF LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: That is a lot. This happened just moments ago. And the judge, a Clinton appointee, said he was making this ruling because he believes the Office of Personnel Management unlawfully directed the agencies earlier this year to lay off probationary employees.

As you may remember, this hearing was supposed to feature testimony from the director of the Office of Personnel Management. He would have faced probably pretty tough questions from lawyers representing unions.

But the Justice Department decided not to make him available and also withdrew a declaration that he made last week about these firings. And let me tell you, Dana, we've been listening to this hearing in San Francisco. The judge was not pleased.

He said, quote, "You're afraid to have this person testify because you know cross-examination will reveal the truth. I tend to doubt that you're telling me the truth". The judge went on to say, "You're not helping me get at the truth. You're giving me press releases. Sham documents, referring to documents submitted by the Justice Department to the courts".

Now, going forward, the judge has ordered that another senior adviser at the Office of Personnel Management be deposed. So these lawyers are going to have the opportunity to question that senior adviser. The judge said he wants someone from this agency to go under oath and to finally tell the truth about exactly what happened with these firings.

Now, the judge also anticipated that this ruling today will likely be appealed. He said, if you want to do that, quote, "God bless you". But he says that he wants to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with these firings.

So in the next two weeks, we expect the senior leader at OPM could be deposed, depending on what happens with the appeal.

BASH: Yes. This is a very, very big development. And real quick, before I let you go, given that, do we have any sense of whether or not this ruling today could impact what we were just talking about earlier in the show, which is that there are more layoffs expected very soon?

REID: I think it would depend what specifically those layoffs are targeting here. We're talking about probationary employees at specific agencies. But I'm sure that lawyers at the White House, at the Justice Department, they are going to look at what the judge said today, decide if they want to appeal.

Because, again, another thing they don't want is an unfavorable ruling on appeal. So I'm sure this is going to factor into their considerations. But we know, Dana, they have lost several cases. They have won many cases. And they continue to try to call the sides of the federal government through any means necessary.

BASH: Yes, they sure do. Thank you so much for that, Paula. Appreciate it.

And now we're going to turn to Pete Buttigieg. He said today that he is not going to run for the United States Senate. There's an open seat in Michigan where he now lives. It does set up a potential 2028 presidential run instead.

My panel is back here. I'm just going to read a little bit of what Buttigieg said in the substack just moments ago. "Leadership means not only opposing today's cruel chaos, but also presenting a vision of a better alternative. While my own plans don't include running for office in 2026, I am intensely focused on consolidating, communicating and supporting this kind of vision."

MATTINGLY: I mean, no disrespect to Hulse, but, like, would you want to be in the Senate right now?

BASH: Because you effectively are the 101st senator.

HULSE: The -- I mean --

BASH: Well, you or Manu (ph).

HULSE: It would have been tricky to run and get in the Senate and then begin running for president, but that hasn't stopped people from doing that recently.

BASH: Yes. HULSE: Right? Everyone kind of does that. But it seems like he wants to really get it together for a presidential run. And people are seeing what's happening and, like, OK, there's going to be an opening.

BASH: And our friend David Axelrod, CNN Contributor David Axelrod, who, of course, ran Barack Obama's campaigns, did speak with Buttigieg as he was making his decision. And he told -- Axelrod said to Politico, "The hardest decision in politics is to pass on a race you have a very good chance to win," meaning the Senate seat. "Pete was an A-list recruit and would have been a formidable candidate for the Senate".

Obviously, he is keeping his options open for 2028. Speaking of options open for 2028, we got to talk about Gavin Newsom and his new podcast. And the most recent MAGA guest that he had on his podcast is Steve Bannon. Let's roll some of that conversation.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

STEVE BANNON, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE CHIEF STRATEGIST: I think that's a lesson that we learned after President Trump. And, look, you know, we disagree on this, but President Trump won the 2020 election. And we were kind of shattered as a movement when he left Washington, D.C. And we had to go back to basics to say, you know, it can't be somebody else do something.

You know, we had to do something. And that's where we went back to really a pure populist movement to go with the grassroots, the precinct strategy, and kind of rebuild ourselves from there.

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D), CALIFORNIA: Well, and I appreciate the notion of agency, that we're not bystanders in the world. It's decisions, not conditions, that determine our fate and future.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

[12:45:14]

BASH: I listened to the whole thing. It was very substantive, a really interesting conversation. When Steve Bannon says the election was stolen and the governor -- the Democratic governor of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, does not correct him on that, that surprised me.

ALVAREZ: And added to the list, right? I mean, he has -- there's that moment. And then there were his comments about transgender athletes as well, my friend.

BASH: With Charlie Kirk.

ALVAREZ: Right. And then in addition -- I mean, even in addition to all of that, just reverse a little bit, rewind, I should say. And he was also one of the Democrats who was going to the border and --

BASH: Yes. ALVAREZ: -- a little critical of what the Biden administration was doing. So this has been some time coming, but it's at a point now with characters now that we weren't expecting.

BASH: Right. And to be fair, Democrats have been trying to get into the conservative ecosystem to reach those voters. That is clearly what he's trying to do. He's got a very, very specific idea here.

Charlie Kirk, who was on his show, said, "One thing I learned in my podcast experience, the California governor isn't a joke. He has a shark's instincts and he is hoping that voters will have a goldfish's memory." Real quick.

TAUSCHE: It's very clear Democrats are not the audience here and that Newsom's playbook is that no publicity is bad publicity. But this is also a space he's been in before. You'll remember a couple of years ago, he went toe to toe with --

BASH: Yes.

TAUSCHE: -- Governor DeSantis offering to debate him.

BASH: Right.

TAUSCHE: DeSantis took up the invitation. And I think he wants to be seen as someone who's willing to step into that arena.

BASH: And he's doing it and we're talking about it. But if he does want to be president, he's got to get through the Democratic primary first. That's for another discussion.

From D.C. pariah to being back in Donald Trump's orbit, how a controversial defense contractor is trying to lobby Trump. We have some new terrific reporting after a quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:51:27]

BASH: Now we have new CNN reporting about one of the most notorious men in the Trump orbit. Erik Prince, the military contractor and founder of the private security company Blackwater. You remember Blackwater, in 2007 during the Iraq war, Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, leading to convictions against some of the men working for Prince.

Blackwater's $1 billion government contract was canceled. Prince became a pariah here in Washington, but not anymore. He's back and we have some brand new, really important reporting from CNN about his efforts to persuade the Trump White House to use his private contractors to carry out mass deportations now.

We have all three authors of this reporting, CNN's Phil Mattingly, Priscilla Alvarez and Zachary Cohen is also here. They broke this story. Phil, let's start with you. What is Erik Prince saying to the Trump administration about what he wants to do? MATTINGLY: I think what's most fascinating is we can work through this story over the course of the last several weeks is just how much he's saying or how much he's putting on the table and wants to be involved in. What's interesting is he actually was in the general orbit of the Trump administration in the first term for a period of time.

He has always been a devoted supporter of Trump, very close to kind of the MAGA universe of people that many of which, including himself, were really pushed out, ostracized towards the end of the first Trump term by more career and establishment conservatives.

He has moved his way back into influence and so have those other individuals he's very close to, including Cabinet secretaries, senior officials across various departments. And those officials are now potential entryways for Prince as he talks about immigration, talks about using small contractor forces for military operations, for hostage rescue.

Zach even picked up potentially even the minerals that Trump is very interested in. They can have a role in that as well. And so I think the scope is wide. The question is, how much of that actually has uptake with the administration.

But there's no question he is connected. And those proposals are actually being considered in a way that they just simply haven't been in the past.

BASH: And never mind fun fact, he's also Betsy DeVos's brother.

MATTINGLY: Doesn't hurt.

BASH: Yes. Zach, the reporting also gets into how he played in Trump's world during the first term, which we just heard a little bit from Phil. I want to read some of what you guys write about him. You write, "Every crisis, he finds a way to poke his nose in. He is constantly press" -- excuse me -- "constantly presenting plans to fix national security issues with his company.

ZACHARY COHEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Yes. Erik Prince really embraces the throw a lot of things at the wall and see if any of them stick. And until now, he really hasn't had much success, but that doesn't seem to deter him at all.

And we're seeing him get some traction on immigration issues specifically, right? We saw from multiple sources that -- and even Trump was asked about a memo Prince wrote basically saying that they would deputize military contractors to carry out mass deportations.

Trump said he's not opposed to the idea, right, though he said he had read the memo. Of course, this is a policy one former ICE official said is a dangerous, un-American escalation. But it kind of speaks to the moment we're in and why maybe the White House and the Trump White House is more sort of willing to consider these proposals that a lot of folks in the career ranks would consider to be extreme or even dangerous as that one former --

BASH: Proposals like using the military to help with mass deportations --

COHEN: Exactly.

BASH: -- in a big way. And on that note, Priscilla, talk about Erik Prince's relationship with El Salvador's leader.

ALVAREZ: So I think we learned over the course of our reporting that it's not just putting ideas on paper or tossing ideas with different former officials and current officials, but he also has direct lines to foreign leaders. Foreign leaders, by the way, that are key allies to this administration and their execution of their mass deportation pledge.

[12:55:11]

One of those leaders who I have talked to multiple Trump officials about is El Salvadoran President Bukele. He has always come up in conversations as being someone that they can lean on, being someone they can test things with and who has a willingness to do it to help them with their deportation pledge.

Well, Erik Prince has a direct line to him. And in the course of our reporting, we learned from sources that he had actually led a meeting in late January with private sector heads to talk about the U.S. immigration system and deportations. One of the ideas that caught his attention was sending migrants to the prisons in El Salvador.

Well, a week later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio --

BASH: Yes, that's right.

ALVAREZ: -- was talking about that. I will say Trump officials have told me that they were separately talking to Bukele about it, but all the same --

BASH: Wow.

ALVAREZ: -- direct line communication.

BASH: I'm so grateful that the three of you came on to share your reporting. Please be sure to look at the large story online.

Thank you for watching today. Inside Politics is now over, but don't go anywhere because CNN News Central starts after a break.

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