☕️ PIPELINES ☙ Thursday, May 15, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The real news about Kennedy’s fiery testimony in the House Appropriations Committee, and the rapid-fire fruits of Trump’s historic Middle East trade deal trip.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Today’s roundup includes yesterday’s two biggest stories: Kennedy’s fiery testimony in the House Appropriations Committee, and the fruits of Trump’s historic Middle East trade deal trip.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “RFK Jr. Defends HHS Overhaul as Democrats Denounce ‘War on Science.’” Kennedy’s testimony, the Times reported, quickly “devolved into a series of fiery exchanges with Democrats, who wanted to talk about the mass layoffs and cuts to research funding he has already imposed.” Plus, one psychotic ice cream vendor was hauled out screaming. But the real story was, Kennedy tossed out newsworthy claims like he was sitting on a box of rhetorical hand grenades. Of course, the media studiously ignored nearly everything newsworthy that he said.

CLIP: Secretary Kennedy’s opening statement at House Appropriations Hearing (5:48).

Yesterday, HHS’ new Secretary testified before Congress for the first time since he took office at the House Appropriations Committee. He was ostensibly there to discuss funding the next HHS budget, but Democrats spent the entire time trying to create gotcha moments and generally being as disagreeable as a group of purple-haired ‘gender studies’ students at a MAGA rally.

Kennedy held his own, as you might expect from a lawyer and veteran of the vaccine wars. For instance, Democrats tried their best to foul him up over the Great Measles Epidemic of 2025, but Kennedy waded right through like he was crossing a Washington creek. “We’re handling measles better than any other country,” he shot back.

Representative Rosa DeLauro complained, “I think we’re watching the demise of our public health system. Under the guise of fraud, waste and abuse, they are just obliterating our public health system.” Hopefully.

Democrats repeatedly obsessed over their favorite subject —vaccines. In a very lawyerly way, Kennedy refused to take the bait, saying, “I don’t think anybody should be taking medical advice from me.” He also discussed his plan to test all vaccines against placebos. In a sign of small progress, the Times spent three paragraphs “debunking” Kennedy’s plan because it found three vaccines (out of hundreds) that were tested against placebos. It’s like “debunking” UFOs by coming up with a reasonable explanation for three videos out of two hundred.

In any case, at least they gave up the foolish argument that we don’t need placebo testing.

The article next reported that Kennedy confounded their expectations by not taking the relentless scolding lying down. The Secretary “showed little hesitation in telling lawmakers they were wrong, and engaged in a heated back-and-forth that is unusual for any witness.” Usually Secretaries who come to the Appropriations Committee are more conciliatory.

But the Times admitted the twist: Kennedy didn’t need to be “nice,” because Republicans hold the House, and because he’d be even happier if HHS’s budget were cut anyway. But more cuts is just what Democrats were terrified of, and they complained about HHS layoffs more irascibly than a pack of old ladies who were just told they had to give up their usual bingo night table to make room for visiting foreign exchange students.

Some Republicans seemed uneasy wearing the health freedom mantle. Representative Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), for instance, asked whether Kennedy’s plan to ban certain petroleum-based dyes in food would increase costs for his candy manufacturing constituents. This evidenced a curious reversal between the parties’ normal positions. Democrats defending Big Food and Big Pharma is a wild new development. At one point, Kennedy snarkily reminded Congresswoman DeLauro, “You’ve tried to get food dyes banned for ten years, but I did it in 100 days.”

It was media malpractrice of the highest order. The Times article gets an ‘F.’ You could read the whole story and think that Kennedy only has critics. The Times didn’t quote anyone favoring Kennedy’s reforms or programs. But its most egregious failure was ignoring the most remarkable and newsworthy things that he did say.

First, Kennedy discussed strictly regulating gain-of-function research, and astonishingly admitted, “NIH research almost certainly led to the pandemic.” Here’s the clip (0:54). You would think that the head of HHS’s’ admission that the government agency itself “almost certainly” caused the pandemic would be bigger news.

The Times didn’t bother mentioning that.

At another point, the new HHS Secretary spoke about the agency’s processes for unaccompanied immigrant kids’ permanent placement. “If you look at a grand jury report from Florida, what happened to many of those children was horrific,” he told stoney-faced lawmakers. “We’ve opened up five hundred criminal investigations,” he added. That’s 500 so far.

It never fails. Whenever Democrats have a chance to show their oft-advertised devotion to children and vulnerable adults, they retreat. Every single time.

Kennedy’s next truth bomb was as big as his pandemic admission, but once again, the media ignored him. They are too scared to even challenge the premise. “Under the prior administration,” Kennedy said, “the federal government became the biggest facilitator for child abuse in history, certainly in the history of our country.” Kennedy said HHS is now thoroughly investigating sponsors— “Nobody gets a kid without showing they are family,” Kennedy vowed. Link to clip (3:32).

So in one hearing, as the top official in HHS, Kennedy accused his own agency of starting the pandemic and of being the biggest child sex trafficker in history. You would think those kinds of accusations would be some kind of news. But no.

🔥 At times fiesty, passionate, and pugilistic, Kennedy expressed deep frustration over endless NIH studies that only develop marginal improvements of chronic diseases— but never get down to root causes. “Isn’t it as important to find out why kids are getting colorectal cancer,” Kennedy asked. He explained, “When we were kids, there were zero kids with colorectal cancer. It’s an epidemic now. So it’s not really a badge of success. Why don’t we go figure out what’s causing it, and get rid of that, so we can have healthy kids again?” Link to clip (1:04).

Nor did the HHS Secretary have patience for hysterical complaints about his cuts, given the country’s quickly growing chronic disease burden. At one point, he explained, only a little impatiently, “The budget for my agency increased by +38% under the Biden Administration. And Americans got sicker. And more Americans overdosed. And more Americans died from cancer. And now we have an epidemic of colorectal cancer in our children. The chronic disease rate is now up to 60%. The autism rate is down to 1 in 31. And all that money that was supposed to cure those diseases or revert them, but none of that worked. We need leadership and a new vision.” Link to clip (0:52).

Finally, he mentioned the devastating loss of public trust in government health agencies. “The reason people have lost faith in this program is because they’ve been lied to by public officials for year after year after year,” Kennedy said. Link to clip (1:31). Again, you’d think media would at least ask for a few examples. But they are as silent as a vaccine freezer.

🔥 Early in my career as a lawyer, I represented a real estate developer building a large new subdivision. I will never forget our conversation about gopher tortoises— a legally protected endangered species of hard-shelled reptile that have become every Florida developer’s worst nightmare. If even a gopher tortoise burrow—not even the tortoise itself— is found on a job site, the law requires developers to halt work, conduct biological assessments, and apply for relocation permits before turning over so much as a clump of dirt.

A single meandering tortoise can cost developers more than a well-equipped Hyundai. On top of direct relocation costs —up to $2,000 per reptile— construction comes to a shuddering halt while developers must conduct mandated ‘biological assessment studies’ and draft mitigation/habitat conservation plans to submit along with relocation permit requests. Permitting and relocating delays projects by weeks or months every time it happens.

So, as you can easily imagine, developers do everything they legally can to avoid finding protected species. A blindfolded bulldozer driver would be ideal, as long as they can drive in the right direction.

In this particular case, my client faced tortoise activists showing up to county commission meetings complaining that his job site was the type of property preferred by protected tortoises. They wanted the commission to require my client to conduct an environmental study— even before a single tortoise had been found. My client scoffed at the idea that there were any tortoises on his land. So I asked him: why not just voluntarily do the study, to prove the absence of tortoises and settle the matter once and for all?

He looked at me like I’d just suggested he make a major donation to the National Wildlife Fund. He impatiently explained that doing voluntary studies invites disaster. Who knows what they’ll find? It could be something even worse than a gopher tortoise, like a spotted gecko or an EPA regulator in a ghillie suit.

That was when I realized most government regulations create perverse incentives, and that most liberal solutions to communal problems are inherently punitive. The laws virtually ensure that real estate developers develop conditional myopia. If the government paid real estate developers to find and protect tortoises, rather than punishing developers for stumbling over them, developers would hunt for them with drones.

Another way to think about it is, if taxpayers won’t fund turtle relocations, why should developers be forced to pay for them?

It’s the same way with drug manufacturers and government regulatory agencies. Right now, drugmakers are punished for finding problems with their drugs, and regulators get paid for approving them even with problems. The whole regime relies on the honor system and people acting altruistically against their own best interests.

Worst of all, the enormous cost of getting a drug approved makes developing cures financially impossible. We’ve built a perverse bureaucracy that rewards silence, punishes transparency, and turns patients into revenue streams.

It seems to me that Kennedy is proposing to start flipping the incentives. He is saying look, let’s not punish drugmakers by forcing them to find medical tortoises. Instead of making them tiptoe around regulatory burrows, let’s put the billions in taxpayer money behind figuring out what’s actually causing America’s chronic disease epidemic— so that inexpensive, effective treatments can be developed without paying massive “user fees” just to navigate the FDA’s drug-approval rat maze.

You probably already thought that was what public health was all about: finding the common root causes —the tortoise burrows— since drugmakers, like developers, lack incentives to do so. The fact that isn’t how our tax money is spent is a much bigger scandal than Pfizer lying about side effects.

Right now, the system punishes people who find cures. It rewards endless incremental treatment protocols and protects diseases like they are national turtle sanctuaries. Taken together, Kennedy’s comments show he aims to start moving the incentives into better positions.

PS: Anticipating the comments, to be perfectly clear: I am pro-tortoise.

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Yesterday, President Trump made corporate media eat Qatari crow. After four days of relentless criticism of Trump brokering the gift of a free luxury plane for the U.S., CNN was forced to run a story this morning headlined, “Boeing secures ‘largest-ever’ order from Qatar during Trump visit.”

After a single visit from Trump and his powerhouse economic team, Qatar agreed to order up to 210 new jets from the struggling Boeing company, which the White House called the aircraft maker’s “largest-ever” widebody order, worth $96 billion dollars. CNN’s reporters apparently felt the need to decorate “largest ever” with scare quotes, unable to verify that mysterious claim any other way, like calling Boeing’s PR department.

Following a relentless stream of bad news about cabin door failures, engine fires, and stranded astronauts, Boeing has been limping along like a three-legged pony in a glue factory. Now, according to the White House’s fact sheet, the Qatar deal will support 154,000 new U.S. jobs annually, totaling over 1 million new jobs in the United States during the course of production and delivery. It was industrial CPR for the struggling plane builder.

That was only the start. Reuters ran its version of the story about Trump’s Qatar visit under the headline, “US, Qatar deals to generate $1.2 trillion in 'economic exchange', White House says.” Besides Boeing, other big winners included defense manufacturers, high-tech and AI firms, and energy companies. Between Qatar’s investments and Saudia Arabia’s agreement to invest $600 billion, Trump’s two-day trip has hauled in nearly $2 trillion dollars worth of new deals for American companies.

Among other things, President Trump might be America’s greatest salesman. While corporate media was sulking over one “gifted” jet, he was closing the biggest aircraft deal in U.S. history, discharging Boeing from the ICU, and stacking up $1.2 trillion in new foreign investment like they were poker chips in Trump’s Atlantic City casino. Biden talked about building bridges and infrastructure, and nothing happened. Trump attached a money I.V. from the Persian Gulf straight into the U.S. economy’s veins— forcing corporate media to report it, scare quotes and all.

Though the media won’t connect these dots, the Qatar deal is undoubtedly related to Trump’s tariffs. His tariff strategy has made it increasingly expensive (and risky) for countries like Qatar to rely on importing high-tech goods or aircraft from nations other than the U.S. With so-called ‘baseline’ tariffs in play and subject to change without notice, countries realize they could be shifted into less favorable tariff slots if they don’t play ball. So everyone wants to talk trade now, to stay in America’s generous embrace.

Trump’s tariffs were supposed to start a new Great Depression. But it is beginning to look like they are kicking off a Great Expansion instead. Fortunately, the experts were wrong again.

Even before this news, media was already receding from talks about recession. Two days ago, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Trump's approval rating rises to 44%; Americans worry less about recession.” And this morning the financial rags were talking about a “meteoric rise” in the markets. That’s in spite of media’s best efforts to make everybody miserable.

Trump hasn’t triggered a protectionist depression; he’s triggered a stampede. In other words, the plan is working. And it is working fast. Hang on— all signs suggest it’s only getting started.

Have a terrific Thursday! .

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