WORLD Radio Rewind

PAUL BUTLER: This is WORLD Radio Rewind: a 10-minute review of some of our news coverage and features from the past week on WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

First up today, competing with China. Earlier this month, the Senate passed the U-S-I-C-A … or the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. It’s intended to pump billions of dollars into American research and development. On Tuesday’s program, WORLD intern Josh Schumacher reported on the bill and its potential consequences.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, INTERN: The bill allocates more than $200 billion dollars for various research and development projects with a focus on technology and scientific studies.

But is all that money really necessary? Scott Lincicome is a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

LINCICOME: The issue is that U.S. R&D spending overall has actually just hit an all time high.

And that renders the USICA a solution in search of a problem.

LINCICOME: For the first time ever, the United States, collectively private and government, spent 3 percent of our GDP on R&D. Now, that doesn't sound like a ton but also remember we have a massive $21 trillion economy, give or take. So that's a lot of money. So, the underlying premise of the bill, that there has been a collapse in R&D spending, is just not true.

Tony Mills is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He says the US R&D sector suffers from several systemic issues that the USICA doesn’t address. For example, administrative burdens placed on scientists in recent years have taken away from the time they would otherwise spend on research. He also says the publish-or-perish culture in the scientific community could be incentivizing researchers in problematic ways. He also mentions the problematic use of certain statistical methods.

MILLS: If we don't try to rectify some of these underlying problems, spending a lot more money may not get us what we want, it could actually end up exacerbating, some of the problems that we have.

House lawmakers have a chance to address some of these concerns in their version of the bill. But it’s not clear that they will. No matter how the details shake out, it seems certain that a large increase in federal R&D spending is on the horizon. Much less certain is whether that will give American innovation a competitive advantage. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

PB: Coming up next, the Biden administration’s infrastructure deal.

On Wednesday’s program, host Mary Reichard spoke with Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute about the ongoing tug-of-war between Congressional Republicans and the Whitehouse on infrastructure. Here’s Mary.

REICHARD: Well, these two bills together are the infrastructure plan and the separate spending package. President Biden at first said he’d insist on both bills passing. But the White House now says he will sign the bipartisan bill into law with or without a separate spending bill. Is that correct?

RIEDL: The President has been somewhat all over the place on this, but it seems like at this point his position is that he will not wait for the infrastructure bill. He will pass the $600 billion bipartisan compromise if it comes to his desk. The problem, however, is that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she will not bring the $600 billion compromise to the floor unless the reconciliation bill has already passed. So, even if President Biden's position is that he will sign it, the Democrats aren't all on the same page and the bottle neck just moves over to the House. One factor, too, is they're dropping Republican support at this point. I thought last Thursday this thing could get about 20 Republican senators to vote for it. Right now, they may not even have the 10 Republican senators they may need to pass the bill without reconciliation.

PB: Our last two stories today come from Thursday’s program. First, government jobs and the environment.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the C-C-C. It built roads, campsites, bridges, and cabins in state and national parks across the country. Congress ended the program in 1942. But now, President Biden wants to resurrect it. WORLD’S Sarah Schweinsberg reports on the new Civilian Climate Corps.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: President Biden wants to recreate the CCC. The program would have two goals: mitigate climate change and employ young people.

Biden’s American Jobs Plan includes $10 billion dollars for the program. Eighty percent of that funding would go to personnel. It would pay about $40,000 dollars a year for up to 200,000 workers. It would also provide housing and stipends for clothes, food, and transportation.

The rest of the $10 billion dollar budget would fund climate mitigation projects across the country, like clearing undergrowth that can fuel forest fires, planting trees, and creating green spaces in cities.

Melissa Bass is a public policy professor at the University of Mississippi. She wrote her dissertation on the original Civilian Conservation Corp. Bass says although the original CCC did a lot of valuable work throughout the country… Congress didn’t renew the massive program because it was no longer needed. The country was mobilizing for World War II, and jobs were plentiful.

BASS: There were questions of should we still have a big national government program, when there is not an issue with high unemployment.

Rachel Greszler is a labor policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation. She points out that many businesses are struggling to find enough workers.

GRESZLER: We're going to let you come to this CCC program that's going to give you lush compensation, housing, food, clothing, transportation, everything else. That just makes it harder for the other businesses out there who are struggling to get the workers to come in to be able to recover.

Despite those economic concerns, environmental experts say they’re excited about the prospect of having a larger labor force. America’s public lands are getting more traffic than ever and that requires more maintenance than ever.

The CCC’s $10 billion dollar price tag is a drop in the bucket of the newly negotiated $1.2 trillion dollar American Jobs Plan.

But Heritage’s Rachel Greszler says the government is different today than it was in the 1940s. Once it creates a program, it’s usually here to stay.

GRESZLER: All these little things tend to add up over time.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

PB: Finally today, an excerpt of my story from Thursday’s program on the long-term side-effects of COVID-19.

AUSTIN: My name is Keturah Austin, and I’ve had COVID twice.

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER: Keturah Austin lives in Bel Aire, Kansas, a suburb of Wichita. After her first bout with COVID, she struggled with symptoms for weeks.

AUSTIN: I think the things that stuck around and started making me wonder what was going on were things like, the brain fog, the exhaustion. Instead of eating lunch, I would take a nap.

Doctor Greg Poland is a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

POLAND: This virus affects virtually every system of the body, every organ system. We see problems with taste and smell. We see evidences of scarring of the heart, scarring of the lungs. We have certainly seen a large number of people who will have various phantom nerve sensations, for example, something crawling on them, or electric shock-like phenomena happening in their nerves. And we don't have a good way of predicting who will have what kind of complication.

When these symptoms persist for more than 30 days, it’s known as Post COVID Syndrome. Those who suffer from it are informally called: long haulers.

In the spring of 2020, Keturah Austin was slowly recovering from COVID. After four weeks, her symptoms weren’t much better. Her doctor assured her that it might take six to eight weeks before she got back to normal. But normal didn’t arrive on schedule.

AUSTIN: Probably eight to ten weeks after I first had it I kind of broke down at that point. And I was like, Hey, I know you don't know me. But this is not me...

Austin informed her doctor that what she needed was a partner to help her figure out what was going on.

According to Mayo Clinic’s Greg Poland, that’s a critical step for COVID long haulers in finding relief. First, you have to tell your doctor what you’re experiencing. Then, advocate for yourself.

POLAND: And that might involve bringing somebody with you.

Doctor Poland says we’re in a critical time for post-COVID care. Patients need to inform their doctors about their symptoms, no matter how small, and physicians need to listen carefully.

POLAND: We are literally building this airplane while we're flying it. We, by definition, only have 18 months experience with this virus. That’s why I would say if you have a symptom, report that. You might even think, “well, gosh, it sounds like kind of a crazy symptom,” but it might just be the symptom that triggers the right diagnostic pathway in the physician’s thinking as to what to do.

PB: That’s it for this edition of WORLD Radio Rewind.

If you’d like to hear the full versions of any of these features, we’ve included links in our transcript at wng.org/podcasts.

For the latest news, features, and commentary from WORLD Newsgroup, visit wng.org. For WORLD Radio, I’m Paul Butler.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.