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This is Washington Journal for Saturday, November 16th.
This week, President-elect Donald Trump announced his picks for several key cabinet positions and other top roles in his administration.
Among the appointments, Tesla in SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency aimed at reducing wasteful federal spending.
To start today's program, we're asking you, how would you cut federal spending?
Here are the lines.
Democrats, 202-748-8,000.
Republicans, 202-748-8,001.
And Independents, 202-748-8,002.
You can text your comments to 202-748-8003.
Be sure to include your name and city.
You can also post a question or comment on Facebook at facebook.com slash C-SPAN or on X at C-SPANWJ.
Good morning, and thank you for being with us today.
Wanted to give you a little more information about that newly created agency, the Department of Government, Department of Government Efficiency from Fox News.
President-elect Trump announced the billionaire Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump said the pair will work together to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.
It will become potentially the Manhattan Project of our time, the announcement on Tuesday evening said.
Republican politicians have dreamed about the objective of Doge for a very long time.
The President-elect said that Musk and Ramaswamy will provide advice and guidance from outside the government and will partner with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to drive large-scale structural reforms and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.
Trump said the agency will be more focused, will be focused on creating a more efficient U.S. government that looks to make a better life for all Americans.
It was last month in a Madison Square Garden rally with President Trump that Elon Musk was asked about potential cuts to the federal government.
Here is that clip.
I've only got one question for you and then I'm getting out of here because this is your stage.
But we set up Doge.
Yes.
How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget?
Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion.
Yeah.
Yeah!
Yes, $2 trillion!
I mean, at the end of the day, you're being taxed.
You're being taxed.
All government spending is taxation.
So, whether it's direct taxation or all government spending, it either becomes inflation or it's direct taxation.
Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Deficiency is going to fix that.
We're going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.
And America's just not going to be great.
America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before.
The future is going to be amazing from the Associated Press.
Last year, 2023, it did a poll talking about government spending and the size of the government.
It says it found that U.S. adults are closely divided on whether they want to see a bigger government offering more services or a smaller government offering fewer services.
But a clear majority, 60%, say they think the government is spending too much altogether.
Just 16% say the government is spending too little, while 22% say spending levels are about right.
Looking at some of the specifics, you can see this chart.
The 60% in the orange is the number of people who believe the government is spending too much.
When it comes to a breakdown of where that money is going, 12% say too much is being spent on education.
16% say it's too much is being spent on health care.
7% too much is being spent on Social Security.
10% say Medicare has too much spending.
23% say border security.
And the largest percentage, 29% of people say the military has the government is spending too much on the military.
Again, this morning we want to hear from you and how you would cut federal spending.
We'll start with Miguel in Gramble Hills, Maryland, line for Republicans.
Good morning, Miguel.
Hey, good morning.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of places that can be cut.
I personally feel like the ATF is a big one.
You know, Elon Musk, I think he pointed this out: that both, you know, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are all legal in America.
So why do you have an agency that, you know, I'm sure we spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, funding, you know, to address these things?
It's like addressing studies.
You know, the government's paying for studies on quail and other animals.
And sometimes they're even paying for studies in other countries, which is just totally odd.
I mean, unless you're paying for a study, something that is in America's direct interest, these kind of grants and stuff like that, they need to get cut out.
Help an American, help somebody on the street, help somebody in a shelter or help somebody in need here in America.
Americans first.
I think America first should also be Americans first.
So that's my comment.
That was Miguel Betty in Swamp Scott, Massachusetts, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Betty.
Hi, I wouldn't cut any spending at all.
I'd tax the rich.
And people realize Musk and Ramaswamy are both immigrants.
They're not Americans.
They're out to line their own pockets.
They're not out to do anything good for America.
Elon Musk bought America.
They're out for themselves.
And they're running.
Putin, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel now own America.
I wouldn't cut anything.
Todd in California, line for independence.
Good morning, Todd.
Hi, good morning.
Go ahead, Todd.
You're on yeah, I would cut unnecessary departments like the Department of Education.
Everything should be returned to the states.
Things such as like the Department of Interior could be merged with, you know, Department of Energy.
And then we have like entirely too many, you know, three-letter government agencies.
Like, we don't really need the NSA and the CIA and the DIA.
You could just lump it all, you know, like under FBI, things like that.
Yolanda in Nashville, Tennessee, line for Republicans.
Good morning, Yolanda.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Good morning.
Good morning.
My name's Yolanda.
I'm actually really excited to see just some of the big names that he put for the cabinet.
I know, just name some off the top of my head.
I know what we got.
Gage for Attorney General, Gabbard for National Intelligence.
So I guess a little self-disclosure, and I don't want to make this a sob story.
So this is definitely my last primary election I voted and I'm currently in hospice care.
And I'm just really excited that I was able to participate, participating in this really historical election.
And I'm not going to be able to see the next four years.
And to be honest, I wish this terminal diagnosis would have came up four years ago during Biden's campaign.
But that's besides the point.
No one's here to listen to some you who from Nashville.
But I guess just to answer your question, I'm really excited to see some of these names that he has on his cabinet.
And I'm not going to see it, but I'm excited.
Yolanda, let's talk about the question we're asking.
What about federal spending?
What would you cut?
You know, I think what I would cut is, I mean, I think the first caller made a really good point with the Quell studies.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Eddie in Atlanta, lying for Democrats.
Good morning, Eddie.
Good morning, everybody.
It's hard to say what can you cut because it take money.
It take money to make money.
So what we need to do is cut, stop giving all these billionaires.
They happy.
When they die, they can't take that money, all the billion dollars with them.
So they need to cut.
What we need to cut is that people that can go out and get donations from people that ain't got money.
And what they want to Republicans want to talk about when they want to do some cut, they want to cut money off of Social Security and Medicaid, Medicare, just like Brian Kemp is the governor of Republican government.
And he didn't want to pass the bill to extend Medicaid for the people.
So Donald Trump is in there.
He's all about the rich.
He ain't going to get nothing done.
It's nothing going to get done under his watch.
I don't see why these people put him in charge and put him back in this office.
I mean, the poor people are going to suffer more.
We feel a, and then that Trump, you better watch, Trump is going to try to put all the Republicans That they don't have 25.
They didn't talk about how you're going to try to get into your bank accounts now and put the Trump tax Trump stamp on your forehead and your bank account.
That was Eddie in Atlanta.
Jim in Winter Park, Florida, line for Republicans.
Good morning, Jim.
Good morning, Tony.
I got to tell you that gentleman just now from Tennessee, he just reads off the playbook from the Democrats.
My first thing that I would cut is, first of all, I would cut these people out that are not going to work.
We have gotten to the point now where what do we have?
Like 50 or 60 percent of the people that work for the government work from their homes instead of going to the offices that we are still paying the rent on in Washington, D.C.
It's like a ghost town in those buildings.
So either cut the buildings or cut the people.
And, you know, the gentleman from Tennessee said, oh, we need to take more money from the rich.
And we got it, but it takes money to make money.
There you go.
The government doesn't make any money.
We make the money.
The government takes it from us.
Jim, when you said people who don't work anymore, are you talking about federal employees who are working remote?
Yes.
I can tell you because I've seen people that are working from their homes.
And we live on a lake.
And I can tell you that I see a guy who works from his home.
And every day he's out doing yoga on his waterboard rather than being on his computer doing his job.
It's for hours.
And, you know, he's supposed to be working eight to five.
So, because he used to drive out of here every morning and go to work and come back after five o'clock.
That was Jim in Florida.
Ralph in New York, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Ralph.
Yeah, yes, good morning.
I'm a UAW worker from upstate New York.
I'm not looking to cut.
I'm looking on the otherwise.
I'm looking to, we need to raise revenue in this country.
We're not raising revenue.
And the Republican Party, they don't want to raise any revenue.
They want to cut everything that is vital to working people.
I mean, when it all comes down, you're going to see cuts in OSHA that protects the health and safety of workers in the workplace.
They're going to cut funding for the National Labor Relations Board that administers the law for over 80 million private sector workers.
So that's where the cuts are coming from.
So federal workers are going to be cut.
So all these workers that voted for the Trump administration and his allies, they're on the menu right now.
And that's where you're going to start seeing all these cuts that really benefit working people.
And I thank you.
That was Ralph.
The other member who will be co-leading the new agency of the new department is Vivek Ramaswamy.
He was on Fox News on Wednesday talking about the new department.
Here is a clip from that interview.
When Ronald Reagan became president, on the issue of defense, he called it a gap of vulnerability.
China, Russia, they have hypersonic missile technology.
We do not.
We're going to have to spend a lot of money on defense to catch up and to surpass our enemies.
Social Security, Medicare are headed towards insolvency.
We'll have to spend money there.
To me, that money is going to be made up through energy dominance.
That's where I think our greatest opportunity is.
Your thoughts.
Look, part of what's holding back energy dominance in this country is that administrative state.
Look at the regulations coming out of the Department of Interior, the slow permitting requirements, how hard it is to open a new refinery.
So I think that is the root cause of our failure as a country is this unelected fourth branch of government.
And I think they look at elected officials as these cute little puppets that come and go every little while.
Not anymore.
There's a new sheriff in town.
Donald Trump's the president.
He has mandated us for radical, drastic reform of this federal bureaucracy with the learnings of that first term.
And you look, Elon and I, I mean, Elon solving major problems of physics.
I came from the world of biology.
What we're solving here now is not a natural problem.
This is a man-made problem.
And when you have a man-made problem, you better darn well have a man-made solution.
That's what we're bringing to the table.
We're assembling the brightest minds in the country.
This is the equivalent of a modern Manhattan project to take on.
I think the major problem holding our country back is the federal bureaucracy.
Target that cost, save the money, restore self-governance.
I think we did something pretty novel here, if I may say so.
If I just want to say, is this Department of Government Efficiency built with an end date?
We want to be done by July 4th, 2026.
So, for the first time in history, creating a department, creating a new government project that is designed to end when its work is complete.
That's on the 250th anniversary of America's Declaration of Independence.
And that's the gift we want to give this country on that birthday.
Wanted to show you this chart from the Congressional Budget Office showing the federal budget for fiscal year 2023.
The outer ring is the mandatory spending that accounts for $3.8 trillion.
The inner ring is discretionary spending, and that is at $1.7 trillion.
The mandatory spending includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income security programs, and other.
The discretionary spending includes non-defense and defense.
That defense alone is $805 billion.
We'll hear from James in Boston next on the line for independence.
Good morning, James.
Yes, good morning.
I think there's a great opportunity to actually raise revenue for the U.S. government treasury and also lower mortgage rates.
And that is actually merging the government-sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then coming up and actually having, by executive order, sell the equity that the U.S. government has in those entities.
They'll probably have about $200, $300 billion.
And if you merged both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you'd save a substantial amount of money and you could reduce mortgage guarantee fees, which would be a win for housing, for people trying to do housing formation, but also bring in $200 to $300 billion.
I think Mr. Ramasani has it right on there when he talks about administrative state.
In reaction to the 2008 crisis, we created the Federal Home Finance Agency, which now is bloated and now has been starting doing social engineering around housing, which nobody wants.
It's a great opportunity actually to move the supervisor Rosalbat into the Treasury, eliminate FHFA, and merge Fannie and Freddie.
It would be a triple win, bringing $200, $300 billion to the U.S. Treasury, lowering guarantee rates, and also upholding the constitutional standards of eliminating administrative state separation of powers.
James, do you work in the industry?
No, I used to work in the mortgage industry a long time ago and been following it since the financial crisis and the role of the National Electric Council and U.S. Treasury and actually sort of participating in that.
I was an investor in some Fannie Mae preferred, and I did not know that the U.S. Treasurer actually had a memo out there and leaked a memo to Barron's where they said it was insolvent.
But I bought that from my wife's IRA not knowing that.
And since then, I've been waiting for the government to do the right thing and exit the conservatorship.
And this is seeing how much money is coming in to these entities, but still being held by government control and also raising guarantee fees for mortgages.
So I understand the industry, but I think this is just a real example of how the administrative state has grown and how the government, if you leave it uncontrolled, will just use these administrative agencies for political purposes.
And James, is this somebody who's worked in the industry and familiar with how it works?
Is it an idea that you have come up with, or is this an idea that's been floated in the mortgage industry circles?
Yes, it's actually an issue.
Some people don't want it to happen because there's legacy businesses that are protected by the captivity of these very important institutions.
But there's even the CBO has done reports about how these entities could be brought out of consumership and how much money the U.S. Treasury could have.
So there's a lot of room.
There's extra proposals by the Heritage, not the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Foundation.
There were proposals on the table how this could be a win-win for housing for almost a decade now, but there just hasn't been, it was really disappointing that the Biden administration did not take action and Sandra Thompson as the rural head of the FFHA did not take action.
This is something that President Trump was going to work on, but actually had to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the separations power issue and didn't have time to finish it.
So, you know, this, I think you look at all this stuff, it's actually very complicated with employments clause issues and separation power issues.
But ultimately, doing the right thing is a win for future homebuyers and people who want to refinance the mortgages.
It brings at least probably $200 billion to the U.S. Treasury, and it really represents how the excesses of the administrative state can harm and make our government less efficient.
That was James in Boston.
Jim in Hudson, Florida, line for Republicans.
Good morning, Jim.
Good morning.
I think there could be a ton of money saved by not delivering residential mail on Saturday.
If any check you get, my mail today will be delivered around 2.30.
If I get a check, the bank, my bank closes at noon.
I think they should keep the branches open till noon, but they could save a ton of money by not delivering residential mail on Saturday.
Think about all those trucks on the road today and all the gas are using and everything.
And they could consider changing those trucks to electric trucks.
They think about saving the environment, have those trucks, electric trucks.
Regardless of what you get today, you can't do anything with it till Monday.
So it would save a lot of money to I feel to not have residential mail delivered on Saturday, just Monday through Friday.
What do you think?
That was Jim in Florida.
Bradley in Georgia, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Bradley.
Yes, I have a couple ideas.
As far as cutting things, maybe some subsidies to maybe the oil industry.
But what I would like to say, like bringing up revenue, the capital gains tax needs to be raised.
The corporate tax rate should be raised.
But more importantly, why do we not tax churches?
Like it seems to me like, because obviously the churches now are really getting involved in politics.
And I mean, I can't really think of like anything I've ever seen where churches do anything with all that money.
It seems like there's a lot of revenue for taxing churches.
And I'm sure the religious people will go berserk, but I think it's time to be done.
Thank you.
Richard in Alaska, Line for Independence.
Good morning, Richard.
Well, thank you very much.
And the previous gentleman just spurred another interest of mine, but I was initially going to say that I think that the best way to reduce federal spending is first to find the indiscretionary spending with the Department of Defense,
the black hole money there.
I am going to now agree with the previous gentleman that taxing the churches is exactly something that needs to be done.
I also agree that taxing the rich and the corporations, the multinationals, so the money goes directly into the general fund should be done.
I also believe that congressmen, congresspeople should have their wages lowered to minimum wage.
Now, I know that's silly, but if it could be, and it won't happen because Trump's in office now, but I do believe the indiscriminate spending with the Department of Defense and the industry around it, that it's a huge black hole that nobody looks into.
Lower the taxes on the middle and lower class incomes and raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour so that money gets spent locally.
I live in a town of roughly 5,000 people.
Everybody's busy.
There's very few unemployed.
There are some and there are homeless on the Kenai Peninsula.
There's only 45,000 population.
And we do okay, but it's still tough.
We know now with the Trump administration that it's going to be tougher to do anything for the middle class and the lower class people.
Richard, what's the minimum wage in Alaska?
Between $7 and $8.
Do you know the last time it went up?
Maybe five years ago, roughly.
But the average working wage, though, I may have to back up on that a little bit.
It may be closer to $8 or $9.
But the average person here makes around $10 an hour.
But there's a lot of the population is in sales, retail sales, or government, or oil, or fish.
So there's a lot of seasonal.
So distributing the balance of the wages is kind of tough to do.
When I I'm retired, now I'm 77.
I never worked for less than $25 an hour in the last 10, 15 years of my working experience.
I do not hire out as a mechanic or an autoelectric mechanic for less than $40 an hour on a part-time basis.
As an ex-musician, I work for $25 to $40 an hour at night.
So, I mean, it varies.
That was Richard in Alaska.
I wanted to show you this article from today's Washington Post.
Government efficiency panels like Doge have long and disappointing history.
The article says that since at least the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, presidents have been appointing commissions to recommend reforms to the executive branch in the name of making government more efficient or saving money.
But many have come up short in their goals to tackle waste and abuse, especially when led by business leaders with limited experience and federal bureaucracy.
Commissions that attempt to deliver private sector efficiency to government are all abject failures, said Douglas Holtz Aikens, president of American Action Forum, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The things that make them successful businessmen don't translate to setting rules for competition in government, Holt Aikens said.
The article goes on to say, many of the specifics of the Department of Government Efficiency, which the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Musk is co-leading with entrepreneur Vavek Ramaswamy, remains unclear.
Despite its name, the organization will be outside the government, though it will work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget, the panel nickname Doge, after a dog-branded cryptocurrency that Musk sometimes promotes.
Musk and Ramaswamy have not said how the commission will be funded.
Trump AIDS are also preparing unconventional strategies to implement at least some of the recommendations of Doge with or without the approval of Congress.
Let's hear from Manny in Daytona Beach, Florida, line for Republicans.
Good morning, Manny.
Good morning.
The first thing I would do is I would research the original reason that the federal government was set up, in other words, for defense and so forth.
And I would eliminate any duplication that there would be between if the states are doing it, why do we have to have the duplication of the federal government doing it also?
I would make the Congress go back to go home, you know, it might be for six months, a year, whatever, and have to live under the laws that they're making.
And then I would cut out the fraud and abuse.
And people should be able to keep their money.
The problem is there's so much taxation.
We get taxed when we get paid.
We get taxed when we buy gas.
We get taxed when we go to the store.
I mean, it's crazy.
There's too much duplication.
The people should learn to work hard and be able to keep their money.
And that's my opinion.
That was Manny Laura.
Sorry, Lori in Cincinnati, Ohio, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Lori.
Hi.
I wanted to comment on the fellow that was talking about working at home remotely, which is something I do.
I teach college.
I don't keep regular hours, and the college doesn't require that I do that.
So I just wanted to point out that because he may see somebody out between the hours of 9 and 5, whatever the case may be, that doesn't mean they're not doing their job and doing their job effectively and efficiently.
So I just think that's something I wanted to point out.
That is Laurie Douglas in Wyoming, line for independents.
Good morning, Douglas.
Good morning.
I would eliminate useless, futile, fruitless research projects.
But for the best advice, I would go to David Schweikert and Rand Paul.
I would very much appreciate hearing more from David Schweikert and Rand Paul on C-SPAN and especially Washington Journal.
Douglas, what kind of research have they?
Oh, I'm sorry, we lost him.
We'll go to William in Priest River, Idaho, line for Republicans.
Good morning, William.
Yes, my suggestion would be to eliminate the ethanol subsidies because that would not just save the money for what they're paying for ethanol, but also be good for the environment and lower food prices.
My information is not up to date.
It's been years since I've checked on this, but as I recall, about a third of all the corn grown in the United States was turned into ethanol.
There was a professor at UC Berkeley who determined that the energy requirements for manufacturing ethanol are five and a half times greater than the energy you could extract from the ethanol that was produced, going all the way from preparing the field all the way to your fueling station.
Also, about a third of all the food in the store is connected to corn in some way.
You know, your egg prices, chickens, corn is the primary food, you know, for the chickens, beef, pork, and on like that.
The reason for having ethanol also was that it came out shortly after the oil embargo of the 70s, and people started stockpiling fuel.
And the government didn't want people to do that.
So if you add, have E15 ethanol fuel, then you have maybe a year, six months for small engines, a year for your vehicle before it no longer works.
And all the chemicals that are used to clean up the mess left behind for ethanol is, you know, it really damages the environment.
And millions of gallons of fuel are dumped every year because it goes bad.
So that was my suggestion.
That was William and Idaho Liz, Clinton, Connecticut, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Liz.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you for having me.
I love so many of the responses.
One of the ways to cut government spending is to eliminate subsidies for large corporations who if they're profitable, why do they need subsidies?
And there are a lot of companies still, especially in the oil industry, getting subsidies and then getting subsidies to be able to do research to get more oil.
So and especially where it's affected.
I would look at the two people who are going to run that agency.
Number one, lack of control, how is it going to be funded?
But are those two people paying taxes to be able to support?
Do they even pay taxes?
And that was something that taxing people on a fair basis.
It's sort of like a pay-as-you-go, pay-as-you-can.
You know, people who can't afford it shouldn't be paying taxes at all.
You know, if you make under a certain amount, zero.
But when a teacher is going to be paid less money than someone in Congress, you know, and, you know, who has lifetime medical after they leave, even if they've been there one term, and their pensions when they are on these circuits and they can have other income sources.
So reduce the amount of how much the salaries of Congress, especially when they're inefficient and they're not going to work, you know, teachers, if they get paid, you know,
when to eliminate the Department of Education and bring it to the states, you know, how about focus on the education is the thing that's going to bring us to the future to be able to educate our youth and make it affordable by someone else said about these.
There's sort of like that when you want to get a student loan and all of a sudden you're literally paying for your lifetime when you've tripled, you know, it's one thing that you have a mortgage, you pay your mortgage and the interest, you know, just pay it.
You know, I love what the woman said about people who without without means.
Why are we giving space and subsidies?
And we give subsidies by allowing rich people not to pay taxes.
That's basically putting money in their pocket.
You know, prices are high, but corporate profits are over the top right now.
You know, so price caps is another thing that I would be looking at.
And rather than eliminate some of the things, is that also reducing waste and military spending and fixed prices by in the note, you know, certain, you know, make the lowest bidding, the bidding process a little bit more competitive.
Thank you.
That was Liz in Connecticut.
This from today's Wall Street Journal opinion page, the Musk Ramaswamy Project says skeptics sneer, but the duo are serious about shrinking government.
It says the Doge will be a non-government operation working with allies inside the White House.
The policy vector, as one source put it, will be the regulatory shop in the Office of Management and Budget.
The goal is a rapid repeal of regulations and a massive reduction in the size of the federal bureaucracy with or without the help of Congress.
It says the duos are convinced they have enough legal authority to pull this off in the executive branch.
The legal theory of the case is that the Supreme Court's West Virginia, the EPA, and Lopper-Bright rulings rein in the administrative state, meaning that much of what the federal government now does is illegal.
Doge's first order will be to pause enforcement of overreaching rules while starting the process to roll them back.
Mr. Trump and Doge could direct agencies to settle legal challenges to Biden rules by vacating them.
This could ease the laborious process of undoing them by rulemaking through the Administrative Procedures Act.
A source tells us they can do, tells us they'll do whatever they think they can legally do without the APA.
The article goes on to say, Mr. Musk says he wants to slash $2 trillion from a $6.5 trillion budget, which is fanciful without touching Social Security and Medicare, which Mr. Trump won't do.
But there are other ripe targets, such as fraud in the Affordable Care Subsidies Act.
The Paragon Health Institute estimates fraud at $15 billion to $20 billion this year.
Agencies could also move to fix price contracts so taxpayers aren't on the hook for contractors' cost overruns.
Just about 20 minutes left in this first segment of today's program asking you, how would you cut federal spending?
Brian, Athens, Georgia, Line for Independence.
Good morning.
Hi, good morning.
So, yeah, my answer is going to be really, really counterintuitive.
So, I used to work as a timber sale contract administrator in the Forest Service, did it for about 10 years.
And I would still be doing it now if my mom hadn't gotten Alzheimer's and I had to bail and move down to Georgia to take care of things.
But the thing that I noticed when I was working for the Forest Circus was we started switching over to a model where we were relying super heavily on contracting to get almost everything done.
We were sitting there contracting out, building vault toilets, the toilets that we have at recreation areas that got to get pumped out every once in a while.
And then, you know, like that's just a good example.
And then we started contracting out the pumping of the vault toilets.
And then we started contracting out all the campground maintenance.
Unfortunately, our desire to cut the personnel costs resulted in us having to take on these contracts that put us in a really bad situation because the contractors would essentially bend the agency over the barrel and force us into these really, like, really high contract rates.
On paper, it would look like it was going to be efficient.
And then they would use a contract provision where, hey, there's, you know, say for example, on the Hiawatha a couple of years ago, they shut down all of the campgrounds because the vendor bid so low on the project that he wasn't actually able to even cover his operating costs.
And the way that he amended the situation was he claimed every single tree in every single campground that he was in charge of was a hazard tree and needed to be cut.
And then when the Forest Service told him, no, you're being silly, he just suspended the contract.
It's, you know, a provision where it's a breach and suspension of operations if one side is not agreeing to the terms or whatnot.
And yeah, so we ended up, the Hiawatha National Forest lost every single campground reservation, millions upon millions of dollars because of this one vendor.
And when we were doing timber operations, I was on one of the highest production timber or higher timber production districts in the United States.
I was producing 20 million board feet like it was nothing.
And it was me and two timber markers.
And yeah, we could accomplish maybe 40 to 50 percent of our annual timber target.
The rest of it had, like the lion's share, had to be carried by contractors.
And so, mind you, a GS5 timber marker, which was usually the standard GS6 timber markers, that sort of in that pay range, it runs from about $21 to $26 an hour.
And we were having to pay these timber markers approximately like, I think it worked out to be about $60 an acre was our average.
And they would run through the sale because we were paying them by the acre.
So the faster they do the job and the faster they get it done, you know, the more money they're effectively paid per unit effort.
Unfortunately, when that happens is when that happens, they do a terrible job.
They just mark random trees.
Forestry is an art.
When you're going in with logging machinery, you have to make sure there's enough space.
We have to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.
We have to comply with the forest plan.
We have all this stuff that we need done confidently.
But these timber markers just move so fast.
They're just trying to make as much money as possible for as little effort as possible.
And unfortunately, on the Forest Service side, where we do, you know, we send out a contracting officer's representative to go and inspect these sales.
Brian, talk to me about a dollar amount.
Do you have any idea how much if the government weren't to hire contractors and vendors and examples like that, how much it could save?
Well, so, for example, I got the Stony South timber sale I can throw at you with dollar numbers right now.
So the Stony South timber sale, it would have taken us $40,000 in-house to go and mark that timber sale.
We bid it out to a timber marker for $35,000.
The contracting officer's representative that we had sent out, he'd been administering to, I think, seven or eight timber sales simultaneously.
He did not have the time to fully inspect it.
On top of that, he was so hairy and just didn't have the experience.
He ended up approving a lot of the stuff just because it was too much of a pain because the timber markers would make it too much of a pain to go and fight to get it actually done right.
We just didn't have the time.
So what ended up happening was the timber sale got sold.
I got it thrown on my lap and realized that everything was messed up and I had to spend an additional $35,000 in timber marking and overtime with my guys who were already worn out from keeping up with our timber target.
So instead of costing $40,000, it costs $70,000.
That's the sort of thing that we could avoid.
That was Brian in Georgia.
John and Virginia, Line for Republicans.
Good morning, John.
Hi.
I think they spent a lot of money in compulsory education.
I think probably collectively on a federal and federal level so that money that winds up with the federal government that might not have come through a compulsory education system could be transferred or otherwise transited to a federal management financial program,
financial management program, financial program, federal financial program.
And that I don't know what other sorts of implications would be inherent or incumbent to say that if you're not spending on compulsory education, that people have a choice whether they want to go to school, et cetera, what are they going to be doing.
And so, but there's a Jefferson quote that says that the earth belongs to the living, so that whatever debt that you accrue, deficit, it doesn't transmit, transfer to the next generation.
So in federal, with federal government borrowing or spending, or that money that they don't have, or that on a local or state level or local level, and then so that if, and if your constituents,
your trading partners internationally, if it's contractual, that the debt the federal government accrues is whomever acquires it can is responsible for it, then so that it's it's payable, it's identifiably payable to whomever it is.
And so I know it's large in scope, but that's one thing that I would think that a free society and an advanced society would not compel education from people where that they say that one, that it's going to cost, and two, that, well, you know, you have choices, you're free, but in a very primary sense, you know, you have imperatives that you have to meet domestically.
And so I just, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
John, do you work in education or do you have children that are in school-aged children?
No, no, I don't.
My experience with the education system is primary, again, that is in having had to go through school.
My mother was in public education, compulsory education field.
Pretty much everything entitled in the United States is compulsory when they say that it's universal, in other words.
And so if in my experience, my experience now, like the town that I live in, really essentially, the entire economy is consumed, subsumed by that system, the educational system.
So that if or that if so, any experience that I don't know how else that you would approach it, but to say that like that, that if either it's free, free education, whether it's by choice or that or that it's sort of like a dark space, I guess, in other words.
But thank you for your time, and I don't know if that I know it's large in scope, but then that was John and Virginia Matt in Wilmington, North Carolina, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Matt.
Hey, good morning.
My name is Matt.
I'm from Wilmington, North Carolina.
And I called from time to time to remind you guys that I don't like us to use the term trillion.
I'd rather we use 1,000 billion so people can really grasp the size and scope of the America's budget or the United States budget per year.
And we're currently not collecting, or we're overspending by almost $2 trillion, or I should say, $2,000 billion.
So I think the question is kind of a BS question because most people don't understand the budget, you know, as far as how much is in the budget and how many things the American government is trying to do.
We need to collect more taxes.
I think that's one thing.
But rich people write the tax code, so that's never going to get done.
They're always going to write it to benefit them and their business cohorts.
And so that's really super frustrating.
Also, I'd like to suggest that we give Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices and get the Pentagon to complete an audit so we can find out where they're really spending the money.
And when we talk about Elon Musk going in and doing all this cost cutting, what he's really talking about is American people losing jobs.
I mean, he is going to be firing people in the United States, like in D.C., which is where I used to live.
People are going to be losing jobs.
I mean, they're going to be losing jobs.
They're going to be out on the streets.
Please remind the American public this.
They're going to be losing jobs.
People are going to be losing thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs.
People are going to be out on the streets.
That was Matt in North Carolina.
Elon Musk did talk about government spending during a town hall in Pennsylvania last month before the election.
Here's a clip from that event.
Well, I've had some exposure to government spending because, you know, SpaceX does have a lot of government contracts.
You know, there's a lot of work for NASA and for DOD, Intel, and whatnot.
And so I've actually seen just the level of waste that happens.
And if you talk to people in the government, they actually agree, yes, this is very wasteful and inefficient.
And I'm like, well, why don't we do something about it?
But really, in order to do something about it, it has to be a mandate from the top.
And if the president is, you know, if we have a great president like Donald Trump who is willing to make major changes, and it's difficult because the system will fight you.
You know, the system is not going to be like, oh, yeah, no, totally, we're totally happy being smaller.
That will not be, like, the sort of antibody reaction of the system will be quite severe.
You know, I don't think it's going to be, they're not going to, you know, like it, basically.
So, but you have to have that mandate from the president.
And we need a real president, not a puppet.
From News Nation, they did a piece looking at examples of government waste, and one of them is congressional funding for expired programs.
It says the Congressional Budget Office recently found that Congress provided $516 billion in appropriations this fiscal year to programs that had expired under federal law.
The funds were associated with nearly 500 expired authorizations according to the CBO's July report.
Nearly two-thirds or $320 billion of the $516 billion was provided for activities whose authorizations expired more than a decade ago, the report said.
According to CBO's estimates, about half of the authorized appropriations in the report expired at least 10 years ago and the oldest expired in 1980.
In 2023, the amount of funding for expired authorizations was $519 billion.
Just a few minutes left.
We'll hear from Ronald in Alexandria, Virginia.
Good morning, Ronald.
Hi.
I'm sorry.
Is it Donald?
Yes, it's Donald.
Apologies.
Good morning, Donald.
Okay.
Thanks for C-SPAN to begin with.
And Wall Street General stole a little of my thunder, but regulations are created by the executive branch to enforce laws written by the Congress and signed by the President.
Each agency has an inspector general's office, and the Inspector General's Office is charged with monitoring the activities of the agency for waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Government Accounting Office is a congressional office responsible for investigating the executive branch for waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Congress can use that to go into any agency and do audits to make sure that they are following the regulations or following their law that's been assigned to them.
The Congress is responsible for conducting hearings to investigate the executive branch for waste, fraud, and abuse as well.
They can do this through their own hearings, which kind of indicates that we have a whole lot of ways to look for waste, fraud, and abuse already in existence.
Now, maybe they need to be augmented by added staff to help them out.
But the bottom line is the Congress needs to repeal laws that they don't think are that they think are contributing to waste, fraud, and abuse.
That was Donald and Virginia.
Trina and Lawrence, New York, Line for Republicans.
Good morning, Trina.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I have a few points, but mainly my overall point is that I think too much money is spent on not fixing what's broken and trying to fix things that are not broken.
So for example, some of the things that are broken would be the NIH, definitely.
How much money have we sunk into trying to develop vaccines and medications when we aren't even preventing the things that they're trying to address with those sorts of things?
Torturing animals.
There's just so much fraud and evil that's going on in that department.
I agree with turning the Department of Education's control over to the states.
A lot of people have called in about, I have a one-size-fits-all idea.
I don't agree with those things.
Another thing that's ineffective is the IRS.
Let's minimize that right down to the bare bones just for a little oversight.
If there was a flat tax and a tax on consumption, life would be fair for everybody.
You would have to stop worrying about the people, corporations not paying their fair share, and everybody would be paying a proportionate amount of what they're buying.
So just the money that's wasted on the election, let's look at that.
If you're going to add any rules, and I'm not a big person about rules, but if you're going to add any kind of rules, then every dollar that you donate to some kind of politician, you should be able to, you should have to pay $1 into Social Security or Medicare.
Tariffs, I think, are a good idea.
I think that one of the things I wanted to respond to, there were two things I wanted to respond to with callers.
One person said that people are working from home and not doing anything.
Well, again, one-size-fits-all is not the case.
Some people are working very, very hard from home, and this is saving us dollars from the office spaces that can be turned into the much-needed housing.
There are many people who are working at home, well, quote unquote, working at home that aren't doing anything.
And that's the bloated government and politicians that were duplicating things.
And those are some of the folks that are fixing what's not broken, coming up with more policies and procedures for us to follow when it's working just fine.
Those things need to be taken care of and looked at.
And I just, the second thing, thank you so much for allowing me the space.
And this is the last thing I want to say is that the person that said, what do churches do with their money and they should be taxed?
That is those people are voluntarily, besides spreading the life-saving gospel, feeding the hungry, helping with disaster cleanup, providing health care in isolated areas and places of poverty, all volunteers.
They're doing wonderful things with their dollars, and they're not mandated to do this.
So I just wanted to respond to that because I couldn't believe that one.
Thank you for taking my, for your time.
That was Trina in New York.
And our last call for this hour, Joan in Virginia, Line for Independence.
Good morning, Joan.
Good morning.
I agree with Matt, who said we need to talk about the federal spending in thousands of billions of dollars.
It makes it more real.
And also with his idea of increasing the federal revenue.
Someone mentioned doing away with the nonprofit status of churches.
And a lady just talked about all the good things that they do.
I support a church very much.
But I'd be okay with that if they also would do away with all other nonprofits because these other nonprofits often have thousands, millions in their bank accounts that they can put aside.
And they're not, lots of them are not properly monitored.
I looked at the small one that was in New Jersey.
They hadn't filed their appropriate papers that they're supposed to file.
And of course, they have all kinds of ifs, ands, or buts about if you don't get that fired.
But nobody's really providing accountability for them.
And they can also be a cover for people who just want to have salaries for their own use.
I'd like to see cuts in higher education or it turned over to the state.
And I'd like to see them do away with all these federal grants.
For the last couple decades, we've seen lots of federal grants to educate people about dementia.
Yet right up there in Washington, D.C., we had a president sitting in office who obviously had signs of it.
So I think those millions spent on dementia education were a total waste.
Thank you.
That was Joan in Virginia.
Our last call in this first hour, but next on Washington Journal, R Street Institute resident senior fellow and former Senate aide James Wallner will discuss the GOP-controlled Senate in the 119th Congress and President-elect Trump's potential recess nominations.
And later, Brookings Institution Governance Studies Senior Fellow John Vellant will discuss President-elect Trump's education policy proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education.
We'll be right back.
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Next week, on the C-SPAN networks, the House and Senate are in.
House Democrats will hold their leadership elections for the 119th Congress, and orientation continues for the newly elected House members.
The House will revote on legislation that ends the tax-exempt status of terrorists-supporting organizations, which failed last week.
And the Senate will vote on more of President Biden's remaining judicial nominations.
On Tuesday, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell testifies before a House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Disaster Readiness and Response.
Then Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Brett Holmgren, the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testify on worldwide threats to the U.S. First on Wednesday before the House Homeland Security Committee, then Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Watch next week, live on the C-SPAN networks or on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app.
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Washington Journal continues.
Joining us now to discuss a GOP-controlled Senate in the 119th Congress and President-elect Trump's potential recess nominations is James Wallner.
He is a senior resident fellow at the R Street Institute.
James, welcome back to the program.
Thanks for having me.
Remind our audience what the R Street Institute is and what you focus on.
Well, the R Street Institute is a terrific organization.
I would encourage everyone to check it out.
It looks at real solutions for real problems.
It's one of the best places for creative inquiry in Washington, D.C. today.
And it really tries to get above the stale left-right kind of dichotomy that we see that has kind of led us to this point where many people feel frustrated with the paralysis and gridlock in D.C.
And I focus on the governance program is my program.
I focus on the Constitution and how our system operates, but more specifically, Congress and in particular, the United States Senate.
It's something that is near and dear to my heart, having spent many years working there.
And I just stand by its rules.
What can I say?
Well, we are going to talk about the Senate for the next 45 minutes.
And this week, President-elect Trump announced several key cabinet nominations and has asked Republican leaders in the chamber to allow recess appointments.
Explain what that is.
Well, the Constitution's appointments clause requires the president to nominate the Senate to confirm any judge or other officer of the United States.
This is advice and consent.
But it also has a provision in the Constitution that allows for the president to put officials into positions, including judges, when the Senate is in recess.
Because for much of the Senate's history, the senators weren't in town and it took quite a long time to get to town.
This is before you could hop on a plane and get to DC from anywhere in the country in a few hours.
And the idea was to ensure the functioning of the government while the Senate was away.
But when the Senate returned, the Senate would have to then vote on that nominee if the president wanted that person to continue in that job for a longer period of time.
Because recess appointment nominees, unlike other nominations, can only serve for a limited period of time.
And when was the last time a recess appointment was used?
And what kind of position have they been used for?
Has it ever been used for a cabinet-level position?
Well, recess appointees have been used for pretty much every position.
I mean, the presidents throughout American history have used them on a routine basis.
They're not controversial in and of themselves.
However, they've gained added controversy in this era of partisan polarization that we have.
But they've also gained added controversy since former President Barack Obama appointed several commissioners to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate was ostensibly not in recess, but he claimed they were.
And that went to the Supreme Court.
And there was a case in LRB v. Noel Canning, which spoke to this issue and really limited the power of the president to make recess appointments.
And this may be a tricky question, but who decides if a recess appointment can be used?
Well, the first thing I like to say is that at the end of the day, no one is in charge.
No one rules America.
That's the point of America.
Ultimately, it's the people, and the people will make a decision as to how their elected officials, both in the White House and in the Congress, act when they go back to the polls in the next election, right?
And they can make their feelings known in between.
But with regard to the powers of each branch, each branch gets to decide how it will execute its powers, use its powers under the Constitution, right?
The president can certainly decide that, as President Obama did, that he wants to make a recess appointment.
But if the Senate and House disagree, they have tools that they can use, the power of the purse, and other things they can even impeach if they want.
And then the courts also have a role to play in this as well, as we saw in 2014 with the Noel Canning versus NLRB case at the Supreme Court.
And you were talking about the chambers having control over the use of recess appointments.
It was during former President Trump's now president-elect Trump's, once again, his first term, that he threatened to adjourn Congress to push through nominees using recess appointments.
How does that work?
Well, the Constitution does give the president power to adjourn the House and Senate on extraordinary occasions.
That's the term it uses: extraordinary occasions when they can't agree, when they are in cases of disagreement between the two chambers in terms of the time of the adjournment.
So the president has floated, or others have floated, this idea that maybe the president could use that to forcibly adjourn Congress and therefore create a recess, create the opportunity that he could then use this power under the Constitution to make recess appointments.
But if you actually look at it, one, it's never been done before.
It would be an extraordinary power that the president would use, something more akin to what the king had in Great Britain when we declared our independence, when the king could convene and dissolve parliament at will.
And that's not something that the founding fathers were really thrilled about, right?
But also, you have to be in a state of disagreement.
And that's a very precise term.
And it seems to me very clear that the Senate can control when it wants to be in a state of disagreement with the House and when it doesn't want to be in a state of disagreement with the House.
We are talking with James Wallner.
He's a senior resident fellow at the R Street Institute about the GOP-controlled Senate in the upcoming Congress and also President-elect Trump's potential recess nominations.
If you have a question or comment for him, you can start calling in now.
The lines, Democrats 202-748-8,000.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
Independents, 202-748-8,002.
And James, you talked about both chambers.
You mentioned both chambers, although appointments and nominations usually go through the Senate.
What is the House's role?
What can they do when it comes to nominations?
You're absolutely correct that the Senate and only the Senate has a role in that confirmation process.
The House does not.
However, if the President wants to make a recess appointment or if the President is to make a recess appointment, the Senate has to be in recess.
And the Senate can control when it goes into recess, when it adjourns, and when it doesn't adjourn.
However, the Constitution requires the Senate to get the permission of the House if it wants to adjourn for more than three days.
And so this will involve the House, whether the Senate wants to or not, or whether the President wants to or not.
You have to have both chambers in agreement to adjourn for a sufficient period of time in order for the president to have the opportunity to make a recess appointment.
And for viewers who regularly watch Washington Journal, you probably see us dip into a House pro forma every now and then.
And that is what some of what James is talking about in order to continue to keep chambers in session.
James, the Republicans won control of the chamber for the upcoming 119th Congress.
Right now, they'll have, it's expected, 53 seats.
There is one House in Pennsylvania or one race in Pennsylvania that is going into a recount, but they're expected to have 53 seats to the Democrats and Independents with 47.
What does that mean for things like wanting to gavel out for a recess appointment and potential legislation?
Well, the first thing your viewers need to understand is that a simple majority can adjourn in the Senate.
And ever since we saw them use the nuclear option to get rid of the filibuster for executive and judicial branch nominations, a simple majority can overcome a filibuster and ultimately confirm a nominee.
So this isn't a problem.
There is no problem.
There is no crisis if you're president-elect Donald Trump if you have the support of all the Republicans because you have the votes right there.
You can't filibuster these nominations.
However, if you don't have the support of all of the Republicans, then this isn't going to happen because as I suggested before, you have to be in a state of disagreement for the president to use this extraordinary power on, as the Constitution says, extraordinary occasions.
And it seems to me that you can't force the House into a state of disagreement.
It has to take action on its own, which itself takes a majority, right?
So in the meantime, and we've seen this going back to President George W. Bush before, majorities will take these pro forma sessions, which will sound a little bit bizarre to those watching at home, but where you come in, you gavel in, someone's in the chair, there's no one else around, just a few staffers, and then they say, we're here, and then they adjourn.
And then that's it.
And they do that every three days.
And as long as they keep doing that, that prevents the president from making a recess appointment because the Senate isn't in a recess of sufficient length.
Our first caller for you, James in Rome, Georgia, line for independence.
Good morning, James.
Good morning.
You know, I was a progressive Democrat, but, you know, I agree that Trump should be able to put into faith anybody that he wants.
The Democrats are weak.
They could have did it.
They let him do merit garland.
They can interpret the Constitution.
Trump can.
I'm for Matt Gates and whoever else they want to put in there.
I'm sick of the Democrats crying.
We gave them Obama 60 votes.
They could have did whatever they wanted.
Use the filibuster.
Do not use the filibuster to stop y'all from passing any legislation.
Pass it.
The people who voted for Trump and what I'm trying to say is they should live through whatever he wanted to do.
All the Democrats do is complain all the time and stuff about the Constitution and this and all that and everything else.
But the Constitution can be interpreted to mean anything that any administration wants.
Democrats, shut up, especially you Hispanics who voted for Trump.
James, any response for James?
Well, the first thing I would would point out is that we've been in this position before.
We have unified Republican control of government.
We had Donald Trump in the White House making cabinet level appointments and Democrats were very much opposed to that.
And at the time, Senator Chris Murphy, this is in February of 2017.
They went around the clock one night, one night, they went around the clock, stayed in session all night long voting on cabinet level nominations.
And afterwards, Senator Chris Murphy spoke to a group, a progressive group, and they asked him, they're very excited.
They're like, this is going to be great.
We're going to take the fight to them.
Chris Murphy looked at him and said, I'm exhausted.
I don't know how much longer we can sustain this.
And I think that's an important thing to remember.
We haven't seen all-out obstruction with the filibuster or even without the filibuster of presidential nominations because it takes a lot of effort and it takes time.
And if you know you're going to lose in the end, that's very, very hard to do.
And so I think it's important that we kind of keep this context in mind because in reality, we've seen this before.
And the president typically gets his nominations.
The only other thing I would say is a lot of the people right now who are alarmed by this idea that the president would use recess appointments in this way and are pushing back very aggressively against the president were also the very same people who argued aggressively that the president ought to have his team, that the president ought to be able to put people in executive branch positions with George W. Bush.
And if we look at George W. Bush's judicial nominations in 2003, four, and five, Miguel Estrada among them, Priscilla Owens, these very same people would say things like, it is unconstitutional for the Senate to not have a vote, an up or down vote on a presidential nomination.
And so, again, I think it's important to keep this history in mind because the moment we're in, you know, maybe they've changed their talking points.
Maybe people have turned things around a little bit, but it's never totally unique in American history.
And James, to the caller point, the caller's point, there's a writer headline, expect to hear the F-word a lot in the Senate next year.
F-word, of course, is the filibuster.
It's something that Republicans have said that they want to keep in place.
How could that impact President-elect Trump's legislative efforts?
Well, as we understand the filibuster, it operates as a veto, which means that you have to get 60 votes, not 51, to get anything done.
And because the Republicans don't have 60 votes, that means they would have to moderate their agenda in order to get stuff done.
And that's the kind of conventional understanding of the filibuster.
After having worked in the Senate for many, many years, watching senators try to filibuster things, I can assure you the filibuster is not a veto.
And it doesn't seem like that until you're actually tasked with trying to filibuster something.
No one asks for your permission if they don't want to, right?
And so the filibuster is an opportunity to speak.
It's an opportunity to speak and be heard and participate in the debate.
And you have to sustain that filibuster and sustain that obstruction.
And that's very hard.
And for much of American history, there was no way to end a filibuster.
And the Senate still did very, very big things on very narrow majority votes.
And so we could still see lots of things pass, even with the filibuster on legislation.
But that's up to the Republicans, not the Democrats.
It's up to how they manage the Senate and how aggressively they try to push through their agenda next year.
And remind us what type of legislation 60 votes is not needed on.
So, in recent years, everyone's probably heard the term budget reconciliation.
And budget reconciliation is just a fancy term that just refers to a bill that can't be filibustered, that there is a time limit for its debate on the Senate floor and the House floor, but the House can do whatever they want with the special rule.
So, these rules and the budget process only really apply to the Senate.
And the idea is that when the Congress passes a budget and it has top-line levels for spending and revenue, that later on they can look at that budget, look at the permanent law, and see how they're comparing.
And if we're spending more than the budget said we ought to, if we're not bringing in as much, we're bringing in too little as the budget said we ought to, then they can pass a bill to reconcile or align that permanent law with the budget.
And that's what this budget reconciliation measure does.
But it's ostensibly meant to only focus on budget-related items, not policy-related items.
But of course, both parties have used budget reconciliation in recent decades to do purely policy-related stuff.
Richard in All Slip, Illinois, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Richard.
Yeah, I just had a basic question.
It's due to the fact that Trump says that he wants to put two czars up there to make major cuts, which I'm being there, these two billionaires.
I would like to know where does the American people fit in where if they disagree with what he's doing, that they can call and put in a complaint because he's eliminating Congress, too.
So, I just want to know.
That's my question, sir.
Well, Richard, we've seen the executive office of the president and the president's staff grow significantly since its kind of first real appearance with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
So, presidents in both parties have used non-Senate confirmed positions and people to basically get advice and ultimately to carry their agenda to Capitol Hill and out into the press.
I can reassure you, though, unless Congress gives the president this power, the Congress ultimately has the power of the purse.
James Madison calls it the most effectual power that any free people can give their elected representatives to defend themselves against tyranny.
It's the most important power.
And so, the Congress ultimately has to approve, has to approve of any cuts.
And I would go one step further.
The Constitution is explicit.
No money can even leave the Treasury.
So, we have to spend money every year.
We approve it every year.
No money can even leave the Treasury unless the House first acts to approve that.
So, if the House decides to do nothing, then no money leaves.
If it decides it wants to spend money, then it goes to the Senate.
The Senate will have to decide how they want to spend money.
If they disagree, then they vote on that bill.
Then they're in a state of disagreement.
Then they'll work that out.
Then it goes to the president.
That bill may or may not be based on the recommendations of that czar of whatever process that President-elect Trump establishes.
But ultimately, the people's elected representatives in the Congress have to make that decision.
Another James for you.
This one in Secaucus, New Jersey, line for Republicans.
Good morning, James.
Hi, good morning.
Thank you both so much for taking my call.
I do have a question regarding these recess appointments.
What would be the political cost of, I'm not even sure what the correct term for that would be, recalling a Trump nominee.
So, for example, Matt Gates seems to be one of the more controversial choices for a very consequential position.
And so, hypothetically, Matt Gates is put in that role via a recess appointment.
And then, what happens when the Republican-controlled Senate returns?
Is it even remotely possible after President Trump's resounding victory that a Republican-controlled Senate would even consider something like that?
It seems to me, and I'm no expert by any means, but it seems to me like a huge political risk.
I mean, some of them are up for re-election in 2026.
So, to me, they want to do anything and everything to keep President Trump happy and his supporters happy after such a resounding landslide victory.
So, the president can't nominate the attorney, the presumptive attorney general nominee until he's sworn into office.
But once he's in office, then that nomination can be made.
That nomination will then go to the Senate.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will review it.
If the Senate Judiciary Committee, after reviewing it and has a hearing, wants to vote on it, they vote on it.
Then it goes to the full Senate.
At any point in that process, that nomination can be withdrawn by the president.
We've seen this, for instance, with former Senator, former majority leader Tom Daschell, for that matter.
President Obama appointed Daschell to serve in his cabinet.
And ultimately, because of a tax issue, that nomination was ultimately withdrawn.
So presidents can withdraw nominations all the time.
And the Senate ultimately, you know, defeating a cabinet-level nominee in a vote is going to be rare, right?
But what is much more likely to happen is that the Senate will lean on the president, tell the president, make it very clear to the president that he doesn't have the votes if he doesn't have the votes, at which point the president would then presumably withdraw the nominee.
But of course, President-elect Trump is unlike other presidents in many respects.
And so it's unclear whether or not that would be the case.
James, a question coming in on X for you from Pep.
He says to your guest: explain a filibuster used by Tommy Tuberville used in promoting generals.
So what Senator Tuberville did was not a filibuster.
So this is why we think the filibuster is a veto.
Because again, the filibuster is just the opportunity to stand up and talk.
You can't call a vote in the Senate as long as the senator is speaking or seeking recognition to speak.
And as all of you know, standing up and talking takes a lot of effort and you get the lights on you and the cameras are rolling and there's other places you want to be and your colleagues are grumbling and maybe your spouse or your kids back home are like, why aren't you coming home?
You know, there's a lot of things that factor into that and make it very hard to sustain.
What Senator Tuberville did was just simply say no.
And the Senate has rules, right?
And it can follow those rules.
And for much of its history, those rules led it to do big and great things.
But just like the House today, the Senate doesn't really follow its rules all the time.
Instead, it creates new rules.
It just cuts to the chase.
And the mechanism it uses to do that is what we call a unanimous consent agreement.
You would say, I ask unanimous consent that we take these five nominations here, let's put them together and just confirm them, right?
That's something that you would do.
But when you ask for unanimous consent, you are asking for everyone's consent.
This is a vote which essentially requires 100 senators to vote yes.
You're essentially asking for Senator Tuberville's permission at that point.
At which point, Senator Tuberville is completely justified if he wants in saying no, because after all, you asked for his permission.
And I would submit to you that if you don't want Senator Tuberville to say no, then don't ask for his permission and just use the rules instead of asking for unanimous consent.
David in New York Line for Independence.
Good morning, David.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
So my question is kind of framed around Matt Gates and whether Trump has the ability to install whoever he wants to install in that position.
And the way that I'm looking at it is basically I'm looking back at January 6th, right?
And what happened in January 6th, which is just a terrible time for our country.
But in January 6th, it was framed at the viewpoint that Donald Trump was trying to stop the certification of the votes, right?
But I'm looking at it from a different perspective.
I'm trying to figure out what was actually happening in the House when January 6th happened.
And what was happening was that Tech House was standing there with two congressmen ready to try to debate whether the election was fair or not.
So I'm looking at that as motive.
Why would Trump want to stop that?
Who would want to stop that?
From my perspective, Trump wouldn't want it to stop that, right?
When everything stopped and they went back, right?
They didn't pick up with Ted Cruz.
Everyone, I guess, got scared and just said we're going to certify this election, right?
So my point is: what really happened, right?
Do we need to investigate that?
Does Trump have a duty to get someone in government that would actually look at possibly people that are still in our government that might have done something illegal that day, right?
James.
Well, what the members of Congress were doing, severed and apart from the people who broke into the Capitol and ransacked the place, and separate and apart from all of that, what the members of Congress were doing, whether we like it or not, was that they were using rules that are on the books.
The Electoral Count Act establishes procedures, and they were using those procedures to adjudicate electors, presidential electors.
Again, their motives may be, you know, we can question their motives, we can question all kinds of things, but ultimately they were using rules that Congress under the Constitution has the authority to make and set.
And I think that when we talk about, you know, punishing members for using the rules or punishing members for what we call illegal acts that are ostensibly, you know, just sanctioned by the rules, we get into a very slippery situation because ultimately then it becomes any behavior we don't like that is pursuant to the rules is somehow you know going to be damaging to the Constitution and we ought not to do it.
And so I think what I would encourage everyone to do in thinking about January 6th is to try to separate the kind of the institutional processes that were playing out inside and then the stuff that was happening outside.
And I don't think that the institutional process caused what happened on the outside, right?
I don't think that maybe they're both manifestations of the same thing.
But ultimately, you know, rule-bound behavior in and of itself, in my opinion, is not illegal, right?
I think that's an important thing to remember.
Kyle in Honolulu, Hawaii, line for independence.
Good morning, Kyle.
Aloha, Sam.
Thanks for doing this program.
I have a super question.
Despite the few controlled Senate and Congress, what still requires a two-thirds vote?
And I'll listen off the air.
So the filibuster, when we talk about the filibuster, essentially says that you have to have three-fifths of all senators duly chosen and sworn.
So if you have 100 senators in office, that's 60.
You have to have 60 senators vote to win debate if a senator or senators don't want to win debate and go to a final vote, right?
So that's one thing.
But of course, since the nuclear option doesn't apply to nominations anymore, it still applies to legislation.
However, within the legislative realm, there are certain things like budget reconciliation measures and the past trade approval measures.
There are things that don't require 60 that are what we call fast-track.
They have time limits on their debate.
And then when we get to the two-thirds level, any effort to end a filibuster on a proposal to change the Senate's rules requires two-thirds of senators not duly chosen and sworn, but present in voting.
So it's if you have all 100 senators on the floor, then it's going to take 67 to end a filibuster on an effort to change the Senate's rules.
It also requires, you also need two-thirds to confirm treaties and ultimately to impeach a president or any other official of the United States.
And James, we've been talking about the Senate winning control or the GOP winning control of the Senate chamber for next term, but the House, also Republicans there, were able to hang on to it.
But it's likely that they'll also have a very slim majority.
What does that mean when it comes to legislative efforts?
And when was the last time a party had a trifecta?
Well, the Republican Party had a trifecta in 2017.
Like we have been here before.
Very narrow control in the House and the Senate with a President Trump in the White House.
And this is coming out after seven years of the party signing blood oaths that they would repeal and replace Obamacare.
The Senate had one vote on it.
They came one vote short and then they walked away.
They didn't so much mention it again.
The majority leader now, the former or the minority leader, the majority leader then, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, after that said, if there's anything that Republicans agree on, anything at all, it's tax reform.
We all love tax reform.
They barely, barely passed tax reform.
And that was only after senators like Pat Toomey and Bob Corker came in and ultimately led an effort in the finance committee to help to jumpstart that process.
So if you don't like the Republican agenda and you don't like President-elect Trump's agenda, I think a lot of the concern that you may have right now is fully justified.
But it's, you know, I think that it's not likely based on past history that Republicans are going to be able to just steamroll and pass whatever they want.
If you are a big fan of that agenda, if you want to make America great again, I think a lot of the excitement and the expectation is going to lead to maybe some disappointment.
Because in reality, Republicans don't all agree on the agenda.
They just don't do that.
I mean, immigration is a great example of that.
The same with the Democrats.
And so I think what we're going to see over the next, say, six, seven, eight months is going to be the reality of our partisan kind of divisions within the parties coming to the forefront.
And it's going to change our expectations that we have right now.
And you mentioned Senator Mitch McConnell.
He has stepped down from his leadership role of the party after 18 years.
And this week, the Senate Republicans elected John Thune of South Dakota as their new leader.
What do we know about his relationship with President-elect Trump?
Senator Thune, like most Senate Republicans, has a relationship with President-elect Trump.
He's been making efforts to get closer with the President-elect Trump.
And even when he was president before, he comes from a state in which the president is very popular.
But look, any Senate leader is going to have a relationship with the president, especially the president of your own party.
I think the question becomes, you know, when that Senate leader is seen as just doing the job of that president versus helping to facilitate the process for all of the senators and all of his or her own senators in their own party.
And we saw this, you know, Alvin Barkley, he was known as the president's man.
He was another majority leader from Kentucky, incidentally.
And his president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And he was criticized.
He was criticized for being too close to FDR.
And at one point, he resigns his seat as leader.
And then the Senate Democrats come in and unanimously re-elect him the very next day.
And so I think it's about, there's a give and take here, right?
Because ultimately, when we say the president's agenda, what we're talking about are an agenda that the voters of these senators want to pass, right?
And so it's not that the senators are working for the president.
It's that they are basically doing things that their voters want them to do.
But when that changes and their voters decide they don't want that to happen or the senators themselves say that's just a bridge too far for me, then they're going to expect their leader to work for them and not for the president.
Audrey and West Babylon, New York, Line for Democrats.
Good morning, Audrey.
I wanted to know if the senators refuse to do the recess.
Will their states be impacted?
Will their states be impacted, James?
Well, the only impact would be if they refuse to help President Trump, if they vote against his nominations for that matter, or they speak out very aggressively against the president and his effort to make a recess appointment, right?
There would be a political ramification if the president-elect is very popular in their states.
And then that would play out and say, as soon as two years from now, when one class of the Senate is up for re-election.
But in the near term, in the near term, it's not like it's going to have an impact on any one particular state.
Catherine in Maine, line for independence.
Good morning, Catherine.
Good morning.
Yes, I would like to ask, can there be more than one president at a time?
Proud Biden is currently president.
Therefore, how can Trump, who has not been inaugurated yet, do recess appointments?
Well, the president-elect can't actually nominate anybody until sworn into office, until he takes the oath of office in January of next year.
So we only have one president.
Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, and the Constitutional Convention back in 1787, actually proposed to have, he wanted three presidents.
And we can think, I mean, how remarkable our politics would be today if we had three presidents instead of one.
But the idea that we have one president is something that the framers believed in very strongly because the president is meant to have unity in the executive so that you can manage the executive branch, a hierarchical organization, unlike Congress, and ultimately represent the nation abroad.
And so we only have one president at a time.
Now, the president may be eclipsed by other figures in his or her own government.
The president may be eclipsed by their successor.
Like in this case, people are talking about Trump and what's to come, as opposed to Biden and what we have right now.
But we still have, from a legal perspective, only one president.
And if we didn't, then Edmund Randolph would be very happy.
He called having one president the fetus of monarchy.
And that's something that he, you know, he was very, very, had strong opinions on in the Constitutional Convention, but he ultimately lost.
Rick in Idaho, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Rick.
Hi, how are you doing?
I want to know if somebody's appointed or confirmed to like the Department of Justice or whatever, what mechanism can the Senate use to get him out of there if they don't like him, if he's messing up or whatever.
Good morning, Rick.
So the Constitution gives the Congress the power to impeach, right?
So it gives the House the power to impeach.
And if you think about an impeachment, it's like an indictment, right?
It's like we are going to charge you with this crime.
And the House will pass a resolution of impeachment, and then it goes over to the Senate.
And then the Senate would have a trial and they would hear, you know, they would, and then ultimately decide.
Senators are both the judge and jury in this sense.
And then they would decide whether or not to convict.
And if they convict, then that official in the government is then removed from office.
But that's not the only power they have.
They have the power of the purse, right?
Which you can cut off salaries.
You can do all sorts of things.
You can limit the way funding is used.
And you can use your power of the purse and your power to just pass laws to ultimately insulate that person so that they can't cause a lot of trouble and try to make their lives miserable so that they can ultimately leave.
The president can veto anything, of course, but then the Congress has the ability to override that veto.
And then lastly, they have the ability to conduct oversight.
And that's not, you know, that's not nothing, as I would say, right?
That's the, you know, you have hearings, and then those hearings are opportunities for the media to cover something and you can draw attention to stuff and then let the American people know what's happening.
And that's a very important tool to use in between elections because it ultimately shines a light on what the government is doing.
And then the people can make it very clear, very clear to their elected officials what they expect them to do moving forward.
And if they don't comply, that they're not going to go back to D.C. after the next election.
Ralph in Washington, D.C., line for independence.
Good morning, Ralph.
Well, it gets me how you say that the Congress member represents clearly Harvard did a study that said that they only vote for what the positions want about 30% of the time.
What I'm saying is everybody, it's both parties.
And that's, you know, people say, well, how can you not be a Democrat or not be a Republican?
I think both parties are full of crap.
What you're saying is all these congressmen, 95% leave Congress rich.
So how can you leave Congress millions of dollars in your pocket and not be corrupt?
And then it's if, you know, we have a media that's, for example, we have a media that's bought by the drug companies.
Then we have a vaccine that was funded by Fauci.
I mean, a virus is funded by Fauci.
So they have a rule that says, oh, you can't leave your house unless you get a vaccine shot.
You know, because the politicians are bought and the media is bought.
And now Pfizer's made $90, what, $90, $100 billion off of his vaccine?
And the death rate is so high in the country, it's 13% higher.
I don't trust any of these guys anymore.
Well, and maybe it's because I'm a staffer, but I can assure you, I didn't leave Congress with millions of dollars in my pocket.
You know, I mean, obviously, they're going to be, you know, they're going to be bad apples.
There's going to be things that happen.
I can't explain everything in our system is by no means perfect.
But what I can also believe very deeply that our system of government, while not perfect and it's gotten better over time, all of the things that we've done in our nation and in our history, those things have happened with the exception of the Civil War amendments to the Constitution.
Those things have happened not in spite of our Constitution, but because of it and through it.
And I think a big, you know, one of the big tragedies we see with a lot of the frustration right now, a very genuine frustration, frustration I understand with the government on both sides, with how it's operating and the inability of the people's elected representatives to adjudicate their concerns, right?
That frustration, when it then is turned on the system itself, I think that's the danger, right?
Because the way that you fix these things, the way that you rein in an executive that you don't like, that you stop a president, that you replace the Congress, that you force Congress to take action on things, the ways that you do that is through the system, not in spite of the system.
And the American people have all the tools they need to get the government they want.
But we have to first see the system as the place where we go, the politics as the place where we go to adjudicate our disagreements and then govern ourselves.
Because after all, we are a self-government.
And that means we have to govern ourselves.
And we need a place to do that.
And for better or worse, that's Congress.
That's where we go to negotiate the non-negotiable.
Mark in Malone, New York, Line for Democrats.
Good morning, Mark.
Yes, I was asking the guests or interested in what the guest has to say about the presidential immunity.
And I'm sure that don't only extend to Trump.
It must extend to Biden as well.
So with all Trump's threats about the martial, whatever, call it out, martial law and bullcrap, I'm assuming Biden would be able to do the same thing.
Am I wrong?
Well, the Supreme Court recently had a case that basically declared the president, an official act, is immune.
And this is a very controversial decision, and it's one that we're going to continue to see the consequences of.
But I think we have to play it out and see what happens.
But ultimately, these questions, when we think about immunity versus not, these types of questions, we are trained almost today to think of them in terms of the law, as in it's a legal process with a legal decision and a legal outcome.
And that's very good because it's very certain.
This is what the law says.
And therefore, if you break that law, then you repay the consequences.
And if you don't, somehow the system isn't working.
When we think about presidents abusing their power, when we think about Congress abusing its power, like with the Alien and Sedition Acts, or back in the 1790s, for instance, and other things, when we think about the branches of government abusing their powers under the Constitution that they have, I think we need to think of it in terms of political, kind of political, fundamental type law, where the people ultimately are tasked with protecting their own liberties by replacing that government.
Or if the, say, the president isn't doing something, then the Congress needs to step up and the people need to act through the Congress, not the courts, to rein in the president.
Because after all, that's the whole very notion of the separation of powers.
But instead, today we hand it all over to a legal process into judges because we expect that that's what it's going to take to ultimately rein everything in and make sure that presidents don't abuse their powers.
But I can assure you that if you have a very popular and very aggressive executive, and this has been the case throughout human history, the judges aren't going to be able to stop the executive.
They aren't going to be able to stop Napoleon, right?
The only thing that stops executives like that, the only thing that stops tyrants for that matter, is the people themselves.
And ultimately, it's up to them acting through the political branches, acting through the branches established by the Constitution to preserve that Constitution and the separation of powers on which it depends.
Liz in Waterford, Connecticut, line for independence.
I'm sorry, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Liz.
Hi, how are you?
A caller, a couple callers before me, asked, how can President-elect Trump put nominations forward if he's not the president?
And if the Senate and House are on the recess, and he didn't answer the question.
He told the history of how there was only one president, but he didn't answer the question.
Well, the president-elect Trump can't make a recess appointment until he is the president.
The Constitution gives that power to the president, not the president-elect.
And the president-elect won't be the president until the end of January next year.
And just for a point of clarification, when we are talking about the nominations this week, it is who Trump, President-elect Trump, is planning to nominate once he is sworn into office on January 20th.
He's just getting a head start.
James, we appreciate your time.
Our guest, James Wallner, he is a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute.
You can find them online at rstreet.org.
Thank you so much for being with us, James.
Thanks for having me.
Next on Washington Journal, we will be joined by Brookings Institution Governance Studies Senior Fellow, John Vellant.
He's going to discuss President-elect Trump's education policy proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education.
We'll be right back.
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Going back to Joe Kennedy Sr. in her book, Ask Not.
Bobby moves his new girlfriend, the actress Cheryl Hines, into a home just a few yards away, maybe a few hundred yards away.
They're flaunting their relationship all over the place.
He's threatening like he's going to get the kid.
You know, it became this whole thing and she felt hopeless and that she had nothing to live for.
And this culminates in her suicide in May 2012.
She hung herself in their barn on their property up in Westchester.
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This is the mother of his four children.
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Washington Journal continues.
Joining us now to discuss a second President Trump term and education policy is John Vellante.
He is the Brookings Institute Governance Studies Senior Fellow and also the Brown Center on Education Policy Director.
Welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me.
Why don't we start with your roles?
We just talked about them.
I just mentioned what they are, but what exactly do you focus on?
Sure, thank you.
So Brookings Institution is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institution in a think tank here in Washington, D.C. Within Brookings, we have a center that focuses on education policy called the Brown Center on Education Policy.
I direct that center.
So I do research and then also a study and pay attention to education policy and politics.
And you focus mainly on pre-K or kindergarten through 12th grade?
That's right.
So I do mostly K-12 education, a little bit of higher education, a little bit of pre-K, but mostly K-12.
And President-elect Trump will be re-sworn into office for a second term come January.
What impact did he have on the education system during his first term?
So I would say that there really wasn't much lasting impact from that first term.
So when presidents come into office, there are different ways that they can have impact.
The most lasting impact often comes from legislation where they work with Congress and they pass big new laws that fundamentally change something about our education system or whatever else it may be.
And really, we didn't see much of anything when it came to big, important K-12 legislation in the first Trump term.
Now, that's not to say they didn't have any impact, but the impact they had was mostly in regulations and in guidance that the Department of Education was providing to districts and some of the more important, at least short-term impacts they had related to Title IX in particular.
So that is protections against sex-based discrimination, where they had sort of changed some of the definitions of what constitutes sexual harassment and assault.
They changed some protections for transgender students and for students of color when they're disciplined disproportionately.
So they had some of these kind of shorter-term effects.
But when you're making policy through rulemaking and through guidance, the next administration can kind of quickly come and undo whatever it is that you do.
And that's what we've seen lately.
So we've seen this sort of back and forth when we've had Democratic to Republican to Democratic presidents where they've undone the regulations and the rules that their predecessors have put in place.
And that really is most of what we saw Trump do.
And we could see that happening again come January once President Trump is back in office.
He's already said that he will restrict, quote, woke teachings in schools and universities and also implement universal school choice.
When we hear woke issues, I think a few of them you just mentioned, but what are those and how much control will he and his administration have when it comes to how states handle those issues?
Right.
So over the last few years, we've seen a lot of sort of political heat around questions of what is it that schools teach and how do they teach civics and how do they teach about race and about gender and sexuality.
And it's become a popular issue on the right to say that schools are essentially too woke.
They're too progressive.
They're talking too much about those issues.
It is important to keep in mind that the federal government has very little role in defining curriculum or in determining what it is that students are actually learning day to day.
That is really a function that's left to states and localities.
And that the root of that is that the U.S. Constitution says nothing about schools, says nothing about education.
So that really is left to states.
And so how exactly President Trump or really even Congress would plan to go about fundamentally changing the curriculum and doing whatever it is they have in mind when it comes to restricting woke teaching is very unclear.
And one sort of one path that people sometimes talk about is, and President-elect Trump has suggested this, is maybe withholding funding to schools that don't teach the type of lessons that he would like them to teach.
But really, if we're talking about something like withholding Title I funds, which are funds that go to schools that disproportionately educate kids in poverty, it's actually explicitly written into the legislation that created Title I that you can't, as a president, as an executive branch, make decisions about what schools teach.
So it's very unclear how they would go about doing that, but it's certainly a talking point, if nothing else.
And you talked about withholding funding.
How are public schools funded when we were talking about kindergarten through 12th grade?
And how much of that funding comes from the federal government?
It's about 10%.
So about 10% of funds come from the federal government.
The other 90% comes from a mix of state and local sources.
And it's about half half of the state and local sources.
And that mix is important because the funds look very different in kind of where they come from and what schools they go to.
So if we had a school system that was based entirely on property taxes, where we were raising funds locally and then using those funds to fund local public schools, we would have wild inequality in school funding.
So it's much easier to raise funds from property taxes when you have wealthy properties around.
And so what we see is those local funds tend to disproportionately create funds for schools in wealthier areas.
And then federal funds and state funds tend to move in the other direction.
So they offset some of what would be disproportionate funding for the wealthiest areas by providing some additional funds to areas that have fewer resources.
And you mentioned that 10%, about 10% of funding comes from the federal government, which may sound like a small amount, but it's not.
Can President-elect Trump, once he's in office, cut off money to states or schools?
He can certainly request it.
So the president will put out a budget and will present that budget to Congress.
The recent history when it has come to attempts to try to cut education spending at the federal level and even from President Trump himself is a president might request some cuts and getting those cuts through Congress is very difficult.
And the reason for that is that a lot of these programs that the federal government manages are really popular and they're popular both among Democrats and Republicans.
So for example, if President Trump went and said, you know, I want to cut Title I funding, and Title I funding is a fairly substantial piece of that 10% that the federal government funds, that would have really significant effects, not just in Democratic areas, but in a lot of areas that congressional Republicans represent.
And in fact, if you were to look state to state at the states that receive the greatest share of their per-pupil funding from Title I, so from that federal funding, it's actually a lot of Republican states that receive the highest share.
And I think Mississippi is atop that list.
And so when you start to threaten that funding as a president, as a Secretary of Education, you find resistance, not just from Democrats, but they'll find resistance from Republicans.
And there's a good chance that any steep cuts that they propose won't actually get through Congress.
And once he's in office, President Trump could withhold the funding.
Doesn't mean it would happen, but if it were to happen, what impact could that have on those schools?
So if that funding were withheld, it would disproportionately come from the schools that need the funds the most, the schools and the students.
So it would be schools that are serving students in kind of concentrated poverty.
It would be students with disabilities who have a lot of needs that cost money to provide for.
And without those federal funds, you really would create a lot of serious problems for those schools.
Now, if they tried to withhold those funds, there's a good chance that that would get tied up in courts if they were to sort of go around the typical legal process.
So there are political obstacles, there are legal obstacles, but if they did push down that path, and I'm sort of skeptical that they would spend their political capital on that, but if they did push down that path, it would have potentially catastrophic consequences for some of the students who need federal help more than anyone else.
We are talking with Brookings Institution Governance Studies Senior Fellow, John Vellant, about a second President Trump term and education policy.
If you have a question or a comment for him, you can start calling.
And now the lines, Democrats, 202-748-8,000.
Republicans, 202-748-8,001.
And Independents, 202-748-8,002.
Also want to let you know that we have a special line for teachers and administrator, that line, 202-748-8,003.
And John wanted to ask you about when we are talking about funding, the Associated Press has done a survey looking at where the public is dissatisfied with the way with areas money is being spent.
And education is at the top, with 65% of Americans saying that too little is being spent on education.
What are some of the challenges to increasing funding for the education?
Yeah, so it's a good question.
And that's a consistent finding.
So when people are asked what they think about schools and whether they think that we ought to invest more or less in schools, they very consistently say that we don't invest enough.
And part, so that would primarily be work that would happen at the state level and at the local level if we were to sort of substantially increase education spending, most likely.
Not entirely, and Democratic presidents in particular have sort of suggested that maybe we should be spending more at the federal level.
But part of the obstacle, I mean, a lot of those obstacles are political, and some of them relate to the fact that it is expensive.
Schools, so it costs a lot of money to run education systems because we have in this country something like three or four million public school teachers, and it just costs a lot of money to run school systems.
But it is the case that we have generally underinvested in schools when we think about what the payoff might be to investing more, and also could be much more strategic when it comes to how we spend the funds that we do.
Our first caller, Joe from Melbourne, Michigan, Line for Independence.
Good morning, Joe.
Sir, are you familiar with the Office of Education?
Certainly, the Department of Education, and the department has many offices within it.
No, can I read you an excerpt from Funkin Wagnall's Encyclopedia, circa 1966?
Let me read it to you: A U.S. government agency established by an act of Congress in 1867 to promote the progress of education in the United States.
The 1867 legislation established a federal Department of Education.
In 1870, however, because the states were unwilling to accept any national control of education, the agency was made a division of the Department of the Interior.
An executive order in 1939 transfers control of the Office of Education to the Federal Security Agency.
What is that?
The main function of the Office of Education is a collection of publication of statistical data and information concerning the status of American education.
Other functions assigned to the agency include administration of funds appropriated by Congress for education matters such as funds for vocational education and land grant colleges.
Yes.
Hello, Elon.
Yes, thank you.
So the Department of Education has a long and interesting history, and it does go back to the 19th century.
So the contemporary U.S. Department of Education really started at the tail end of the Carter administration.
But the history of the department goes back much longer than that.
And in the mid-19th century, it was set up initially as really an agency that was collecting data and producing some reports just so we could have some view from Washington of what was going on in U.S. schools across the country.
And over time, the department has taken on different roles.
And that does include vocational education became sort of an important part of what the department was paying attention to.
The current kind of the department as we know it now came into being in the early 1980s and it came into being in part because whether there's a U.S. Department of Education or not, there is legislation that touches schools in various ways.
So it's these Title I funds that we were talking about to provide funds for students in concentrated poverty.
It's protections for students with disabilities.
It's the Perkins Act, which relates to some of what you're talking about there.
And when we have all of this legislation and all of these programs and all of these funds, there was a sense that we needed an agency to keep track of all of that and in a kind of coordinated and coherent way to administer those programs.
So today's Department of Education really exists to administer what are a whole bunch of programs and a whole bunch of laws that in particular started to sort of come together in the civil rights movement and in the mid-20th century.
Kyle in Buffalo, New York is on the line for teachers and administrators.
Good morning, Kyle.
Good morning, C-S-Ban, and to the guests there.
I've been a teacher for about 22 years and the one thing I can honestly say is that there's a disparity between urban education schools for funding and the, I guess what you could say, the suburban schools, which functions more on a higher tax base.
The playing grounds aren't fair and equal for the students that come from poorer districts.
And if the federal government is involved, then it really should be dissolved because there's no equal opportunity, if you understand me.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, Kyle, thanks for the question, and thanks for your 22 years of service in classrooms.
So it is absolutely the case that if we leaned very heavily on property taxes to fund schools, that we would have enormous disparities in the resources available to different communities.
And part of the role of the federal government is actually to offset those funding disparities.
So it's true now that we still don't fund schools in the way that we need to.
And it's true, too, that some students just require more funds than other students do.
So students with disabilities, it just costs a lot more to educate students with disabilities.
And the same goes for students who are growing up in poverty and students who may come to school behind grade level.
And the federal government, so where I maybe would push back a little bit on that, I agree with a lot of the diagnosis of the problem.
When it comes to the solution, the federal government really plays an important role in offsetting what would be even worse disparities and even worse inequities in the resources.
And so when I think of the role the federal government is playing when it comes to funding schools, it is very targeted to, and not always in the best ways that it could be, but it's targeted to students who need those funds the most.
Robin in Columbus, Ohio, also on the line for teachers and administrators.
Good morning, Robin.
Yes.
Hi.
Thank you for being with us to talk about education.
I'm Colleen, as I'm an educator who is also doing research on access to opportunities to get free college education before students leave high school.
And what we're seeing in my state and across the nation is that the students who are able to take advantage of the dual enrollment, dual credit opportunities are usually the students who need that access to free college the least.
And so it's increasing the gap between particularly the racial gap in college education attainment.
I was just wondering what you could say about that and what is being done to close that gap, that access to college, free college.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Robin.
So free college has been an issue that we've seen come up at the state level in particular and in some cities too.
And I think cost of college is top of mind for a lot of people right now.
So in the Biden administration, we saw a lot of attention on student debt forgiveness and sort of questions of how do we reduce the cost of college.
I don't think we quite know what we're going to see from the Trump administration.
If there is one place where there seems to be some agreement between Republicans and Democrats right now as a potential area of focus when it comes to federal policy or even state policy, it's career and technical education.
So there seems to be some interest in trying to think about how do we create opportunities for students who might not want to enroll in a four-year college right from high school.
So I think we may see some movement on that front.
And it is a sort of persistent challenge when it comes to making policy, that if you want policies that benefit the students who need it most, the policies have to be constructed in a way to do that.
And there are certain issues when it comes to college affordability on that front.
And we may talk at some point too about some school choice policies.
It's another area where I think that the Trump administration has really sort of given some signals that they'd like to make policy.
And I have a lot of concerns when we talk about school choice policies.
There too, there are policies that will generally benefit the students who might need it the least.
President-elect Trump has said that he plans to eliminate the Department of Education.
They also play a role in funding for college and loans.
How would that impact?
How would closing the department impact those in higher ed?
It's a good question.
And so when people talk about closing the Department of Education, it's really important to ask them what they mean.
So if we're talking about closing the department and shutting down all of the programs that the department administers, it would be, one, it would be totally catastrophic and chaos inducing.
I mean, it would mean funds stripped from K-12 schools.
It would mean the student loan portfolio just kind of going away.
We would have no FAFSA.
I mean, it would be a true mess.
And so that's not going to happen.
It would be terrible if it did happen, but there's no appetite for that among Democrats, among Republicans.
Another way that people sometimes talk about closing the department is changing the agencies that administer those programs.
So that wouldn't be shutting down every single program that the department runs, but rather maybe Title I moves into the Department of Health and Human Services.
Maybe the Office for Civil Rights and what's now in the Department of Education moves to the Department of Justice.
And in that world, which I think is more likely, but I actually think still unlikely, but in that world, we would likely see not major, major changes in higher education or in K-12, except that it would be different agencies around the federal government that are actually running those programs.
One of the suggestions that has been floated if the department were to close is, again, going back to the funding from the federal government that goes to states and instead giving states block grants.
What would that look like?
So this has been a proposal that Republicans have made in different forms for some time.
And the basic idea would be taking some of these individual programs and these individual funds that the federal government provides, sort of bundling them all together, and then providing no strings attached funding to states to decide what they want to do with that money.
So I have concerns about that approach.
I think a lot of people have concerns about that approach, some of which relate to when you start offering no strings attached money, you worry about what gets lost.
And so just as one example, there are real strings attached to money that goes to support students with disabilities.
And students with disabilities require protections in schools because we know from our history that you can very easily fall into a place where those students' rights aren't protected, whether they're not getting access to the right schools or the right classrooms or the services that they need in school.
And if we were to start to block grant that money, I would worry first about some of those strings no longer being attached.
And then you also might worry about what happens to those funds in the long run and how stable and secure is that funding in the long run if it becomes a block grant and we'd start to do away with some of those programs.
And there too, just to speak on the politics of that for a second, there too, that is difficult to do politically because even a lot of those individual programs are very popular across the political spectrum.
So that may be a move that we see the Trump administration take.
I think it is far from a foregone conclusion that they would be successful if they decided to go down that path.
Dave in Palm City, Florida, Line for Republicans.
Good morning, Dave.
Good morning.
I'm 72 years old and 1965.
I recall that that's when the foray into secondary education really took off with the Johnson administration, and so that living up north it was different than living in the south, and I think that things have evolved over the years to where the states are much more ubiquitous in the way in which they handle different matters, including education.
And so what amazes me is how the federal government has grown and so I'd like to know how many employees are there in the Department of Education and if you have any historical perspective as to how many there were back when it was called Health Education and Welfare Department in 65.
Thanks Dave for the question.
So don't quote me on this.
I think the current department has somewhere in the range of 4,000 employees but that is a few it's a few thousand employees and it's actually one of our smallest federal departments.
So it does not size-wise it just doesn't stack up to some of the other departments around DC.
I think you're raising an important and interesting question around what exactly is the federal role in education and you're right that a lot of the kind of current operations of the department trace back to the mid-20th century in the civil rights movement and we did see some additional funds and some additional protections and laws passed kind of at that time.
So the key roles that the federal government plays in education are they first of all they protect students' civil rights and so it at one time you know that may have looked different in the 1960s from how it looks now but now it includes things like making sure with Title IX that we don't have sex-based discrimination in schools.
It's making sure that students aren't discriminated against on the basis of race or whatever else it may be.
And so a key function that the federal government plays and really the department plays is enforcing those civil rights protections and making sure that students' rights are protected.
A second role is the federal government has a compensatory funding role that it plays, which we've talked about here a bit, which is essentially that it's making sure that it's providing funds so that students have a real shot at a good education.
And then the federal government still plays the role that it's played really since the mid-19th century when it comes to data collection and helping us learn something about what is working and what isn't working so that we can spend our resources well.
Now, what the federal government does not do is the federal government is not the entity that is making decisions about curriculum.
It's not deciding who teaches and what types of teachers can be hired and can't be hired.
So when a lot of, if you're a parent and you're frustrated and you don't like your kid's math lesson from yesterday or you don't like what the topic was in high school social studies class or you think your daughter has a bad Spanish teacher or whatever that problem may be, it is very likely that the origin of that problem is someplace other than the federal government because that's just not of what that's not really what the federal government does.
That really is about school districts and state departments of education and sometimes state legislatures and governors.
And just to share some facts about the U.S. Department of Education, as our guest John mentioned earlier, it was put into place in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and began operating in 1980.
It currently has 4,400 employees per the Department of Education.
And as he noted, it is the smallest staff of the cabinet agencies.
In 2024, it had a budget of $238 billion, which is 1.8% of the 2024 U.S. federal budget.
Up next is Hillary in Edmonds, Washington on the line for teachers and educators.
Good morning, Hillary.
Hi, good morning.
I just have a question about the direction for supporting states in educating the number of undocumented children that have entered the system in the last five, seven, eight, ten years.
The amount of resources that go to educating children with technical specialties in that they don't speak English and aren't really able to just come into the system and benefit right away simply because of the shortage of multilanguage learning teachers.
So my question is, you know, how does the Department of Education, since the federal policies around this influx of children needing this education with these special needs, play a role in supporting the cost of doing that?
That's my question.
Thanks, Hillary.
That's a good question.
And so here, too, that is largely a function of state and local government.
So that's actually not, the federal government is not particularly engaged on that front.
Now, I will say this is one area where the federal government may become particularly important when it comes to schools, and it's a bit indirect.
But if we do start to see some real movement with deportation and in sort of thinking through what to do when it comes to moving people around and potentially out of the country, that could have real implications for a whole lot of students around the country.
And it could potentially be quite costly.
We could run into cases where students are pulled out of school and left out of school for some time.
So I think one of the true kind of great unknowns at this point about what we're going to see over the next few years here is how schools and education might interact with whatever we see when it comes to immigration and deportation.
And I will say it is true that we, so, and this is true for immigrant students, it's true for other non-native English-speaking students, that often those students do require additional resources and not just resources, but also additional work to make sure that they're sort of set up and having good experiences in U.S. classrooms.
And it is a good thing, it is a good feature of our education system that we welcome all kids into public schools.
That was not always the case in U.S. school systems.
I think it can be a point of pride in our school systems, and it has not always been the case elsewhere around the world, that we welcome all kids into our public school system.
But it is also the case that there are challenges and that we need to respond to those challenges.
But I would say it's primarily a state and local role and not so much a federal role.
Hillary, are you still on the line?
I am.
Are you a teacher there in the Edmonds School District?
I teach in Western Washington.
I don't teach in the community I live in.
But yes, I'm in the area.
And so the question more had to do with about welcoming these children in and providing them with an education, but the financial challenge of it and the shortage of teachers that speech.
I work at a school that represents over 40 languages.
So it becomes a challenge to be able to integrate these children into the community simply because of the lack of resources.
And yet the states don't have the control over the budgets to bring in the additional supports to provide this for this population.
And I guess that's my question about the federal role.
The states don't control the immigration policies.
We're just trying to support these families once they're here.
And part two of that is not only specialty teachers, but also the mental health support and the community support to get the whole family working and productive, because that's part of what these kids need as well.
And that is certainly not unique to Western Washington.
That is, those are challenges that come up across the country.
I would say the federal government has not done enough on that front.
when it comes to providing funds, providing support, because as you say, it is much more difficult and it is costlier because it may be the case that you need additional staff to work with students.
It may have implications for teacher hiring and there may be shortages of certain types of teachers who are particularly helpful in those schools.
The federal government's funding, again, it's roughly a 10% funder in schools, and it just, it has not focused on that area, but I think certainly there's a case that it should.
And we've relied much more on states and localities to sort of pick up for what the federal government has not done in that area.
And I think in a lot of states, we've seen that students, English language learners, and other groups of students that just have more needs and tend to be costlier to educate don't necessarily have the funding they need through those state funding formulas.
President-elect Trump has also said that he wants to provide public subsidies for private school tuition and other educational expenses outside of the public school system, likely through legislation like the Education Choice for Children Act.
We want to show our audience what that includes.
It is bicameral legislation that is making its way through the chambers.
It passed the House Ways and Means Committee earlier this year.
It provides $10 billion in annual tax credits to be made available to taxpayers.
It has a base amount that will be set for each state, and then the credits are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.
It uses a limited government approach with their respect to federalism, thus avoiding mandates on states, localities, and school districts.
And it also includes provisions that govern scholarship granting organizations, SGOs.
As SGOs are given the ability to determine the individual amount of scholarships that are awarded.
John, what is your response to the legislation and the proposal to provide subsidies for private school tuition?
So I think this is a really important topic to be talking about.
And honestly, I think a lot of the discussion about the incoming Trump administration in schools has focused on the potential closing of the Department of Education.
I think that is less important, frankly, than what these questions are about.
So to sort of step back a little bit, for a long time, conservatives have liked the idea of school choice, of giving funds to families so that they can choose schools that they want for their kids.
And school choice policy can look, it can take a lot of different forms.
So for a long time, we've had charter schools in this country, and charter schools are publicly funded, privately run schools that families opt into, but that are subject to a lot of the same requirements and restrictions and accountabilities that our traditional public schools are.
Lately, over the last few years, there has been a push, especially in the state level in a lot of Republican-leaning states, toward big private school choice programs where public funds go to families and they can choose private schools for their kids instead of those funds going to public schools.
And the way, so a lot of people kind of know the idea of vouchers and historically those are voucher programs.
There are different forms these programs take.
They have different names and it's a little bit confusing and it's a bit of a shell game as far as where the money goes.
But what we've seen lately at the state level are what are called universal education savings account programs.
And what those programs essentially do is they take a lot of funds from the state and they provide them to families in accounts that families then can use to pay for private schools or to some other approved educational expenses.
And in about a dozen states over the last few years, we've seen big universal or near-universal programs that are different from anything we've seen in the past in that they're available to basically any family in the state.
And so it doesn't matter if you're the wealthiest family that's already sending your kid to the most expensive private school in the state, you can take those funds from the government and use them to pay for that private school education.
And that, I believe, those programs create a host of problems.
I think there are real questions about government waste and efficiency.
Those schools don't provide the same types of protections for students that public schools do.
They aren't subject to the same accountability.
They don't take the same tests.
And so we don't know how students perform.
There's very little research to suggest that students perform well when they take up those vouchers and go into those programs.
There are questions about separation of church and state.
There's just, I could go on.
There are a lot of questions and concerns about those programs.
Now, that particular type of school choice program is very unlikely to happen at the federal level.
What is possible is that the Trump administration would push for this kind of federal tax credit scholarship program.
And the way that would work, and again, this is essentially a voucher program, but it takes a different form.
But the way that would work is that taxpayers, federal taxpayers, could get a credit for donating funds to an organization.
And it could be a one-to-one credit so that they don't actually feel any difference in what they owe the government.
But they would get a credit for donating funds to an organization that then provides vouchers to families to pay for private school tuition.
So it's essentially a voucher.
It just has this kind of different structure.
And what we've seen around the country is that voucher programs are really unpopular.
And so they are kind of universally unpopular among Democratic lawmakers across the country.
But we've also seen in state after state a lot of opposition, especially from rural Republicans, who look at their own school system and say, we don't have a lot of private schools in our community.
And if we're going to redirect resources that were going to public schools to private schools, that essentially is redistributing funds from our public school, which is sort of an anchor in our community, to these wealthier schools that might be in the suburbs or in the cities.
And so there's been a lot of opposition among state legislators to that idea and among voters too.
And actually on Election Day, on the same day that Donald Trump kind of swept through a whole lot of states, three states had school choice provisions referenda that were on their ballots.
And it was Kentucky, it was Nebraska, and it was Colorado.
And those, they performed terribly.
All three of them failed.
And they failed with a lot of opposition, not just from Democrats, but also from Republicans.
But all of that said, what the Trump administration may look to do in this first term is to sneak that federal tax credit scholarship program into its more comprehensive tax reform bill.
So we almost certainly are going to see some action on tax reform maybe next year.
And if this voucher program becomes just one among many programs that are part of that bigger tax reform, it could sort of sneak under the radar.
Even though if they were to try to create that bill on its own, it would very likely fail because of Republican opposition joining Democratic opposition in the House of Representatives.
And so I think that is something certainly to keep an eye on.
And if you're concerned about that kind of voucher system and that school choice policy, or if you're opposed to those universal ESA programs and universal voucher programs that you may have seen in your state, this is another version of that.
And so I hope that people are paying attention to what this could be if it does get sort of tucked into that more comprehensive school choice reform.
I'm sorry, that more comprehensive tax reform.
Jill in Indiana, Lineford, Teachers and Academics.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Okay, wonderful.
I had two things.
I really wanted to.
The first comment was just recently, two days ago, and our school board CTE came.
They had a whole CTE discussion and they were up in arms.
It was not a happy sight because there was a private company trying to push CTE.
So CTE is great.
I used to sell for a big publisher company a few years ago, and CTE was a smaller portion of the account, but it was growing.
And CTE is a wonderful opportunity.
But I don't know if you have any comment on that, but more of my real question has to do with something totally separate.
That was just a comment of some things that were turning as the CTE begins to become.
But more importantly, I wanted to know more about if you have an idea, we have a 21st century scholarship program, which means free education in college here in the state.
I was wanting to know the origin of that.
Is that our state that just came up with that, or is that other states that have come up with that free tuition program and call it something and allow kids from eighth grade for us to do certain things?
And then as they graduate, they can go to a state-run college for free.
Is that something that you know more about?
Yeah, thanks, Jill.
Good question.
So it is not unique to any one place.
There are, they're sometimes called promise programs or free college programs, and some of them are local at the city level.
So Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example, has a promise program that pays for college tuition and has for some time.
Some are at the state level, and they kind of take different forms from one another, but they are not federal programs, so they are state and local programs.
And as you mentioned, it's unlikely that the Department of Education would be eliminated, and former President Trump, president-elect now, is looking at nominations and who could head up the department.
If we have the names Ryan Walters, Cade Brumley, Manny Diaz Jr., what do we know about them and what they could bring to the department?
Yes, good question.
So this is, I mean, you know, a lot of us are waiting for a name.
We have not yet heard a name for Secretary of Education.
So the way I have been thinking about potential choices for secretary are there are kind of a few types of candidates that President-elect Trump could choose.
So there is one group of candidates who I would regard as kind of true culture warriors, where they do not have a lot of experience at schools.
They do not have a lot of experience running agencies or programs and would essentially be totally unqualified to run for schools, to run the department.
I think a couple of names I would put on that list are Tiffany Justice's name has been floated.
Tiffany Justice is one of the co-founders of Mobs for Liberty and really has no experience that would qualify her to run a Department of Education.
Chris Ruffo is another.
Chris Ruffo has background in political strategy and is sort of part of discussions about how Republicans can make gains politically, but in no way has any background that would make him prepared to deal with what are very real challenges in schools right now as we're still kind of coming out of COVID, school closures, and trying to recover.
So there's a group that would, that I, I mean, I would think of in some ways as being the sort of Matt Gates type nomination if we see that.
There is a second group that of state superintendents and you're naming some of those state superintendents.
So Ryan Walters from Oklahoma is a particularly controversial one.
So a lot of people I think heard about Ryan Walters through a story about Oklahoma calling for schools to purchase Bibles and then putting some stipulations on the types of Bibles they could purchase so that essentially they were the Trump Bibles where they would direct funds to the former president.
Kate Brumley is another from Louisiana who himself has been in the news quite a bit, but maybe not quite as much as Brian Walters.
And then there's a third group that I think would be the more kind of conventional Republican type of choice.
And so some names that I've seen there are Mitch Daniels, for example, who is the governor of Indiana and the president of Purdue.
Glenn Young, who's the current governor of Virginia.
And there, even if people don't necessarily agree with all of their policies, I think they would be more conventional and would have the types of qualifications that you might expect someone to run a Department of Education.
One last call, Daniel in Illinois, Line for Democrats.
Good morning, Daniel.
Daniel, are you there?
Yes, when I was in high school, the high school offered not only academic opportunities, but also offered a plethora of skilled opportunities, mechanics, carpentry, all these skills that are now in the private sector.
So my question is, since the inception of the Department of Education in 1979, all of these budgets for the past 40 years in schools have been cut.
So now we're faced with shortages in mechanics, in hospitality, in all these areas that high schools used to offer to students who were not more geared towards the skilled types of jobs.
Now it's all in the private sector.
So what I want to know is, first of all, what good has your institute done for education?
You've done nothing.
We have these academics and these think tanks that, oh, well, we have to do this policy and that policy.
And for me, the Department of Education is useless.
They've done nothing to curtail the salaries of these board administrators in these areas of education, and they make more money than the teachers make.
So what I want to know is, what good have any of you people done?
We're 13th in developed countries.
In some areas, math and science, we are 27th in the world.
So what I want to know, we've thrown all this money at schools federally and locally.
And what have we done?
We've done nothing.
Your response.
Yeah, so thanks, Daniel.
I agree with part of that.
I think you can probably guess which part.
So there has been a trend, if we're thinking about U.S. schools in general and U.S. education policy in general, where for a long time, I mean, over decades, there has been a push in the direction of college for all, where a lot of what high schools in particular do is they're sort of operating from a belief that everyone wants to go to a four-year college and then enter some kind of profession.
That pendulum has actually swung back quite a bit right now.
And I think where you're talking about trying to make space for the trades and for some skill building in high schools, I actually think that's the direction that we're going in.
And a lot of school districts, a lot of states, and I think even the federal government are really trying to think about what does career and technical education look like right now.
And how do we sort of operate when the reality is that if you try to send everyone to a four-year college, you're going to create a lot of disappointment for a lot of people.
And you're not serving a lot of students well for whom that might not be what they actually want to do.
And so I think we actually are moving a bit in that direction and there will be more of that.
And I would say, so sometimes when people hear career and technical education or they think about vocational education, it kind of conjures up images of very particular types of professions that schools would be preparing students for.
So for example, going and working in auto factories or whatever it may be.
There is sort of renewed attention right now on trying to think more broadly about how we could do that.
And is it the case that if you want your skill to be coding, say, do you actually have to go to a four-year college to get a really strong background in coding that would prepare you to be a really productive worker who has a really good career?
And we can probably do a lot more of that in high schools and with our community college systems.
And so I actually think that that is the direction that we're moving.
And again, is one of the more interesting places where there is some correspondence in what Republicans and Democrats seem to want to do.
Our guest, John Vellant, he is the Brown Center on Education Policy Director at the Brookings Institution.
You can find his work online at brookings.edu.
John, thank you so much for being with us.
Thanks, Sam.
We are wrapping up today's programs.
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Welcome back.
We are in open forum for the next 23 minutes or so until 10 o'clock, top of the hour.
We'll start with Mike in Rockford, Illinois, line for independence.
Good morning, Mike.
Good morning.
Yeah, looking at our country from 30,000 feet, there's some big issues that no one's talking about.
You just read an article, the CR had a half a trillion dollars snowballed in there being paid each year since 1980.
I've been seeing that CR is the four-letter word.
There should be a budget.
You had a representative yesterday, Newman, talking about what should we be cutting.
And underneath his name, it says the budget committee.
That was the first, I was like, where's the budget goal?
You know, that's the first thing.
You know, you should also ask them.
Now they are allowed, they got a big pay increase with this thing to the Supreme Court where now they can get tips and gratuity after they pass a law.
It's no more illegal to accept gifts.
So in other words, they're making millions after passing laws and same with the judges.
They can accept gifts now after they do a verdict.
So the CR, the gratuity clause where they're getting big money, and then the clawback.
They can pass a law, pass money forth, and claw the money back.
It was supposed to be just for COVID, but now even the new president is saying he can call the money back.
So those three things, along with ICE being the big Trojan horse, the SS ICE being deployed in each state to police.
And they're not even telling us what they're going to police.
And they're allowing our local police not to police the migrants or the illegal aliens, but ICE is going to come and save the day.
I think looking from above, looking down, we got a lot of things that we need to talk about.
We'll go to Monty in Providence, Kentucky, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Monty.
Good morning.
Looking at you right now.
I'm better off.
I've always been better off.
You know, I'm better off from back then, but you know what worries me?
What worries me?
Go ahead, Monty.
You know, what worries me is when I walk down the street or look at people in the face, they look down.
They won't even look at me in the face because of this election.
It's terrible.
I mean, I'm kind of scared.
And I look up at these people that our new president has elected, putting it with him.
I don't see Tim Scott in there.
He's back behind Donald Trump, but I don't see him putting Tim Scott or whoever that was, Brian Donaldson, all these guys.
I don't see none of them in these people that he's picked.
And so I'm just telling you, I'm just really scared for our country with our new president because I am scared that he's going to just start World War III and all that.
Thank you.
And Jim in Ohio, line for independence.
Good morning, Jim.
Good morning.
And first of all, in a general kind of comment way, I'm glad that people are starting to get used to the delay on C-SPAN and Washington Journal and the call-ins.
I'm very happy that you went to the delay because, you know, sort of some of our daily intercourse has become a little bit coarse.
So anyway, my pointed remark has to do with the discussions this morning, both very excellent, particularly John Vallant from the Brookings Institution.
I'm very happy to have that kind of a discussion on Saturday.
Very often, discussions regarding education occur on weekdays when teachers, administrators, retired teachers like myself and other people have a little trouble sometimes getting in or contributing on weekdays.
And the discussion on education today was very on point and enlightening.
And the call-ins, you probably noticed, were generally speaking excellent.
So thank you for that.
Jim, what did you teach?
And how long did you teach?
38 years.
And I taught from ages 12 to 85.
Not my age, student age.
So I taught middle school, high school, college, and adult ed science and math mostly, and a little bit of foundational courses to the GED learners later on in my career.
But 38 years altogether.
I hope you are enjoying your retirement.
We'll go to Lori in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, Line for Democrats.
Good morning, Lori.
Good morning.
After the election, I found that I've been able to have a better dialogue with people that think differently than me.
At first, it was very contained.
It was very not good.
But we've learned how to discuss things, and we are able to give each other our own views without becoming angry and nasty to one another.
So I'm really grateful that happened.
I worry about education.
Both daughters are teachers, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast.
And I don't think we put enough emphasis or money into education where we don't have the right policies as far as using money to teach the students.
I think maybe instead the Brookings Institute is like a think tank with people there to get ideas and push things forward.
I think there should be a think tank made up of voters, just plain voters.
Not that we have money, that we can give a lot of money to campaigns, but we have ideas that could make things better.
I think an assimilation program for immigrants coming into the country, our country so much stronger, so we could learn from them and they can learn from us.
And it wouldn't have to be this side, that side.
It's a humanity thing that would make our whole entire country stronger.
We are the strongest country in the world.
We have the best economy.
We have the best of a lot.
But things change and AI is coming up.
And I mean, a lot of things change, but I think the people need more voice as making policy and not just sitting back and watching things go by and being divided by this side or that side.
I think that the left, the right, and biting people is really bad for this country.
We need to start looking at things in a way that brings us all together and doesn't breed hatred and division where we can solve problems.
I also have a problem with for-profit schools because I've been watching for-profit healthcare in Pennsylvania and everywhere, really.
And healthcare has gotten worse.
It's hard.
I don't have a doctor.
You know, I know things are changing and they're changing very fast.
It makes it really hard for people to understand, but there's a lot of complex issues out there that affect everything.
Demslauri in Pennsylvania wanted to share this headline from this morning's Wall Street Journal: Trump nears decision on top Treasury Post.
The president-elect has been naming several people to key cabinet positions this week.
And the article says Donald Trump appeared to be nearing a decision on his nominee to lead the Treasury Department as he met Friday with investor Scott Bessnet, who's seen as a top contender for the job.
Besnett, the founder of investment firm Key Square Capital Management, is the candidate, is a candidate for Treasury Secretary alongside billionaire Kantner Fitzgerald Chief Executive Howard Litnick.
Trump and Bessnet met Friday, according to people familiar with the matter, the second time the two have met over the last week.
Trump separately met with Larry Kudlow this week at a Mar-a-Lago at Mar-Lago, the president-elect's private Florida club.
The people said Trump's advisors saw Kudlow as a contender to lead the National Economic Council and possibly the Treasury Department.
But Kudlow informed the president's team that he doesn't want a government job.
And it says, it goes on to say that Besnett and Lednick have made aggressive plays to lead the Treasury Department with their allies making the case for them and against each other in public and private.
The campaigning has irritated Trump, some of his advisors said, and lengthened the internal deliberations over the job as Trump considers other candidates.
Trump's team also discussed Robert Leithiser, who served as U.S. Trade Representative during Trump's first term, and Apollo Global Management CEO Mark Rowan for high-profile economic roles, including Treasury Secretary.
In addition to a new administration coming in, there is also new members of Congress who will be joining the House and Senate come January.
And C-SPAN caught up with some new House members after they made their first visit to the House floor this week.
Here's some of what they had to say.
That's just sort of an awe-inspiring moment.
And you know, our speaker, Mike Johnson, he is an incredible constitutional attorney and knows his history inside and out.
And just having his personal reflections and explanation of things was just very, very meaningful.
And so it was a great evening when we walked onto the floor.
It was surreal.
You know, you know how much history has happened in that chamber.
And to be a part of it, to be there, to be sitting in those seats, knowing what we're about to take on is humbling, it's exciting, and it's an honor.
It was real, you know.
I'm also used to assigned seating.
So I'm a former teacher, but also a state senator.
So we're going to have to figure that one out.
I got very emotional when we got to go on the House floor for the first time.
I've never been there.
And, you know, I grow up watching the State of the Union, watching everyone walk in and the full Congress there.
And now I'm going to be able to be there myself.
So I didn't expect to get emotional, but all of us have worked hard to get here.
And we're still all very excited and sometimes have to pinch ourselves that we're here.
As the first Latina ever to be elected to Congress from New Jersey, for me, it was really very emotional.
It was an opportunity to really remember how important our country is, how important it is to making sure that we do all the right things.
You know, I love my country, and as an American, just to walk into the halls of Congress is such an amazing, just a great feeling.
Kayvon in Indiana, line for Republicans.
Good morning, Kayvon.
Hi.
Good morning.
So I'm a lifelong Republican, right?
I voted Republican in almost every election except for 2016, 2020, and 24.
Honestly, during the Tea Party years in 2008, something was up.
And the Republican Party has lost itself in the last 14 years.
And I don't know what to do from here.
I don't know what has happened with people around this country.
I don't know how people are voting for a convicted rapist, a convicted felon, a convicted insurrectionist.
He literally tried to overthrow the government.
He tried to have his own vice president hanged.
And everybody's saying that, oh, that wasn't him.
You know, they're just blind.
And I'm tired of it.
I'm telling you, I'm tired of it.
And a lot of people are tired of it.
Kayvon, can I ask you a question?
Yes.
President Trump will be, President-elect Trump will be swung back into office on January 20th.
How would you like to see him?
What would you like to see him do or not do this term competitively?
I don't want to do anything.
Well, he's coming into office regardless, Kayvon.
So is there something that a piece of advice maybe you'd give him?
Advice I could give Donald Trump?
Oh, Lord.
Well, I would, my first piece of advice would be to resign, honestly, because he's going to start something in this country that he has no idea what's coming.
He has no idea what's coming.
And everybody who voted for Trump, they think it's some game, they think it's something joke, they're trying to own libs.
Guess what?
You all are in for it.
That was Kayvon.
Sarah in California, line for Democrats.
Good morning, Sarah.
Hi.
Hi, Sarah.
I have a question for everyone that's calling in, except the last caller.
He was great.
Why is everyone whitewashing all of this?
This is not a normal elect your wanting your favorite person to be your Secretary of State.
No.
These appointments are being approved by Putin.
So why is everyone whitewashing this?
It's ridiculous.
Trump is not a normal politician.
This is not going to be a normal four years in office.
The sooner everyone gets with the program and realizes that Putin is going to be directing every policy that Trump makes, the better off we'll be.
At least we'll have our eyes wide open.
Ava in Columbus, Mississippi, line for Republicans.
Good morning, Ava.
I'm in Columbia, not Columbus.
I'm down towards New Orleans.
I want to make a few suggestions for other cabinet members.
I'd like to see Kim Scott, I believe is his name from South Carolina, North Carolina, I'm not sure, as Treasury Secretary, Commerce, or Transportation.
I'd like to see Monica Crawley is somewhere in one of those and Colonel Adam West to take the job that Dr. Ben Carson has had and Dr. Carson be head of that Fauci thing, CDC, and Ronnie Jackson be Surgeon General of the United States.
And I approve of everybody Trump's peak so far, but go to some other states and quit picking them out of Congress.
We need those people there in the last two colors.
I feel sorry for them.
Ava.
Are you still there?
You made some suggestions for who you'd like to see in the cabinet.
Why do you like those people?
Because they're honest.
They know the job.
They're not like the cabinet that's up there now.
These people that's up there now are joke.
They're bidding.
They're jokes.
We're talking about real Americans that stand up for America.
That was Ava Wally in Pennsylvania, line for independence.
Good morning, Wally.
Hello, I'm glad.
Appreciate your call.
I would just like to make a quick comment on the Department of Education.
Jimmy Carter created that in 1980.
And apparently, the public school system flourished before this bureaucracy was created.
And the more salient point I'd like to make is that under the 10th Amendment, the federal government should not be involved in education.
It's not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.
So to me, it is actually an illegal department.
I appreciate you taking my call.
Thank you.
Terry, also in Pennsylvania, line for independence.
Good morning, Terry.
Good morning.
Hi, Terry.
Go ahead, Your Honor.
Go ahead, Your Honor.
Hi.
This is about the election itself.
I've been studying it.
Everybody was saying that a president is untouchable.
And that's not exactly true.
It's a fraudulent belief based on fraudulent teaching and pronouncements.
The same is true regarding the United States Supreme Court justices.
Now, while the Constitution does say they have a lifetime appointment, there are technicality clauses of condition that actually upends that for both the U.S. Supreme Court justices and the president,
meaning technically, by law, they can be held accountable to court-martial, military law, and military court-martial law.
Supreme Court justices, the very top oversight of the Constitution by virtue of and
it's flay my voice Pledges of allegiances, not just to the president, but first and foremost to the Constitution, which is itself federally and militarily, as well as constitutionally protected under all those offices.
And even as regards to the vote of the people, when they're taking their pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, they are also upholding our U.S. Constitution.
Sorry, we'll leave it there.
I want to get in a couple more calls.
We only have a few minutes left.
John, Connecticut Line for Democrats.
Good morning, John.
Hi.
Hi, John.
How are you doing?
My reason for Trump won the election because I hate to say this, but the American people are just dumb.
They watch Fox News.
They don't know how things are so bad, so bad, you know, and people are swallowing it.
Nobody pays attention.
The other day I was talking to this Trump guy, he didn't know Trump was a convicted felon.
And it's just before the election.
Nobody's paying attention.
They want to believe, you know?
He's almost like a religion, you know?
They know he's full of crap, but they want to believe.
You know, things are so bad.
Trump's going to make we're going to sit around and Trump's going to make everything wonderful.
That was John in Connecticut in our last call for this morning's program.
Thank you for joining us.
We'll be back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern and 4 p.m. or 4 a.m. Pacific for another Washington Journal.
Enjoy the rest of your Saturday.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country.
Coming up Sunday morning, Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, discusses President-elect Donald Trump's economic policy proposals and how he can deliver a pro-worker agenda.
Then Tom Hartman, host of the Tom Hartman Program on the new president's electoral victory and the future of the Democratic Party.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN now or online at c-SPAN.org.
House and Senate Republicans elected their new leaders for the 119th Congress, which begins in January.
Louisiana Republican Congressman Mike Johnson was re-elected by House Republicans as their nominee again for House Speaker.
The full House will vote on his nomination on January 3rd.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer were also both re-elected to their leadership posts.
Michigan Congresswoman Lisa McClain won the Republican conference chair race over Florida Congresswoman Kat Kamick and replaces outgoing chair Elise Stefanik, who is President-elect Trump's pick for U.N. Ambassador.
Oklahoma Congressman Kevin Hearn won the policy committee chairpost over current chair Alabama Congressman Gary Palmer.
And North Carolina Congressman Richard Hudson was re-elected to chair the National Republican Congressional Committee for the 2026 election cycle.
Over in the Senate, Republicans elected South Dakota Senator John Thune as their new leader in the 119th Congress, succeeding their longest-serving party leader, Mitch McConnell.
Senator Thune, who currently serves as minority whip, defeated Texas Senator John Cornyn and Florida Senator Rick Scott for majority leader, 29 to 24 on a second ballot.
Current Republican Conference Chair John Barasa was unanimously elected as whip, the number two leadership post.
And Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton was elected Republican Conference Chair for the next Congress over Iowa's Joni Ernst.
West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito will serve as Republican Policy Committee Chair and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 2026 election cycle.
Watch live House coverage on C-SPAN and the Senate on C-SPAN too.
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This is Washington Journal for Saturday, November 16th.
This week, President-elect Donald Trump announced his picks for several key cabinet positions and other top roles in his administration.
Among the appointments, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency aimed at reducing wasteful federal spending.
To start today's program, we're asking you, how would you cut federal spending?