Dan Mitchinson: US Correspondent on Health Department cuts, Signal app warning, and parents financially supporting their adult kids

Another Government department has been hit in the US, as 10,000 jobs are to be cut in the Health Department. 

This comes as 10,000 employees had already left or taken early retirement. 

US Correspondent Dan Mitchinson talks to Ryan Bridge about the cuts, a warning for staff cabinet staff using the signal app that leaked war plans, and how many parents are financially supporting their adult kids. 

LISTEN ABOVE. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dan Mitchison is that US correspondent and he's celebrating something today.
I wonder what they could be, Dan, happy birthday?

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Well thanks, Ryan, I mean, there's no place I'd rather be.
And you were talking about the baseball food just down
the road from Los Angeles my hometown, San Diego. The
Padres fish tacos, if you can believe it, are the
top seller at the ballgame down there. Did they mean
who goes to a ball game to buy fish tacos?

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Did they make them especially or is it just that
that's the most popular thing.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
It's just popular. If San Diego has known for fish tacos,
it's kind of where the trend started, you know, a
couple of decades ago, and it's just become one of
those popular items, right up there with the hot dogs
and the peanuts and the Crackerjack.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
There we go. Now, Donald Trump, sorry, I judge his
ordered that Trump's administration should keep signal records amid this
whole controversy about the group chat. So in other words,
if you send a signal text, you have to keep it.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah. And although you and I would think, with common sense,
would be easy to access these texts, and they wouldn't
be deleted. You have to put everything in writing and
make it understood what is needed to be kept so
it can be filed and used as evidence, and one
side or the other can't come back weeks or months
from now and say, well, we didn't know we were
supposed to keep this. And of course this has to

(01:15):
do with the lawsuit that we've been talking about, because
the cabinet officials were discussing the war plans on this
app And what's interesting, Ryan is the judge, although he
didn't bring this up in this is also the same
one who's presiding over the invocation of war power case
to deport migrants the president. So he's kind of got
two things on his docket at the moment, although the

(01:36):
case was assigned to him by chance, and he wanted
to make sure that everybody in the courtroom knew that
that was the case, and it wasn't just that he
was kind of ganging up on the president.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Now we've had cuts to the Education Department for the
whole Education department cut, but now ten thousand jobs to
go at the Health Department.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, and this is on top of the ten thousand
that had already left or took early retirement that Robert F.
Kennedy Junior has been working on. So this is a
This is a pretty big reduction. It's like a twenty
five percent reduction, and I mean something to think about.
I mean a lot of Democrats are mentioning this. I mean,
who's going to inspect nursing homes, who's going to look
after lead in a lot of these imported toys that

(02:15):
kids put in their mouths? Does this have the makings
of a of a man made disaster? I mean that's
probably going a little bit too far. I mean some
of the Democrats we are seeing that. But is it
going to be a painful pill to swallow? I think
in the healthcare field absolutely, if this goes through.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
There's some new stats on how many parents in the
States are financially supporting their adult kids and how much
they pay them. Would love to know.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Too many, would be my answer as a parent of
a two teenagers. This is a report by Savings dot
com and parents are doling out about fourteen hundred dollars
a month eighteen hundred dollars a month in some cases
for gen Z and millennials. So you said, well, where's
this money going? They're paying for things like their groceries
and their cell phone bills, and their rent, and their

(02:58):
health insurance and even vacations. And they're seeing that forty
seven to fifty percent of these parents who will able
to sacrifice their future financial plans if it means helping
out their grown up kids. In every financial expert that
you to talk to will or should say the number
one thing you don't want to do is to dip
into your savings, make your college kid take out alone.
If they have to get an extra job, they have

(03:19):
time to make up that extra money. But you, as
somebody in their forties, fifties or sixties, don't have time
to make up that extra money that you're saving for retiring.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
That is a lot of money. Who pays for the
kids their adult child's vacation. That's an out I.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Don't know. I don't know, Ryan, not mine.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Dan, thank you for that happy birthday. I hope you
have a good one. Dan Mitchison, who's our US correspondent.
For more from Hither duplessy Ellen Drive, listen live to
news talks it'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.