| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy coming up on C-span's Washington Journal. | |
| We'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
| Then the National Education Association's Becky Pringle will discuss the Trump administration's education policy, including their efforts to close the Department OF Education and plans to fund private school vouchers. | ||
| Later, Paul Danz of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 will discuss the project and its level of implementation under the Trump administration. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Thursday, February 20th, 2025. | ||
| The Senate's in at 10 a.m. today with key confirmation votes expected, including Pash Patel for FBI director. | ||
| But we begin today on foreign policy and the growing rift between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. | ||
| With President Trump calling Zelensky a, quote, dictator and Zelensky accusing the president of living in a Russian disinformation bubble, the past 48 hours have marked a major shift in U.S. foreign policy and left Western allies concerned about the future of Eastern Europe. | ||
| We're getting your reaction this morning. | ||
| Phone lines are split as usual by political party. | ||
| Republicans, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003. | ||
| If you do, please include your name and where you're from. | ||
| Otherwise, catch up with us on social media. | ||
| On X, it's at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| On Facebook, it's facebook.com slash C-SPAN. | ||
| And a very good Thursday morning to you. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling in now. | ||
| Well, it was last week that President Trump had a phone call with Vladimir Putin of Russia. | ||
| This week, top U.S. and Russian officials met to discuss the future of Ukraine. | ||
| And after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed frustration about being excluded from those talks, President Trump has amped up his criticism of Zelensky. | ||
| This is the latest from last night. | ||
| But think of it, a modestly successful comedian. | ||
| President Zelensky talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that basically couldn't be won, that never had to start and never would have started if I was president, not even a chance. | ||
| And it didn't start for four years, never would have started. | ||
| But a war that he, without the U.S. and Trump, will never be able to settle. | ||
| They'll never settle that war without our involvement. | ||
| That's why they did such a great job this weekend. | ||
| That's why Saudi Arabia did such a great job this weekend in hosting. | ||
| The United States has spent $200 billion more than Europe, and Europe's money is guaranteed. | ||
| They get their money back. | ||
| It's a form of a loan. | ||
| Nobody knows that. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| I said, why isn't somebody saying, you know, we do it the same way? | ||
| And we spent much more money. | ||
| We have to equalize. | ||
| But, well, the United States gets nothing back, so they get their money back. | ||
| It's a loan. | ||
| We just give our money. | ||
| And we had a deal based on rare earth and things, but they broke that deal. | ||
| But they broke it two days ago. | ||
| We had a deal because I said we're spending $350 billion, and Europe gets their money back in the form of a loan, and we don't. | ||
| We're just giving the money hand over fist. | ||
| That's the Biden administration for you. | ||
| But they're no longer dealing with the same United States as they were dealing with a few months ago. | ||
| Why didn't crooked Joe Biden demand equalization and that this war is far more important to Europe than it is to us and that there's a very big, beautiful ocean of separation. | ||
| This is, you know, we're helping Europe. | ||
| We're trying to help Europe. | ||
| On top of this, Zelensky admits that half of the money that we sent them is missing. | ||
| They don't know where the money is. | ||
| He said, well, we don't know where half of it is. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| He refuses to have elections. | ||
| It's low in the real Ukrainian polls. | ||
| I mean, how can you be high with every city is being demolished? | ||
| It's hard to be high. | ||
| Somebody said, oh, no, his polls are good. | ||
| Give me a break. | ||
| Every city is being demolished. | ||
| They look like a demolition site, every single one of them. | ||
| And the only thing he was really good at was playing Joe Biden like a fiddle. | ||
| He played him like a fiddle. | ||
| That's an expression we use, yes, sir, to say that he's pretty easy, pretty easy. | ||
| A dictator without elections. | ||
| Zelensky better move fast or he's not going to have a country left. | ||
| President Trump from late yesterday, taking your phone calls this morning as we talk about the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship, what's happened in the past 48 hours. | ||
| Here's some quotes from just yesterday from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking to Ukrainian TV, saying President Trump unfortunately lives in this disinformation space, saying at a news conference yesterday that he wished Donald Trump's team had more truth. | ||
| And then tweeting this out yesterday afternoon, saying he spoke with U.S. Senator Republican Lindsey Graham. | ||
| We greatly appreciate the bicameral and bipartisan support of the U.S. Congress to the Ukrainian people in our fight against Russian aggression. | ||
| As always, he said, Senator Graham is constructive and doing a lot to help bring peace closer. | ||
| It's all important that security guarantees remain on the table, he said, and that they work for Ukraine for real and lasting peace, saying thank you for your support. | ||
| Vlodimir Zelensky yesterday on his ex-page. | ||
| Here's some of the headlines in this morning's major papers about this relationship and where it goes from here. | ||
| Allies fear the U.S. may realign its Russia policy. | ||
| As the Washington Post headlined, Donald Trump appears to move closer to Putin. | ||
| This is the front page of the New York Times. | ||
| The headline, Trump calls Zelensky a dictator as feud grows. | ||
| The news analysis piece from Peter Baker, a hero to Biden, is a villain to his successor. | ||
| This from the Washington Times this morning, Donald Trump topples the U.S. stance on Ukraine. | ||
| Some of the headlines, we'll go through some of the reaction in this first hour, the Washington Journal. | ||
| And we mostly want to hear from you. | ||
| Phone lines open with numbers for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, as usual. | ||
| This is Doug Upfirst in Ohio, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, hello. | |
| First of all, Trump's one wants to be a dictator, not Zelensky. | ||
| And, you know, the Republican Party ought to be ashamed of themselves for keep supporting this man because he's a wannabe dick king. | ||
| And if he wants to be king, he can be Louis XVIII. | ||
| But I support Ukraine all the way because they're trying to stop the evil threat of the communists all over the world. | ||
| You give them an inch over there. | ||
| AM, Putin, and then GEO think he can take China. | ||
| North Korea will think they can take South Korea. | ||
| And the world being a bigger mess. | ||
| And Trump's making a mess as it is here at home. | ||
| And now he's trying to make it a mess overseas, too. | ||
| And we ain't going to turn Gaza into a gosh darn resort for anybody. | ||
| You know, I'm just upset with the man the whole time since he's been in. | ||
| It's been the longest month of my life watching this guy cut up my beautiful democracy the way he has. | ||
| And I just hate the man and everything he does anymore. | ||
| He's destructive. | ||
| He's the most destructive thing this country's had since King George III. | ||
| Like I said, if he wants to be a king, he can be Louis XVI of France. | ||
| Put free Michael 1789 if he wants us to. | ||
| That's the way in Ohio. | ||
| This is Ray in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, yes. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| First of all, I strongly disagree with the previous caller. | ||
| And I'd like to correct him, King George III was not an American. | ||
| But I disagree a lot with what Trump has been saying. | ||
| I totally support Ukraine's freedom. | ||
| They need to be free. | ||
| And I don't trust Russia, not at all. | ||
| Russia started it. | ||
| They gathered troops on the border and they invaded Ukraine. | ||
| I believe Ukraine could be free and must be free. | ||
| And so I would recommend Mr. Trump have the president of Ukraine involved in the talks. | ||
| Ray, what do you think about the reaction that we've seen in the day or so since this feud, this rift has kind of started? | ||
| Here's a headline from the Washington Post: GOP Senator split on Trump's attacks on Zelensky and reversals on Ukraine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the GOP in general is supportive of Ukraine. | |
| There's no question about that. | ||
| But they're walking a tightrope with Trump because they realize he's the president, and Trump has done a lot of good. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| And I support him in the good. | ||
| But Ukraine must be free. | ||
| There's no question about the Russian aggression. | ||
| There's no question in my mind who's a real bad guy there. | ||
| He was a bad Putin. | ||
| I don't trust him at all. | ||
| And so the Republicans, the GOP, they must really come together and really think and see what's best, how to best help Ukraine. | ||
| That's my take on it. | ||
| Lord Mirza, talking about his call with Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator. | ||
| No question in Lindsey Graham's mind about who's to blame here. | ||
| This was his tweet yesterday, his ex-post, I should say. | ||
| When it comes to blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I blame Putin above all others. | ||
| If you're looking for American politicians to blame, Biden and Obama are on the top of my list. | ||
| They were pathetically weak in handling Putin and failed to protect Ukraine from invasion. | ||
| To the chorus of Democrats who now love Ukraine after they were invaded, where were you before Putin's invasion? | ||
| Why didn't you up your game as I encouraged you to? | ||
| Lindsey Graham saying, finally, President Donald Trump is Ukraine's best hope to end this war honorably and justly. | ||
| I believe he will be successful and he will achieve this goal in the Trump way. | ||
| His comments on X, more comments from other members of Congress will go through, but we continue to hear from you. | ||
| Mountain Home, Arkansas, Republican Joel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call this morning. | ||
| I support President Trump and I voted for him. | ||
| I'd just like to say a few things. | ||
| Now, we have given this country $200 billion. | ||
| We got a state here, North Carolina. | ||
| We have not taken care of those people. | ||
| And they are out in the cold today. | ||
| They are nobody. | ||
| I just can't believe what we are doing. | ||
| And the reason I'm saying is we pulled out of Afghanistan and we left all that equipment over there. | ||
| And then Iran and those people got that equipment, selling it on the black market. | ||
| Now, this president didn't have to take all this on. | ||
| He's a billionaire. | ||
| And we've $36 trillion in the hole now. | ||
| And if we can't meet this payment each year, and the payment is much as our budget is each year now, what does the people not understand? | ||
| Joe, you mentioned Afghanistan. | ||
| Are you concerned that Ukraine could become Donald Trump's Afghanistan, what Afghanistan was for Joe Biden, a moment when you can look back and public opinion polling flipped on Joe Biden with the U.S. pullout? | ||
| Do you think the walking away from support or funding from Ukraine, if that's what happens, do you think that could be something akin to Afghanistan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I'm going to tell you what started this war. | |
| Ukraine kept asking to be part of NATO. | ||
| Now, Ukraine was part of Russians many years ago. | ||
| I don't remember when, but they left Russia somehow. | ||
| I don't understand that part. | ||
| The end of the Soviet Union. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Now, we didn't like the Russians in Cuba, and we almost went to war over them. | ||
| I'm 83 years old, be 84 soon. | ||
| I served 24 years in the military. | ||
| We see what's going on. | ||
| And I'm just saying, if we had Texas saying they want to go to another country, we wouldn't like that either. | ||
| That's Joel in Arkansas. | ||
| This is Elizabeth Nashville, Tennessee, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just wanted to say that all the Republicans who are going to be calling in and who still believe Joe Biden was too cognitively impaired to be president, I don't know why they're not saying the same thing about Donald Trump because it's clear something's going wrong with him. | ||
| There's no sort of proof that you can show me from him that Vladimir Selensky is any kind of dictator. | ||
| Vladimir Selinsky is a hero who cares about his people and is trying to save them from war. | ||
| Why doesn't he share this same rhetoric about Vladimir Putin? | ||
| Why doesn't he share this same rhetoric about Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un, who he seems to get along with very well, might I add? | ||
| I just want to say that, like I said, all these Republicans who think that Joe Biden was too cognitively impaired to be president, I think Trump and his team of geriatric fucks with erectile dysfunction should be taken out of office. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Elizabeth this morning. | ||
| Plenty of criticism about this decision in the major national print papers this morning on the op-ed pages, including from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, Trump tilts toward a Ukraine sellout. | ||
| He puts more pressure on Kiev for a deal than he does on the Kremlin. | ||
| This is the Washington Post editorial board this morning. | ||
| U.S. government's biggest cut is in global credibility right now, writing about Ukraine. | ||
| Cal Thomas writing in the mostly conservative pages of the Washington Times op-ed pages. | ||
| No substitute for victory. | ||
| Putin must be defeated is what Cal Thomas writes. | ||
| This is from Nicholas Kristoff in the pages in the New York Times. | ||
| Their op-ed pages, a humiliating month to be an American. | ||
| And it goes on. | ||
| If you're looking for support for Donald Trump's criticism of Ukraine, conservative media online has a few articles on it, including Alex Marlowe writing for Breitbart.com. | ||
| Yes, Zelensky is a dictator is the headline of his piece. | ||
| And then Red State is another one of those websites that you can go to. | ||
| The headline on Red State's website talking about Donald Trump slamming dictator Zelensky, and then JD Vance tags in and hammers Vlodimir for badmouthing the president. | ||
| Getting your reaction this morning, there's plenty for you to choose from. | ||
| This is Doug in Newport News, Virginia, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I don't understand why everybody's upset. | ||
| Yes, I support Ukraine. | ||
| I believe Trump still supports Ukraine. | ||
| But when Trump asked for Ukraine to give us rights to start paying some of the money back to help them, everybody's upset. | ||
| Why are we the world sucker? | ||
| I did 20 years in the military and retired. | ||
| I've been over there. | ||
| And I can tell you, we should have been getting paid in the Gulf War. | ||
| If you give Trump time and let him run his course, he knows what he's doing. | ||
| Yeah, he likes to piss people off, but that's just part of the strategy. | ||
| You say you think Donald Trump still supports Ukraine. | ||
| What makes you believe that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because we haven't stopped giving them any money, and they can't account for the money we gave them. | |
| How do you, it's just like our country. | ||
| We're going broke, taking care of the world. | ||
| Why do we keep being involved in all this stuff when I do agree with him? | ||
| It's Europe's problem. | ||
| It's not our problem until it becomes our problem. | ||
| We have stepped up more than Europe, and Europe is the one that's sitting there with Russia. | ||
| I don't trust Russia for nothing. | ||
| I don't trust Putin. | ||
| At what point, Doug? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have to keep your enemies closer than your friends. | |
| At what point, Doug, do you think this would become what at what point do you think this would become our problem? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When Russia wants to take all of it, then you'll have a problem. | |
| All of Ukraine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you remember, yeah, if you remember, everybody sat back when Hitler went into Poland and just said, okay, it's just Poland. | |
| Let him have it. | ||
| Until he ended up taking almost all of Europe. | ||
| And then we had to get involved. | ||
| It's time we stopped being the police of the world. | ||
| That's Doug in Virginia, Independent Line. | ||
| Bob is in New Hampshire. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, and thanks. | |
| So why make Russia great again? | ||
| I mean, just past caller, I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| Anyway, Trump, Putin, is maneuvering to have Trump do the same thing he did in Afghanistan when he made that peace with the Taliban and left the Afghan government out of it. | ||
| The military, the government folded like thin air. | ||
| That's what left the equipment there. | ||
| And that's going to be the same thing in Ukraine if we pull out and Ukraine can't make it. | ||
| And they'll end up losing. | ||
| And you'll have a mess like the last gentleman just said. | ||
| So we have to do it now or else we're going to spend troops later. | ||
| Why make Russia great again with the equipment we leave there like we did in Afghanistan, like Trump did in Afghanistan? | ||
| One more thing. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know, Putin's maneuvering this. | ||
| He is not, make no mistake, he's going to take Ukraine, and he's afraid of a democratic and free Ukraine more than he is NATO and Ukraine. | ||
| If a free and democratic Ukraine, Russia citizens see that right on their doorstep, it's the end for Putin. | ||
| He knows it. | ||
| It's not NATO. | ||
| It's a free and democratic Ukraine. | ||
| And this martial law in Ukraine, how can you get a vote? | ||
| He can't get an honest vote. | ||
| And Trump himself should know about honest votes. | ||
| Bob in New Hampshire. | ||
| Bob focusing at the end there on the criticism about delayed elections. | ||
| The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal bringing up that point when Donald Trump makes the criticism of Vlodymir Zelensky as a, quote, dictator. | ||
| They note that Ukraine has delayed elections while it is operating under martial law and fighting a war for survival. | ||
| Its Constitution allows it to do this. | ||
| They note Britain under Nazi siege didn't hold an election during World War II, asking the question, was Churchill a dictator. | ||
| Also on the topic of Afghanistan, they touch on that as well. | ||
| The oddity so far, they write, is that Mr. Trump seems to want a peace deal more than Mr. Putin does, which is the opposite of leverage in any negotiation. | ||
| Mr. Trump wants to be able to claim that he brought peace as promised as a candidate, but a cautionary tale is Joe Biden. | ||
| President Biden tried to wash his hands of Afghanistan, but instead his retreat set in motion a chain of global crises that defined his presidency. | ||
| Mr. Biden tried to sell his withdrawal as a triumph of military logistics, but the public knew better. | ||
| Americans may have a similar reaction if they see Russia emerge triumphant and realize this was not the peace that they had in mind. | ||
| The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| This is Charleston, West Virginia, Alberta, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Doug. | |
| I appreciate the time and energy. | ||
| But he hyperlies everything, and he's been spewing the answer on his thing last night of what he thinks of the United States. | ||
| And the three things was love, respect, and strength. | ||
| But in my total observation, love, he only loves his special ones. | ||
| Respect, there is none except for the elite. | ||
| His strength, by bullying everyone who's not in his boat. | ||
| But also, we can loop this up, or, you know, there is a loophole here. | ||
| I mean, actually, Trump's mother was born in the United Kingdom, Vance's wife. | ||
| So, Alberta, bring me to Ukraine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, Ukraine. | |
| I'm totally with Ukraine. | ||
| And as far as him calling him a dictator, I mean, I think he needs to look in the mirror totally because he is straight up. | ||
| He's running a mok. | ||
| He is seriously going rogue. | ||
| And the Republicans are not stopping him. | ||
| I thought there were things in place for this, you know, in checkpoints. | ||
| I've called every one of my senators and representatives on a daily. | ||
| And let me tell you, I'm getting nowhere. | ||
| And it's really infuriating me and really, you know, sending a lot of people over here in anxiety because all of us are immigrants totally. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Alberta and West Virginia, Republican Lime. | ||
| This is Mark Hampstead, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John. | |
| How you doing? | ||
| Doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| So, you know, it's funny that Zelensky used the phrase, he said something about Trump being in a disinformation bubble. | ||
| Funny that he uses the word disinformation because that word was pushed by the CIA a few years back when we had COVID. | ||
| And you notice all the media outlets started using the words misinformation and disinformation overnight at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. | ||
| Now, with Zelensky using that phrase, it's funny because it was the CIA that actually put him in place. | ||
| He was not elected in Ukraine. | ||
| What if he was using the phrase fake news? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry? | |
| What if he used the phrase fake news? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| What if that was the phrase he chose instead of disinformation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I guess that would just be putting it in layman's terms. | |
| But the fact that he was using disinformation and misinformation, those were literally, those words came from the same people that started using the words conspiracy theorists. | ||
| The thing about Zelensky is, is you know that a month before Zelensky even came into power in Ukraine, Victoria Newland, there is a tape of her, and you can look this up on YouTube. | ||
| She was speaking at a conference. | ||
| She was literally naming the people who she wanted to be in Zelensky's cabinet. | ||
| Victoria Newland is the same deep state operative who got us involved in Iraq, in Afghanistan. | ||
| She is a neocon. | ||
| Did you ever support spending for U.S. dollars going to Ukraine to help fight this war? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't, and I'll tell you why. | |
| If I could put it this way, there is a move. | ||
| We had 13 countries who were involved in NATO to begin with. | ||
| Vladimir Putin has been telling us for 25 years that Ukraine was the line for NATO. | ||
| And Biden sends Kamala Harris over there three days before Putin invaded and says in front of television cameras, we'd like to invite Ukraine to join NATO, knowing very well that that was the red line. | ||
| And I'm not saying that Putin is a good guy. | ||
| I don't know why Democrats, you know, Democrats seem to hate Russia now. | ||
| They didn't seem to hate it so much when it was the Soviet Union. | ||
| That's kind of curious. | ||
| But let's put that aside for a second. | ||
| Two things can be true at once. | ||
| Yes, Putin is a bad guy, but that doesn't mean Zelensky is not a bad guy. | ||
| He got rid of all television stations over there except for skate run television and radio. | ||
| He closed down Orthodox Christian churches, and he canceled elections. | ||
| That's the definition of a dictator. | ||
| That's Mark in Maryland. | ||
| This is Ian in West Virginia Independent. | ||
| It's Kearneysville, West Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So I'm going to kind of start with, I've worked in the intelligence community for about 10 years now. | ||
| And I'm going to say plainly, it's kind of well known within the community that Donald Trump is compromised. | ||
| I'll also say that I seem to be the Americans don't quite understand how America maintains global supremacy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So what we're doing in Ukraine is we are literally draining the resources of a world power without using American lives. | ||
| So pulling back at this point is just, it's profoundly dumb. | ||
| We have Russia on the ropes. | ||
| They've lost over 600,000 troops. | ||
| This is a great thing for America. | ||
| And listening to some of these previous callers is very obvious now why we are in the situation that we are in. | ||
| Ian, when you say you worked in the intelligence community for 10 years, can you be more specific? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was in the military. | |
| I was an intelligence analyst. | ||
| I got out. | ||
| I worked in contracting for several different agencies. | ||
| I'm not going to go into direct agencies that I've worked for or different projects that I've worked for. | ||
| But I will say that Russia is on the ropes. | ||
| We are entering the fourth year of this, the invasion in February of 2022. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| What makes you say Russia's on the ropes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're losing troops at an insane rate. | |
| It's pretty bad for Russia. | ||
| There's a reason why Putin is pushing for peace. | ||
| At one point, they're losing a thousand troops a day. | ||
| And this is unclassified information. | ||
| You can look this up. | ||
| Even the last Secretary of Defense spoke about it in this speech, what we were doing. | ||
| And so the NATO alliance between U.S. and the European NATO countries has single-handedly taken a small country like Ukraine and decimated what is once considered one of the premier military forces in the world within four years in all American lifespan. | ||
| So this is a great thing for America. | ||
| And pulling back is really hard, honestly, to see what's going on. | ||
| To see a man like Donald Trump, who is clearly compromised, morally corrupt, and to listen to Americans speak about this man as if he is some kind of savior for America, it's very worrisome for the future. | ||
| That's Ian in West Virginia. | ||
| Lester is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen to the last caller. | |
| While I was standing online, I heard four Republicans call in. | ||
| These Republicans act like they run the United States. | ||
| They don't have a leg to stand on. | ||
| Donald Trump is compromised. | ||
| Donald Trump started the war in Ukraine when he first left office to make Biden look bad. | ||
| How would he have started the war, Lester? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, as simple as this: he didn't want Biden to look. | |
| He knew that when Biden got in office, Biden, America was great. | ||
| We didn't have any problems. | ||
| We had COVID came in. | ||
| Donald Trump lost over close to 3 million people because he came in with nonsense stuff. | ||
| Look at his cabinet he got right now. | ||
| So, Lester, how could he have possibly started the war? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he'm going to just be a poo sympathizer. | |
| United States do not tolerate with Russia. | ||
| Russia, in our history, has always been a dictated country. | ||
| Look at Hitler, how he came into power. | ||
| It's the same way Donald Trump is trying to run the United States. | ||
| That's Lester in Alabama. | ||
| This is Nancy Ann in Louisiana. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm calling in to let your viewers know that I support President Trump's statement on Ukraine. | ||
| And to all these viewers and your callers, President Trump doesn't have a mean bone in his body. | ||
| He is for the United States. | ||
| All these callers should think about these hostages, these hostages around the world that need to be rescued. | ||
| And this is what I have to say. | ||
| This is how I feel this morning, holding on for 20 minutes. | ||
| I support President Trump's statement on Ukraine. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Nancy Ann in Covington, Louisiana. | ||
| It is 7:30 on the East Coast, and we are taking your calls on the rift that we have seen in just the past 48 hours between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, asking you what it could mean on the international stage, what you think it means here at home. | ||
| Phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents as usual. | ||
| And also, we've been taking you through some of the reaction on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Here's a few more comments from ex, from members of Congress, Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri, putting the Ukrainian situation together with the budget framework that the Senate is working on right now, and the House as well, saying, I'm not voting for a budget framework that facilitates more taxpayer money to Ukraine, period. | ||
| This is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna that's saying the deep state in Washington wants the Russian-Ukraine war to persist forever at the expense of American taxpayers. | ||
| We can't let this money laundering scheme continue. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman, saying the Ukraine war has always been a deep state funded and controlled money laundering operation and proxy war against Russia. | ||
| Zelensky is an actor and a green jumpstute that extorts money from everyone, she writes. | ||
| Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, saying that Donald Trump and his American oligarchs are openly aligning themselves now with Putin and his Russian oligarchs. | ||
| This Putin-Trump alliance means abandoning our allies, supporting authoritarianism, and undermining our democratic traditions. | ||
| The independent sender there. | ||
| This is Mark Mourner, Democrat from Virginia. | ||
| President Trump should really have a conversation with his own intelligence officials before he again blames Ukraine for being invaded by Russia. | ||
| And Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic Senator, saying there always was Trump-Russia. | ||
| There still is Trump-Russia. | ||
| The early actions of the Trump administration signal the continuing force of Trump Russia. | ||
| Feel free to add to the list. | ||
| But he starts noting his some of the posts yesterday reaction on X, and we're mostly interested in your reaction this morning. | ||
| Phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and independents. | ||
| JC is an independent. | ||
| Mobile, Alabama. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Listening to Trump's rhetoric, it's surreal what's happening. | ||
| It's actually difficult to believe that this is really happening, but nonetheless, it is. | ||
| That someone could have it or be orchestrating it, stating it, conveying it so absolutely backwards. | ||
| We're seeing right now a kind of replay of the, we could say the ghost of Neville Chamberlain is stalking. | ||
| It was fitting that the recent meeting was in Munich, the famous site, infamous site, where Chamberlain came back and said that, and yes, unfortunately, it's sort of a comparison to Hitler. | ||
| It was a historical fact that Neville Chamberlain said that Adolf Hitler was a man we could deal with and trust and believe in. | ||
| And three different times he signed pacts that he brought back to England saying that Adolf Hitler was someone that could be trusted. | ||
| We remember several years ago, Vladimir Putin gave a grand and sweeping speech in which he called up the greatness of Russian from antiquity, the Russian empire, that he wanted, he was open about it. | ||
| Give him that. | ||
| He wanted he aims to restore, reconquest the old czarist Russian empire, and he's doing an excellent job of it. | ||
| Now, one other thought on we all have heard of the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| If this thing somehow ends up being a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Trump or perhaps Trump and Putin, what it should be is it should be the Nobel appeasement prize, not the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| He is appeasing Vladimir Putin. | ||
| Also noticeably absent were the war crimes, the vast numbers of hideous, vile war crimes that have been documented and verified. | ||
| Also, the thousands and thousands of Ukrainian children who have been absconded, kidnapped, and brought into Russia forcibly. | ||
| These were all noticeably left out. | ||
| These were to suggest that Ukraine caused it is like the old male adage that a woman caused herself to be raped. | ||
| Ukraine was a and is a sovereign nation that has a right to join NATO. | ||
| Since when does Vladimir Putin get to dictate who does and who doesn't enter NATO with sovereign nations? | ||
| That's not a vassal of Putin. | ||
| Ukraine is a sovereign nation. | ||
| JC, you bring up 1938. | ||
| You bring up the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Cal Thomas in his column today in the Washington Times bringing up both those things as well. | ||
| He writes that Wall Street Journal columnist Will McGurn was right when he asked the question, will Ukraine be Trump's Vietnam? | ||
| Consider the 1973 peace accords. | ||
| The National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Prize, but Saigon fell. | ||
| He writes that if the Trump administration is not cautioned by what happened in 1938, when an evil monster was allowed to have his way with one state before invading others and launching the Holocaust, perhaps it needs another reminder about what occurred in 1973. | ||
| Accommodating evil never ends well. | ||
| Columnists, Cal Thomas, this is Sharon in Silver Spring, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| First of all, just to get Afghanistan out of the way, you can thank Mr. Trump for that. | ||
| He's the one with the agreement. | ||
| So tell him to get off that thing and stop repeating, repeating, repeating. | ||
| That's all the man ever does. | ||
| Number two, they better up his drugs because you can see him winding down every day. | ||
| Number three, as far as the who's who, he is the useful idiot of Putin. | ||
| He's scared to death of him. | ||
| He's nothing but a blowbag idiot. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is Miguel Gambrils, Maryland Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, I voted for Trump because I wanted to end the war. | ||
| I think that the bloodshed there is insane. | ||
| As a matter of fact, you had a caller who said he worked for intelligence earlier. | ||
| And he said the whole reason we're doing this is so we can send Ukrainian young men to go fight and die on Russia's, I guess you could say, to go fight and die against Russia to give them some kind of defeat to weaken them. | ||
| And I mean, I think about how if our whole intelligence community thinks like that, I mean, are you going to send people to their death because you want to feel you want to get a victory against somebody without, you know, without them being American lives? | ||
| I mean, they're still alive. | ||
| You know, those guys are going to do, they would usually do something, have a family and stuff, but instead they die for nothing. | ||
| There's no land in it. | ||
| There's nothing in it. | ||
| There's nothing for them to die for, the Russians or the Ukrainians. | ||
| Those people were traditionally Russian. | ||
| They speak Russian. | ||
| They're the same people. | ||
| And everybody's angry because they want to stop the war. | ||
| When was the last time someone was angry that they wanted to stop a war? | ||
| What's going on with this place? | ||
| I'm sorry to say that it's just, you know, it's not the America I grew up in. | ||
| That's Miguel. | ||
| This is Laura in Dale, Texas, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm stunned by Trump anew every day. | ||
| What he is saying about Ukraine is obvious that this man, in my opinion, is in the throes of dementia. | ||
| Zelensky did not start the war. | ||
| Putin did. | ||
| Putin walked into Ukraine and wanted to take so much. | ||
| And I'm afraid that Trump, in his dementia, in my opinion, will sell out Ukraine to Russia. | ||
| And that goes against all American values. | ||
| I do not understand the Republican Party in that they are supporting a man who is clearly mentally ill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are at a constitutional crisis with Doge. | |
| Elon Musk should not be putting his employees into our federal government to tear it apart to the point where Trump will declare martial law because the protests will have become desperate. | ||
| He doesn't want to just take down the administrative state. | ||
| He wants to destroy the government. | ||
| That's Laura in Texas this morning. | ||
| You talk about the claim that Ukraine started the war. | ||
| Plenty of fact checks in plenty of papers to that statement by Donald Trump and other statements as well, including the dictator statement and the polling approval rating statement. | ||
| Here's the BBC on polling approval. | ||
| Donald Trump claims that Zelensky's approval rating in Ukraine has fallen to 4%. | ||
| It's unclear what source the president was citing as he didn't provide evidence. | ||
| The official polling is limited and extremely difficult to carry out accurate surveys during wartime, the BBC writes. | ||
| However, some polling has been possible to carry out. | ||
| A survey conducted this month found 57% of Ukrainians said that they trusted the president, according to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll, that one based in Ukraine. | ||
| That downed from 77% at the end of 2023 and 90% in May of 2022. | ||
| Some other polls suggest Zelensky trailing his nearest rival in a potential future election that would happen, indicating that the two could face off in a runoff. | ||
| That's the BBC reporting one of their fact checks, just one of many in today's papers. | ||
| This is David in Las Vegas, Nevada, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, this is the first time I called him. | |
| I'm just really upset right now because, you know, Putin is 25 years since he's been a dictator. | ||
| Trump just wants to be his buddy, but he's playing Trump. | ||
| And none of the Republicans got the serve to say he's wrong. | ||
| I don't know why he's on Zelensky. | ||
| Zelensky's got more courage than Trump ever had in his life. | ||
| Trump, he didn't go to Vietnam. | ||
| You know, four times he got deferred. | ||
| He wants to be a big shot. | ||
| He wants to be a tough guy. | ||
| Now he wants to be a peacekeeper. | ||
| And he's messing with an evil person. | ||
| And I can. | ||
| Ukrainians, they were part of the USSR. | ||
| They just want to be free, you know. | ||
| And now he's capping on Zelensky. | ||
| And the blocks next week. | ||
| Everybody's going to hate Zelensky. | ||
| That's David. | ||
| This is Michael, Rochester, New York, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm hearing everybody saying everything that is anti-Trump. | |
| It's pathetic. | ||
| I just heard a young lady on your show talk about Trump was suffering from dementia. | ||
| Not a single word for nobody about how Biden suffered from dementia. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| They say that Trump's in the back pocket of Putin. | ||
| The cash cow for Putin, the cash cow for Russia, is a Nordstream pipeline that runs from Russia to Europe. | ||
| Who canceled that? | ||
| Donald Trump. | ||
| Who reinstated Putin to get money to fund his war? | ||
| Joe Biden. | ||
| And what I'm tired of is this. | ||
| I'm tired of looking at my grandkids. | ||
| I'm looking at my grandkids and I'm leaving them $47 trillion in debt. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| The United States cannot be the welfare for the entire world. | ||
| Where's Western Europe? | ||
| Four years under the Biden administration and under Western Europe, they never came up with no peace plan to solve the problem. | ||
| We've been in Europe for 80 years, 80 years, and it's pathetic. | ||
| And I want to say this last thing since everybody's talking about everything else. | ||
| Okay, what Eli Musk is discovering is mind-boggling. | ||
| I have health insurance. | ||
| I can't get cataracts removed out of my eyes because it's cost me $600 per eye for doctor fee. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| They're doing cataract surgery in Uganda at the taxpayer's dispense. | ||
| This is my money. | ||
| All right, that's Michael. | ||
| This is Mike in DeSoto, Missouri, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, sir. | |
| What are your thoughts on what's going on on the international front? | ||
| Ukraine, United States, Russia? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's crazy how the opinions between both sides differ so much. | |
| It's like both sides are crazy. | ||
| But as far as Ukraine, no country that can't support themselves without American tax dollars should exist. | ||
| If you can't support yourself without other countries funding you, then you have no right to be a country. | ||
| That even votes for Israel. | ||
| And that's pretty much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Mike. | ||
| This is Bradley, Marietta, Georgia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I keep hearing, I keep hearing these people call in Republicans. | ||
| I just want to speak to them, speak to America. | ||
| Like, first off, John, you correct the Democrats a lot of the times while they're speaking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wish you'd do the same to the Republicans because the Republicans have said repeatedly that Zelensky does not have elections. | |
| Why do they have elections? | ||
| It's in their constitution. | ||
| They can't have an election while they're at war. | ||
| Why doesn't Vladimir Putin have elections, by the way? | ||
| But then also banning churches. | ||
| The Russian Orthodox Church was like a spinning organization and were like calling in drone strikes on Ukrainian troops. | ||
| They caught them. | ||
| So they changed the or shut down that church, which is completely rational. | ||
| Republicans, America, NATO is being torn apart. | ||
| We have lived through the success of NATO by allowing us to basically dictate the world through our dollar. | ||
| Like we have been running stuff because of our alliances, and we are completely isolated now. | ||
| Canada hates us, Mexico hates us, Europe hates us. | ||
| The only people that he says anything negative about are our allies and says nothing but nice stuff to our enemies. | ||
| We are so isolated. | ||
| If China or even Russia, if they hit us, I don't think he managed to come into our defense. | ||
| No one can trust us. | ||
| And that poor gentleman talked about the cataracts nothing to do with Ukraine being like a country trying to defend themselves. | ||
| And it's taking the place of our boys and soldiers or women having to go there and fight. | ||
| Russia has to be put down. | ||
| We have to. | ||
| And the thing with this cataracts, it's billionaires that are keeping the money from you because that surgery has nothing to do with Ukraine. | ||
| If you have all that righteous anger, sir, directed towards you's responsible, these greedy corporations and billionaires. | ||
| That's Bradley in Georgia. | ||
| This is national security writer David Ignatius. | ||
| His column in the Washington Post today, he writes that Tuesday was a dark day for the United States. | ||
| President Donald Trump and his administration embraced Russia as a peace partner without demanding that it pay any price for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| And then, in a statement that turned morality upside down, the president blamed Ukraine for causing the war. | ||
| Trump is an outrage-generating machine, he writes. | ||
| He appears to take perverse pleasure in saying things that shock. | ||
| And I normally ignore the daily presidential detonation, but this time was different. | ||
| The tragic loss of life in Ukraine will mean nothing. | ||
| And the true resolution of the conflict will be impossible if we can't distinguish between the attacker and the victim. | ||
| David Ignatius writing today. | ||
| Time for about 10 minutes more of calls. | ||
| This is Bob, Old Fort, Tennessee, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay. | ||
| The caller. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| The collar, a couple collar facts, headed straight on the nail. | ||
| Joe Biden started this war when he allowed Putin to sell that oil. | ||
| And then in Iran, he freed money for Iran to start that war to give the home office to Israel. | ||
| So Joe Biden in the fake news is the problem. | ||
| Ray Lee, Erie, Pennsylvania, Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, as far as Ukraine goes, they were invaded, and that's all there is to that. | ||
| But I have a few questions to clear up here. | ||
| When Putin had invaded Crimea, who was the president then? | ||
| Was it Obama? | ||
| You're asking me, Ray Lee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh? | |
| You're asking me, 20, I believe 2014? | ||
| Was that the year? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
| So my question is, if it's Obama's and Biden's fault, why didn't Trump get Putin out of Crimea at that time? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| During his first term, Putin took over Crimea, right? | ||
| So you're saying, in terms of assigning faults, you think it goes back much farther than what we're talking about or even the beginning of this war? | ||
|
unidentified
|
As far as fault goes, I believe it lays on Putin. | |
| That's Ray Lee. | ||
| This is Len in Wilson, North Carolina, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call this morning. | ||
| You know, when I joined the military, I was a kid, and we had a briefing at the base theater. | ||
| And I remember the commander saying that Khrushchev said that we will bury you, and we won't not have to shoot no bullet or nothing. | ||
| We will do it without even having to go to war. | ||
| And I wondered back then, I said, how could they do that? | ||
| And I said, they can only do it through the media. | ||
| And that's what has happened. | ||
| It started back when we allowed them to come over here. | ||
| I mean, Russia and all these other countries to buy into our media. | ||
| Once they bought Fox News, that was it. | ||
| And then they took over all the media and they started brainwashing the American people. | ||
| And they have did it. | ||
| Even C-SPAN, you had all these people up there, and you wouldn't question them, just let them come up there and talk, talk, talk to Harry Foundation. | ||
| All these agencies that was put into our government, not directly by Russia and these other countries, but they can do it. | ||
| They can do it through money. | ||
| And so this is what has happened. | ||
| They has came over and they have completely brainwashed us. | ||
| And, you know, you got people, these kind of things that you're talking about this morning, we're talking about, it would have been unheard of with the people, American people talking like this. | ||
| But this is what has been allowed, especially when the Supreme Court said that money is people. | ||
| That gave them the open door. | ||
| And this thing has been planted. | ||
| And it's funny that as a kid that I seen this, and I fought our leaders and the party, especially the Democratic Party, for letting people get in like that and thinking that they're their friends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got to know who you're working with. | |
| And we've got people up there. | ||
| You talk about the leaders of the parties. | ||
| The leaders of the parties were speaking yesterday on Capitol Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. | ||
| This is what he had to say at the beginning of the day in the Senate yesterday. | ||
| Rather than speak the truth, rather than acknowledge Vladimir Putin's role in starting this war, President Trump amazingly blamed Ukraine for Putin's invasion. | ||
| To quote the president, you should never have started it, he said. | ||
| He was saying that to President Zelensky. | ||
| This is disgusting, disgusting, after how this man has fought so hard and so valiantly. | ||
| And it deliberately distorts the truth. | ||
| It's just awful to see an American president. | ||
| It's disgusting to see an American president turn against one of our friends and openly side with a thug like Vladimir Putin. | ||
| It's shameful to hear the president repeat Putin's propaganda while laying the groundwork for negotiations that favor Russia at Ukraine's expense. | ||
| The people of Ukraine did not start this war. | ||
| Vladimir Putin did. | ||
| Ukrainians have fought and died on the battlefield to defend their home. | ||
| The suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian country and the Ukrainian people that they have endured is staggering, all because of Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And let's not forget, America, maybe there are some who say enough already. | ||
| If we give in to Putin now, America will inevitably pay the price later. | ||
| That's what history has shown. | ||
| When you give in to thugs, when you give in to dictators, you pay the price. | ||
| Hasn't Donald Trump and his allies learned the lessons of history? | ||
| Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer yesterday on the Senate floor. | ||
| Also yesterday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune taking questions from reporters about President Trump's comments about Vladimir Zelensky. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have long supported Ukraine into Ukraine. | |
| Are you at all concerned about the president's rhetoric blaming Ukraine for starting the war and calling for elections in Ukraine, which is what Vladimir Putin is calling for? | ||
| I think what I'm in support of is a peaceful outcome and result in Ukraine. | ||
| And I think right now the administration, the president, and his team are working to achieve that. | ||
| And I think right now you've got to give them some space. | ||
| Honestly, this is something this war has ground on now for three years. | ||
| There's been a lot of cost, a lot of death, a lot of injury associated with it. | ||
| And I think it's in everybody's best interest, Ukraine, Russia, Europe, the United States, if they can bring about a peaceful conclusion to the war. | ||
| And so that's what this is about right now. | ||
| And I think most of us want to support their efforts as they move in that direction and hopefully to a successful outcome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Would you call IPA and President Telunski a dictator as President Trump has? | |
| Well, like I said, the President speaks for himself. | ||
| What I want to see is a peaceful result, a peaceful outcome. | ||
| And I think right now there's a negotiation going on, and let's see where that ultimately leads. | ||
| Hopefully he'll get to the outcome we all want to see. | ||
| Senator Majority Leader John Thune yesterday. | ||
| Time for a few more of your phone calls this first hour of the Washington Journal. | ||
| This is Eric in Buffalo, New York. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| It's just horrible to see an American president spew Russian propaganda the way he is and not support a European nation like Ukraine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have backed out on Ukraine so bad with the Minsk agreement that we have. | |
| We were there when we promised when they gave up their nuclear weapons to protect them against Russia. | ||
| And not only us, I believe it was France, Britain, everybody to protect them. | ||
| And nobody stepped up to protect them when Russia invaded them. | ||
| I mean, it's horrible. | ||
| Russia has taken over country after country, invaded them with their little green men, and just the things that have gone on in there. | ||
| City after city, Rubinsk, Popsana, Mariupol, Bakhmut, just the people, the people that the Russians have killed indiscriminately, the war crimes that have been documented, pictures. | ||
| Mariupol, 100,000 citizens, they think that he's killed in there. | ||
| I mean, it just, the list goes on and on. | ||
| Just last week, the Russians bombed Chernobyl, the biggest nuclear disaster there is in the whole world. | ||
| I mean, I can't believe it. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| That's Eric. | ||
| This is Joe Woodbridge, Virginia, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So just a few observations. | ||
| I think Senator Schumer is right about one thing, and that's that the Ukrainian, the people that live in Ukraine did not stop this war. | ||
| And what I mean by that is I'm 60 years old. | ||
| I served. | ||
| I wore the uniform, and I remember the historical events. | ||
| And I think young people, especially, are kind of being brainwashed to forget the reality that the United States and NATO bear great responsibility for what's going on in Ukraine today. | ||
| Let me give a few thoughts. | ||
| Number one, the U.S. has been sucked into two world wars in Europe by the Europeans. | ||
| And so I support President Trump in not wanting to get us involved in another war in Europe. | ||
| Number two, historically, for hundreds and hundreds of years, Ukraine has not been a country. | ||
| The eastern part of Ukraine was part of the Russian Federation. | ||
| The western part of Ukraine was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. | ||
| And so I think we need to be very careful. | ||
| And let me give you just one quick analogy on what has happened in Ukraine and why the U.S. bears responsibility. | ||
| Let's say that the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact won the Cold War. | ||
| And let's say that they started moving into Central America, gobbling up those countries, incorporating them into the Warsaw Pact. | ||
| And then let's say they instituted a coup in Mexico and turned a pro-U.S. country into a pro-Soviet Union country. | ||
| Well, that's exactly what happened in Ukraine. | ||
| And young people need to understand that. | ||
| We put our State Department in there. | ||
| We put our intelligence forces in Ukraine. | ||
| We instituted a soft coup. | ||
| We even wanted the Ukraine even wanted Vinmin to be their Secretary of Defense. | ||
| That's Joe. | ||
| This is Jamie in Severn, Maryland Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning to you. | |
| I just wanted to say that I think that the worst thing for America is the two-party system that we have. | ||
| I think that it doesn't allow folks to actually support what they really align with. | ||
| I think that if everybody, if all the presidents or whatever, ran as independents, Then we can accurately choose what it is that we want, right? | ||
| Jamie, what do you think we want in Ukraine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Ukraine, I think that, well, for one, I don't think that Trump is wrong for asking for anybody that we support to give us to help fund what it is that they support, right? | |
| So, whether it's oil or whatever resources that they have, I think that he's correct for that. | ||
| I think that he's wrong for pointing the finger at Ukraine as if they started it. | ||
| I think everybody knows Russia did, you know. | ||
| But I don't want everything to become America's problem. | ||
| I don't think that America, I do understand our interests and I do understand supporting your friends and your allies, but at the same time, we can't take on everybody's wars, you know. | ||
| And then, as far as our own problems at home, if I could speak on that, I think that that's a mixed bag as well. | ||
| You know, I think that here, I think that Trump plays on people's fears, and I think he does that very well. | ||
| And that's why we find ourselves in the situations that we're in now. | ||
| I do think that he's correct for going after our spending habits and wasteful spending and those kinds of things. | ||
| I think that the American people as a whole would like to get to the bottom of that, but I think that he goes about it the wrong way. | ||
| I don't think that Elon Musk is the right one to be digging into everybody's personal business. | ||
| I think that we had people, that we had agencies in place for that, and that he should have used those agencies to do so. | ||
| That's Jamie and Maryland. | ||
| Last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Stick around, plenty more to talk about this morning, including up next. | ||
| We'll be joined by Becky Pringle of the National Education Association. | ||
| We'll talk about the Trump administration's education agenda and later a conversation with Paul Danz, the former head of Project 2025, about that policy and the first month of the Trump administration. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All this week, watch C-SPAN's new Members of Congress series, where we speak with both Republicans and Democrats about their early lives, previous careers, families, and why they decided to run for office. | |
| Tonight, at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, our interviews include Texas Republican Congressman Brandon Gill, who grew up on a cattle ranch, worked as an investment banker, and founded the DC Inquirer. | ||
| I grew up on a thousand-acre cattle ranch in West Texas outside of Abilene. | ||
| We raised Angus and Braangus beef cows. | ||
| So been ever since I can remember, working cows, building fences, driving tractors and backhoes, doing everything you would expect to do on a thousand-acre cattle ranch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch new members of Congress all this week, starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | |
| Saturdays, watch American History TV's 10-week series, First 100 Days. | ||
| We'll explore the early months of presidential administrations with historians, authors, and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Becky Pringle is the president of the National Education Association, one of the country's largest labor unions representing teachers, those in the education field. | ||
| And Ms. Pringle, in about two hours, the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee is going to hold a vote on whether to advance Linda McMahon's nomination to be education secretary. | ||
| If you were voting, how would you vote? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would vote no. | |
| Why? | ||
| I actually had the opportunity to be in the hearing, and I wanted to go so I could listen to her answers. | ||
| And she did nothing to assure teachers and educators who work in our schools every day that she was going to protect them from the cuts that the Trump administration is proposing, that she would do nothing to protect the most vulnerable students in our schools, our students with disabilities, 95% of them go to public schools. | ||
| That she would do nothing to protect their civil rights. | ||
| All of those specific jobs that the federal government in education plays. | ||
| And so I would say to you that it left a chilling effect on educators all around this country, scrambling about what they could and could not teach and whether their school would lose funding because they were teaching it. | ||
| Thinking about how they would have to stand in even more gaps to make up for gaps that already exist for our kids, and we know teachers do that all the time. | ||
| So I left the hearing not having confidence that she was qualified for the job and certainly that she was going to take care of our most vulnerable kids. | ||
| You talk about the cuts that Donald Trump wants to make in this area. | ||
| He's even talked about eliminating the entire Department of Education. | ||
| Let me give viewers a sense of some of that hearing that you attended. | ||
| Linda McMahon answering some questions on that front. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order requiring the Secretary of Education to develop a plan for downsizing the Department of Education and working with Congress to eliminate entirely. | |
| Yes or no, do you agree that since the department was created by Congress, it would need an act of Congress to actually close the Department of Education? | ||
| And certainly President Trump understands that we'll be working with Congress. | ||
| We'd like to do this right. | ||
| We'd like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with and our Congress could get on board with that would have a better functioning Department of Education, but certainly does require congressional action. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And in terms of the plans to downsize, what would be the components of that plan that would not require congressional approval? | ||
| Well, I do believe, Senator, that there are departments of education that are established by statute. | ||
| And those particular departments we'd have to pay particular attention to. | ||
| But long before there was a Department of Education, we fulfilled the programs of our educational system. | ||
| Are there other areas, other agencies where parts of the Department of Education could better serve our students and our parents on a local level? | ||
| And I am really all for the President's mission, which is to return education to the states. | ||
| I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child and not serving the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If it is downsized, would the states and localities still receive the federal funding which they currently receive? | |
| Yes. | ||
| It is not the president's goal to defund the programs. | ||
| It is only to have it operate more efficiently. | ||
| Becky Pringle, play out what you think would happen if the Department of Education is downsized in the ways that they were discussing there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We know that every level of government has responsibility in the education of our students. | |
| The federal government, the state, and localities as well, our school boards, all of them play a role. | ||
| If the U.S. Department of Education was downsized, we know that there are vital services that our students wouldn't get. | ||
| I was talking to a parent from Virginia, actually, who was concerned because they depend on the services that the Department of Education provides for her students with special needs. | ||
| And we know that the federal government actually, the funding from the federal government, supplies over 420,000 jobs, almost a half a million jobs. | ||
| So we know that if those jobs aren't there, that class sizes are going to balloon. | ||
| We know that that one-on-one attention that students need will not be there. | ||
| And it will affect our most vulnerable students, those who are living in poverty, those who have disabilities. | ||
| In terms of what the Department of Education does, does the Department of Education get to tell individual school districts what they should and shouldn't teach? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They don't. | |
| That decision is left up to those school districts who, together with parents, parents are involved, educators are involved. | ||
| Some of the school districts, of course, involve students too, and making those determinations themselves. | ||
| The federal government's role, which was established really at the end of the civil rights legislation of the late 60s, so that it would play that job of ensuring that every student, when we say every student, every student has access and opportunity. | ||
| You know, you heard Linda McMahon talking about going back to a time when there was a time when our students with disabilities didn't have access. | ||
| There was a time when we didn't provide those additional resources so they could learn with their classmates in class. | ||
| There was a time when. | ||
| We don't want to go back to that. | ||
| Our parents and educators all over this country, that's not what they need. | ||
| They need more resources, not less. | ||
| Becky Pringle is our guest. | ||
| C-SPAN viewers know her, president of the National Education Association. | ||
| Here's the phone lines for you to call in. | ||
| Democrats, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| And as we often do when you come on a phone line for teachers to call in, 202-748-8003 is that number. | ||
| We'll look for your calls in this 45 minutes. | ||
| And Brandon's up first for you out of Venice, Florida. | ||
| Republican line, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing? | |
| Good. | ||
| You're on with Becky Pringle. | ||
| What's your question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Becky. | |
| I was wondering, do you not find it an issue that we're spending all this money on our education, but we're still ranked at the spot we are? | ||
| There's lots of conversation about the ranking of the U.S. and what we don't dig into is the reality that the scores that they're using and talking about do what they've really always done. | ||
| They tell us that the students who have more resources do better. | ||
| We as a country have to do better. | ||
| We know that the federal government actually promised that it would fund special education at an amount of 40%. | ||
| We've never even gotten close to that, not even halfway close to that. | ||
| And we know that in other countries, they actually address the issues of equity and access first so that they make sure that those students who are coming to their schools are coming to their schools ready to learn. | ||
| And whatever gaps they might have because of their socioeconomic status, the schools and the social system surrounding them are there to try to fill those gaps. | ||
| On some stats on spending and numbers, in the 2024 school year, the federal budget for the Department of Education, $223 billion. | ||
| There were 49 million students in pre-K through 12 in this country last year, more than 3 million full-time equivalent teachers. | ||
| The public school per student expenditures, $15,591 per student, each one of those 49 million students. | ||
| Those stats from the National Center for Education Statistics. | ||
| In terms of where you think the DOE budget is going, what can teachers and parents expect in 2025-26? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get the opportunity to travel all over this country and talk with teachers, and not just teachers. | |
| We know that we saw this in COVID. | ||
| We know that we need bus drivers to get our school kids to school, and those who feed them and counsel them. | ||
| All of those educators who surround our students with what they need so they can learn. | ||
| When I talk with them, what they say to me, along with our parents, is what I know to be true. | ||
| You know, I taught eighth-grade science for 31 years. | ||
| So I have firsthand knowledge of the kinds of gaps that our students tend to come to school with. | ||
| And what our educators are saying is we need every social system in this country to make sure that this country helps to close those gaps. | ||
| So when the kiddos come to us, for me, I'm focused on teaching them the laws of motion. | ||
| I'm not focused on having that weight as a teacher on that middle schooler who has the responsibility of taking care of her younger kids, like I did with Sade. | ||
| Those kinds of issues that we need counselors for, if we have these cuts, we won't have those counselors. | ||
| If we have these cuts, we won't have those mental health professionals. | ||
| If we have these cuts, we won't have the after-school programs that our students need to not just be ready to learn, but to grow and to thrive. | ||
| That's what I hear from educators all over the country. | ||
| They are very worried about their students not having what they need and the educators not having what they need to meet those individual needs of our students. | ||
| Medford Mass, this is Russell Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Becky Pringle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I just want to thank Becky Pringle for taking the time to speak with everyone on C-SPAN today. | |
| I have kind of like a question and statement, but Senator Ed Markey last week asked Linda McMahon to commit to not cutting federal spending to public schools. | ||
| She deflected the question. | ||
| He then asked her if she could commit to not using federal funding to cut from public schools to be used for tax breaks for the rich. | ||
| Again, she deflected the question: How is this not concerning for every senator? | ||
| Republican, Democrat, Party, whatever you're in, this should be kind of a damning statement or non-answer for any sort of person to lead the Department of Education. | ||
| So, I guess my question is: how is this not concerning for every senator, both Democrat and Republican? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It should be concerning, and it was Senator Markey that probably had the best line in the hearing, where he called Doge the Department of Gutting Education. | ||
| The caller was exactly right. | ||
| We're all concerned because Linda McMahon would not make that commitment that she would not cut funding for her kids. | ||
| This is Karen, a teacher in Youngstown, Ohio, on that line we set aside for teachers. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm not a teacher. | |
| I was a secretary in Arizona, but I raised a deaf son in the western suburbs of Chicago. | ||
| And if it weren't for the public education, he would not be where he is now. | ||
| He was profoundly deaf or is, has a great job, married and has a grandson. | ||
| And he's perfectly normal, except he's deaf. | ||
| But there was such great deaf education in the western suburbs. | ||
| It was put in by Northwestern University back in the early 70s. | ||
| And it was funded all through the government. | ||
| Well, I believe in public education. | ||
| It's just great. | ||
| Karen, thanks for sharing your story. | ||
| Becky Pringle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you, Karen, for using your voice to talk for so many parents who are concerned. | ||
| When the OMB memo came out, we had parents crying because they thought that that was going to happen right away. | ||
| And in fact, even though it was rescinded, those cuts have already started. | ||
| We have a teacher in Georgia who is a special education teacher in Georgia, and their job is to help high school students transition, students with disabilities transition from high school out of high school into the world. | ||
| And so the concern that Debbie has that those students will be able to do that is very real. | ||
| And this teacher lost their job last week. | ||
| All of her students don't have that ability to have that transition plan in place so they can go out in the world and like Debbie's son, live on their own and live their life. | ||
| It's very real for parents. | ||
| It's why they are coming together and they're finding their voice, they're using their voice and making sure that they let their members of Congress know this is not okay. | ||
| This is affecting my child and it's affecting the child that's sitting next to my child, which affects my child too. | ||
| I want to come to this Associated Press headline. | ||
| Donald Trump looks to repurpose federal money to expand school choice programs. | ||
| Explain what that means, where, how much money we're talking about. | ||
| What do you know from that executive order? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We know this is a continuation of exactly what Donald Trump did in his first term, that he tried to privatize public education and take billions and billions of dollars out of public tax dollars out of the public school system. | |
| We know that that doesn't work. | ||
| And by the way, that's not what voters want. | ||
| We saw that in this election in Kentucky, every county, every one of their 120 counties voted against vouchers because they understand that they want their neighborhood public schools funded and vouchers take money away from that. | ||
| Same thing happened in Nebraska and in Colorado. | ||
| The voters overwhelmingly said, no, that is not what we want. | ||
| So we know that voters didn't vote for that. | ||
| They voted for making sure that their students, their families have what they need. | ||
| And we know that taking public dollars out of our public schools, that's been a scheme for decades. | ||
| And there is absolutely no evidence that that helps with the learning of kids. | ||
| It actually hurts our public schools. | ||
| It goes to dismantling them, which impacts the 90% of students who go to our public schools. | ||
| To Maine, this is Denise, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Becky Pringle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I have eight grandchildren that are from second grade through high school. | ||
| And I'm very concerned because they're not learning things that they should learn. | ||
| I have a second grader who's not learning to read. | ||
| I have a of my 20-year-old grandson, my oldest, quit school at 16 because he wasn't getting his needs met. | ||
| And I have another, a fourth grader who's very intelligent but can't get the advanced classes that he needs. | ||
| And the schools are failing. | ||
| And I'll hear you talk about how wonderful the teachers are, but the schools are failing. | ||
| And I think vouchers, and I think that competition will make them better. | ||
| I'm a grandparent too. | ||
| My two little ones are in the New York public schools. | ||
| And just like being a parent, we all want our students, our kids, to have the highest quality public education they possibly can. | ||
| And we want other people's kids to have that high-quality public education too, because we're a society and it impacts all of us. | ||
| Cutting funds from public schools is not the way to get at that. | ||
| We have never, as a country, lived up to our promise in funding our schools in a way that our students who are in rural areas have the same access as students who live in suburban or urban areas. | ||
| We saw that with COVID, where they didn't have the connectivity that they need so they could continue to learn. | ||
| But we know that that's been an issue, again, since technology has been front and center and certainly in our schools. | ||
| So cutting funds is not going to do anything to address the issues that this caller raised. | ||
| We need to make sure we have the funds to meet the individual needs of her children as well as others' children. | ||
| What about that argument, and not the first caller to make that argument, and when you've come on, that vouchers will allow for more competition and more competition will make public schools better? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Vouchers have been in place for about three decades. | |
| That has never been the case. | ||
| There have never been any, there's never been any evidence that vouchers helps to improve the learning of our students. | ||
| So it is a failed experiment, and we need to focus on funding our public schools, which we have never done. | ||
| That's what we need to focus on. | ||
| Denver, Colorado, this is John. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| You're on with Becky Pringle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| So I currently work as a guidance counselor and a general mental health staffer at West High School in Denver. | ||
| And ever since Trump got in office and started, you know, messing around with the Department of Education and, you know, doing his classic, you know, getting rid of everything, we've lost quite a bit of, you know, programs and stuff for our LGBT and colored students and our disabled students, our students who are not very financially able. | ||
| And it's been horrible. | ||
| It's been horrible on their mental health. | ||
| And it's just made my job of teaching just that much more difficult. | ||
| And I love teaching. | ||
| It's gotten me out of the worst spot. | ||
| Before I was a teacher, before I was a counselor, sorry, I used to be a male Texas Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, Cecil. | ||
| Ms. Pringle, I want to note that the voucher program, it's interesting that self-funding voucher programs for President Obama and President Clinton worked for their kids. | ||
| They were able to choose schools that they would want to go to. | ||
| My biggest problem with public schools is the lack of discipline in them. | ||
| School districts like Houston ISD, Youngstown Public Schools, Baltimore Public Schools are case studies in five alarm fires. | ||
| And I don't hear any breath of air, any sense of urgency or embarrassment by the outcomes of student test scores. | ||
| But I want to give you another stat here. | ||
| The Department of Education, John Stossel showed up at the Department of Education some 15 years ago. | ||
| And when he went in there, he thought, well, let's get a tour here, see what goes on in this building. | ||
| And of course, he knew the outcome. | ||
| He was demonstrating absurdity by being absurd. | ||
| He was dutifully kicked out of the building because we're not supposed to know what goes on at the Department of Education. | ||
| What happens behind those doors? | ||
| He was just curious what they teach. | ||
| Here's a stat for you. | ||
| Well, Mike, you can bring up a few things. | ||
| Becky Pringle, let me give you a chance to respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we know that we want to have safe, equitable schools for every student. | |
| We want to create an environment that is inclusive and happy and joyful and challenging. | ||
| We want a deep and rich curriculum for all of our students. | ||
| And to do that, we know that it takes qualified, caring teachers, other educators. | ||
| We know it takes resources to make sure we have them. | ||
| And we know that the cuts and the threats to our educators is doing nothing but driving educators out of the profession, which we know we have a five-alarm crisis with educator shortage in this country. | ||
| As I said, not just teachers, all of our educators. | ||
| And so as we think about what our students need, especially after going through a pandemic, which we all went through, by the way, we know they need more mental health services. | ||
| We know they need more counselors. | ||
| We know they need more teachers so we can keep the class sizes down. | ||
| And the Department of Education was extremely helpful at the state and local level in making sure we had additional jobs and raising the pay of educators too so that they would stay in the profession. | ||
| Those are the kinds of things that the Department of Education should still be focused on because that is an issue that in this country we have yet to address. | ||
| Another headline from NPR, schools and colleges have two weeks to ban DEI and education experts warn that that won't be easy. | ||
| What are we talking about in terms of programs that you've seen DEI initiatives at school? | ||
| How much money do we know is being spent on those initiatives? | ||
| How big of a deal would it be to pull those back? | ||
|
unidentified
|
For educators, the biggest concern they have is the lack of understanding exactly what kind of funding will be pulled and cut if they, for example, go ahead with their black history program. | |
| I was talking with a teacher in South Carolina last week, and she was sharing with us that she had to turn in her plans for a black history program that she had done for a decade. | ||
| And we're in the middle of Black History Month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is correct. | |
| She had turned them in right before, right before, so she didn't really have much time to make changes because the school district is afraid that they then will have be cut, the funding to them will be cut. | ||
| Not connected to DEI. | ||
| It's not connected at all to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. | ||
| But because they're afraid, the school is afraid that they'll lose funding if they have a black history program. | ||
| You've heard stories like that all over the country. | ||
| So it was one of the things that one of the senators talked about at the hearing, that educators all over the country would be scrambling after listening to Lindy McMahon say that she would, in fact, support. | ||
| cutting funds to schools that didn't comply with the DEI executive order that not only for educators put them in a place where they are wondering, can I teach this? | ||
| What do I need to take out of my curriculum? | ||
| But also threatening their certification. | ||
| I mean, this is the kind of scare tactics and division tactics that are coming from this administration that are having teachers scrambling all over the country and saying, asking the question, very question we do not want them to ask. | ||
| Should I stay in the profession now? | ||
| That line for teachers, it's Mitch in Jackson, New Jersey. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I was just wondering why we are spending so much money on students per student, you know, in the school districts. | ||
| And we get, we're failing. | ||
| Our grades and test scores are gone down. | ||
| And this has been gone down for the past 30 years. | ||
| You're a teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I was a guidance counselor. | |
| And why do you think public schools are better than private schools or charter schools? | ||
| And the second question is, I got two questions. | ||
| I never found out how much the president, you, make, or your officers. | ||
| It's so tight. | ||
| You know, we see local districts, you know, don't make money, but the NEA has salaries, and we can never get their salaries of those officers. | ||
| I was wondering if you could answer both questions, please. | ||
| Becky Pringle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's important to remember that for the NEA, we don't say that there shouldn't be a private school or a charter school. | |
| What we say is that public education is the foundation of this democracy. | ||
| And it is the responsibility of our democracy to ensure that every student, every one of them, has access and resources and opportunities to live and grow and thrive. | ||
| That's the responsibility of the government at every level, federal, state, and local level. | ||
| So if a parent decides they want to send their child to a private school, then that's their decision. | ||
| But the government should be making sure that all of our students have access. | ||
| And that is making sure that our public schools are funded at a level that addresses those issues. | ||
| You know, when we talk about that per pupil funding, we know that our public schools are the hub of every community. | ||
| And for too many of them, they have to provide social services from health care to making sure students are fed to making sure that they have access to those after-school programs that our students who are living in poverty don't necessarily have. | ||
| So they have a large responsibility for making sure that our students not only are successful academically, but they have the social and emotional learning that they need so they can work collaboratively with others and they can think critically, go on to college or into career. | ||
| Those are the kinds of things that our public schools must ensure that every one of their students has. | ||
| With other schools, private schools, for example, they can make a choice as to whether they accept a student that will require more services. | ||
| Public schools accept everyone. | ||
| What would you say to his question about NEA officer salaries? | ||
|
unidentified
|
NEA officer salaries as well as other salaries are available as we are required to make them. | |
| Gary is in Philadelphia, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I wanted to address with Ms. Pringle is that the amount of fraud that goes on in special education. | ||
| My wife works for the Philadelphia School District in special education. | ||
| And I think they're paying more like $17,000 or $18,000 for a kid. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| And her boss and her boss's boss got let go because they kept tapping into the special education fund and taking it away and using it for other things. | ||
| And she always tried very hard for the kids to get the services. | ||
| And they never got the services because the principal and the assistant wife's principal were embezzling funds until they got fired. | ||
| Becky Pringle on waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
School districts should always have protocols in place to ensure that the money that is being sent to them from whatever level of government is being expended in the way that it was designed to be, whether it's a program or whether it's going to hire teachers or paraprofessionals, or whether it is going to the direct needs of students, if they need a specialized wheelchair, | |
| if they need any kind of specialized care based on their disability. | ||
| So there should be a process in place. | ||
| I don't know anything about this particular instance, but the Department of Education at every level, the state level too, has ways that they can, if you have discovered that, that you can certainly report that into them. | ||
| The Department of Education was one of those agencies whose inspector general was targeted for removal by Donald Trump in the first days of this second Trump administration. | ||
| What does the DOE Inspector General do? | ||
| Do you know of their efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they have a variety of jobs and the targeting of the president started very early in his term, actually before he took office. | |
| He was very clear that he was going to target people and he has followed through with that. | ||
| But not just those people in those kind of positions. | ||
| What we found is by gutting the Department of Education as well as many of the other agencies here has slowed down their responsiveness to, for example, our students who have done everything we've asked them to do and now they want to go on to college. | ||
| And they need assistance as they're filling out those FAFSA forms as they're for financial aid as they are applying to college. | ||
| And what the president has done is gutted those departments and students and families are scrambling trying to figure out at this time of year. | ||
| You know, this is that time where our students are anxious and their parents are anxious, where they need that additional assistance. | ||
| And those federal workers who are no longer there to assist our parents and our students has put them in a place where they are fearful about whether or not they're going to be able to go to college. | ||
| Does the NEA cover federal employees at the Department of Education? | ||
| Are they part of your union? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The federal Department of Education, but we do represent those teachers and support staff who teach and work with the children of our servicemen and women. | |
| So on basis here in the U.S. and around the world, we represent them and they are also under threat. | ||
| George Downington, Pennsylvania, Democrat, good morning. | ||
| You are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, good morning. | ||
| Yeah, I don't understand why we're not using technology. | ||
| This is 2025. | ||
| You know, for instance, I watched C-SPAN, and I'm going to get to this real quick. | ||
| I watched C-SPAN during the hearings and stuff, and the AIDS don't know anything. | ||
| We'll get back to you. | ||
| This should all be, it's all audible. | ||
| It should go into a database. | ||
| They should have everything at their disposal. | ||
| We should educate our kids. | ||
| Everybody from 3 to 12 years old going to education boom because man suffers because of lack of knowledge. | ||
| Teach everybody. | ||
| If you leave people out of the talent pool, then you're not going to get the end result. | ||
| And the thing is, we already know who the most talented people are. | ||
| All you have to do is look at our entertainers, dancers, actors, musicians. | ||
| These are the most talented people in the world, and everybody worships them all over the world. | ||
| They worship our talented people. | ||
| Got your point, George. | ||
| Becky Pringle, what do you want to pick up on from that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So technology absolutely is essential. | |
| And we learned this in COVID, didn't we? | ||
| All the students who didn't have access, either they didn't have broadband access or they didn't have the tools. | ||
| And so one of the things that the American Rescue Plan did for us, for our schools, that was passed under the Biden-Harris administration, was to try to close that gap. | ||
| But we still haven't closed it to the degree we need to. | ||
| We know that not only our students, but their families need access so that they are able to use those tools, they know how to use them, and they have them readily available at school and at home. | ||
| We saw a lot of teachers leave the profession during COVID. | ||
| Are we at the point in 2025 where we've made up for those losses? | ||
| And are there enough teachers in the pipeline right now for the needs of the number of children in this country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have not made up for those losses. | |
| We are still working on the strategies that we talked about during the Biden-Harris administration. | ||
| We know that when we talked to educators, any age did a survey and we asked them were they going to stay in the profession, and we were actually surprised that 55% of them said they were planning, not thinking, planning on leaving the profession. | ||
| When we dug into those numbers, it went up to over 60 for our black teachers, which is a huge problem that we want a diverse profession. | ||
| Did you ask them why? | ||
| Is it school aging out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's not. | |
| And that was what was interesting and a little terrifying for us is it was every level. | ||
| It was the young, it was the beginning educators, those in the middle of the careers. | ||
| And then we saw educators who at the end of their careers, who still needed some years to best in their pensions, they were leaving too. | ||
| And so as we dug into that, the number one word they used was respect. | ||
| And I said, okay, Aretha taught us how to spell it, but I want you to dig into it and tell what does that mean for you? | ||
| And what they said to me was, of course, they've never received the kind of professional pay that reflects the important work they do in our society. | ||
| So that's an issue. | ||
| They can't take care of their own families. | ||
| But they didn't stop there. | ||
| They talked about professional respect, people who haven't spent a day in their classroom making policies, determining what their students, what they should teach and their students should learn. | ||
| All of that spotlight on them and pressure around their freedom to teach. | ||
| Was it a spotlight and pressure from a national level down the way folks up here on Capitol Hill talk about them or at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? | ||
| Or was it a spotlight and pressure on a local level and the parents and the people who are focused on that school in particular? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was going to say yes. | |
| Yes, and it was both. | ||
| But it really did depend on the community. | ||
| In those communities where parents and educators, community members came together and they worked together, particularly in community schools where they supported that whole student and provided all the resources. | ||
| You didn't have that at the local level. | ||
| It was just coming from the talking heads inside the beltway. | ||
| But it was demoralizing that they are professional and not treated as other professionals are, that they know their skill and craft and should be able to make those decisions. | ||
| So as we mounted strategies from apprenticeships to increasing their salaries to making sure that student, that teachers were in those positions to make those teaching and learning decisions, we were starting to stem that tide. | ||
| What's the average starting salary for a teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It varies wildly all over this country. | |
| It can be as low as $30,000 where educators can't live. | ||
| And you saw this a couple of years ago during the Red For Ed movement where we had teachers living in cars. | ||
| People didn't know, Americans didn't know that, that they made so little that they couldn't support themselves and their families. | ||
| And we know that in collective bargaining states, those are states that have the right for teachers to come together in the union to collectively bargain their salaries, they make more and we have less of a crisis in terms of educator shortage. | ||
| What percentage of teachers can get a pension? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that varies as well. | |
| We're going in the wrong direction with pensions, where states are not investing in their pensions in the way that they should. | ||
| And we have some pensions in some states that are in trouble and we're very concerned. | ||
| And I will tell you, and tie this back to the other conversation we're having, that our state governments are very fearful that the federal government will walk away from its responsibility in funding education, particularly special education, and that funding will fall to them. | ||
| And that necessarily means that they're going to either have to try to make it up or they're going to pass on those cuts to the local level. | ||
| And that's what folks are fearful of. | ||
| And that's going the wrong direction when we're talking about pensions. | ||
| Just a couple minutes left with Becky Pringle of the NEA this morning. | ||
| This is Lee in Oklahoma. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I wanted to know what's going to happen to the school lunch programs and Head Start. | ||
| School lunch and Head Start. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're very concerned about that. | |
| That was one of the first things on the chopping block, the first week of the Trump presidency was Head Start. | ||
| My mom was a cook at the Head Start program. | ||
| And the little ones, they were three and four years old. | ||
| As adults, they would come back and thank her for feeding them, giving them the best Thanksgiving dinner they ever had. | ||
| It makes a difference that we start with young learners and make sure they are ready to step into kindergarten. | ||
| We fought hard not only to have universal meals for kids at school, but to have healthy meals, which is so important for their learning and growth. | ||
| We know, because the Trump administration has said, that they're going to cut those programs. | ||
| And even though the memo was rescinded, they made very clear that the executive order was going to go forward. | ||
| So we need everyone to join us. | ||
| We need everyone to text action. | ||
| to 48744, call your member of Congress, call your senator, let them know that you believe every student should have access to healthy, nutritious meals. | ||
| And that's our responsibility. | ||
| It's the only way they can come to school ready to learn every day. | ||
| If a viewer were to send that text that you just encouraged them to do, what happens? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we do a couple of things. | |
| We put you right in contact with your member of Congress so you can tell them exactly how you feel about the cuts that are happening in your own schools. | ||
| You can find out more about those cuts in your local area. | ||
| And you can join us in our action across the state, but especially in your own community, to fight back against any cuts to your child's neighborhood public school so that every student has what they need and what they deserve. | ||
| Time for just maybe one or two more calls. | ||
| This is Wayne Washington. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How you doing? | |
| Doing well. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've been listening to you. | ||
| Number one, I don't agree with the breakfast. | ||
| I do believe that the kids should, that our low-income should get something for something to eat for lunches. | ||
| But the parents need to start doing things. | ||
| And Wayne, I'm running short on time. | ||
| So what's your question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is, how come you can't remember your salary? | |
| It was pretty easy for me to find it. | ||
| That's Wayne in Washington. | ||
| Give you the final minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So who doesn't want a student to have breakfast so they can start their day off right and they can learn? | |
| Everyone wants our kids to be fed. | ||
| And for us to see these cuts coming to our public schools to our students, when we know that at the end of the day, and we'll see this in a couple of weeks, we're looking at this administration finding billions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires who already have more. | ||
| What we're asking is that this government live up to its promise and make sure that our students have more so they can live and grow and thrive in this country and be the leaders that we know we need and that they want to be. | ||
| Becky Pringle is the president of the National Education Association. | ||
| Pretty easy to find NEA.org if you want to look up her organization. | ||
| And we always appreciate your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| It's good to be with you. | ||
| Coming up in just a few minutes, it's going to be our open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, the phone lines are yours to do so. | ||
| The numbers are on your screen. | ||
| And while you're dialing in, wanted you to know that there are more than 60 new members of the U.S. House, and C-SPAN has been talking to them about their lives and their careers, why they ran for Congress. | ||
| Take a listen to a few of those stories, including from Congress members Luis Riavas, Craig Goldman, and John Mannion. | ||
| When I was in elementary school in fifth grade in 1984, so it's a long time ago before anybody had computers at home and cell phones, my teacher had an Apple IIe computer in the back of the classroom and she taught some of us how to program it. | ||
| I thought it was a classroom toy or activity until I got really good at it and she said, you should consider a career in computer science or engineering. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I thought, wow, people get paid to do this? | |
| I have no idea. | ||
| And that kind of sparked an interest and led me to continue and eventually end up at MIT and where I studied electrical engineering. | ||
| Well, that's quite a continuation, electrical engineering at MIT. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then your early professional experiences. | |
| What were they in engineering? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I worked for Motorola in the Chicago suburbs. | |
| I worked on automotive electronics, like what became OnStar for GM, so navigation, telematics within the car. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it was a very exciting time. | |
| This is the late 90s. | ||
| And, you know, I was a hardware engineer, which was a lot of fun back then. | ||
| So born and raised in Fort Worth, I'm a fifth generation native of Texas, fourth generation native of Fort Worth. | ||
| So it's been fascinating to trace my family roots. | ||
| My great-great-great-grandfather moved there in the late 1800s to help build the original TMP railroad from Fort Worth to El Paso. | ||
| And we know this because there was an article written about him in 1910. | ||
| And so his name was Ike Gronsky, and he was a character. | ||
| And so, you know, just really establishing roots and helping build not only Fort Worth, but Texas, you know, helped build Texas. | ||
| My family's been part of for a number of generations. | ||
| So, yeah, with that kind of base of my family being there, not only in Texas, but in Fort Worth, I know, and it's kind of been instilled in me from the very beginning from a baby in Fort Worth, is we're here to serve the community. | ||
| And so any and all opportunities I've had to be able to give back to the community that I love so much, I've been able to do it. | ||
| And then, you know, got into politics about 12 years ago, 13 years ago, and I've loved every second of representing Southwest Tarrant County. | ||
| And now the great honor of representing western Tarrant County and Northern Parker County. | ||
| I was a science teacher, an AP biology and chemistry teacher largely, but I taught every science. | ||
| And in my last eight years of teaching, I was also a teacher union president. | ||
| And it was that advocacy for public education, students, and teachers to push back against some top-down policy that I could see the negative impact of in the classroom that really got me more politically engaged, led to me running for a state Senate position. | ||
| I ended up flipping a seat from Republican to Democrat that was held by the other side for 100 years in 2020 and then was re-elected in 2022. | ||
| And now I'm proud to serve a larger region of central New York and the Mohawk Valley here in D.C. Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's where we are on Capitol Hill today. | ||
| The Senate comes in at 10 a.m. Eastern, also at 10 a.m. here in Washington, D.C. C-SPAN's coverage of the Conservative Political Action Conference takes place. | ||
| It's known as CPAC. | ||
| And this morning we'll hear from Senator Cynthia Loomis, Representative James Comer, and others. | ||
| And we'll pick up this afternoon with several sessions that feature, among them, Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Trump White House official, political commentator Steve Bannon as well. | ||
| Our coverage today, this morning, starts at 10 a.m. | ||
| This afternoon, you can tune back in at 2.50 p.m. | ||
| And of course, that's all here on the C-SPAN network, C-SPAN.org, the free C-SPAN Now video app. | ||
| And now it's open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, now is the time where we turn this program over to you. | ||
| This is Steve Upfirst in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| You are a treasure. | ||
| Let me tell you something. | ||
| Before you, there was none, and after you, there will be none. | ||
| You're the greatest. | ||
| I can understand why Becky Pringle didn't want to answer the question of what her salary is. | ||
| Her salary is eight times that of an average school teacher. | ||
| Last year, she earned $495,000. | ||
| And so where are the numbers that you look up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I can look it up along with you. | |
| All you got to do is Google Becky Pringle's salary, and it's all over the place. | ||
| Three different sites have it exactly to the penny. | ||
| Anything else you want to add? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me? | |
| Anything else you want to add? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this is why there's no transparency in what these people do. | |
| And all they want to do is continue their gravy training at the expense of our students and the conditions of our schools. | ||
| That's Steve in Pennsylvania. | ||
| This is Willie in Slidell, Louisiana. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, sir. | |
| I'm a 20-year military arrest and combat wound in 1966 in Vietnam, two tours. | ||
| And I want to talk about this DEI thing. | ||
| When I went in the military, it was an opportunity for me. | ||
| And to think about it is you never talk about it. | ||
| But we own it, blacks own it was 12% of the population in the United States. | ||
| But we were 34% of the fighting forces in Vietnam. | ||
| And the KIAs and MIAs, boys, we've just run was up to 34%. | ||
| And nobody talked about that eco opportunity then. | ||
| That's Willie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| This is Scott in the Sunflower State Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Scott, you with us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| Go ahead, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, John, can you hear me? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Yeah, the interesting on the education, I wish that students upon graduation would have to take the citizen-citizen test and civics to be a bigger part of our curriculum. | ||
| I know there's limited hours. | ||
| Also, I would have liked to have mentioned that Ukraine, I think it's crazy that we're blaming them for the start of the war. | ||
| And then going back to education real quickly, I think students should be taught how to discern information to know what's truth and what's fiction. | ||
| They do that in European countries to where students have the ability to understand what fake news is about, but then they'll look for the truth of things. | ||
| And STEM is another part of education that helps students solve problems because we don't know what kind of careers they're going to have in 20 years. | ||
| There's just so much of that that's there. | ||
| And again, my last point is when I call in and I do have to a guest and I have a question, I wish I could get the follow-up because they don't always answer the question that I'm trying to ask. | ||
| An example was they were asking this lady for a salary and she didn't answer. | ||
| But if they had to let the caller come back on and say, hey, you really didn't answer my question, the last time was with a politician and he didn't answer my question at all. | ||
| And it's frustrating when that kind of thing happens. | ||
| But again, I thank you for taking my call and I hope you have a wonderful day, John. | ||
| Same to you, Scott. | ||
| This is Alistair here in Washington, D.C., Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to share an experience. | ||
| I grew up down south. | ||
| I attended about 23 schools in my education. | ||
| 23. | ||
| How does one do that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Parents that were just transient. | |
| So I got a wide view of what better funded and less funded schools, how they taught, like how the more wealthy schools taught systems thinking and critical thoughts. | ||
| It seemed like the poorer schools taught nothing but sit down, shut up, and we're babysitting you until you go to prison. | ||
| We were actually taught that. | ||
| We were actually told that directly in one school. | ||
| Years later, I finally, I ended up just leaving home early and joining the military. | ||
| But later on, my own son, I watched him, I tried to keep him as many, as few schools as possible so he could concentrate on academics. | ||
| And it seemed like it was almost impossible to keep order in the classes in public schools. | ||
| And I wished something was done about that. | ||
| It seemed like a couple of class clowns can just derail a class, and there's nothing that teachers can do. | ||
| And speaking of teachers, I learned this growing up too. | ||
| Teachers had, there was once this is anecdotal, but the teacher who refused to actually teach, I would ask, like, could you explain this to me? | ||
| And she was busy reading romance novels and just pointed at the board, just read the board. | ||
| And I literally went out of class to the principal's office to ask, is there anything we can do about this teacher? | ||
| And they said, no, she's tenured. | ||
| And that's how I learned what tenure was. | ||
| But I was kind of appalled. | ||
| And I hope that something can be done about teachers who don't want to teach. | ||
| It's Alistair here in Washington, D.C. | ||
| This is Bill in Ellenwood, Georgia. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Pedro. | |
| I can tell Pedro you said hi, Bill, but go ahead. | ||
| What's your question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just want to say about Trump and Zelinsky. | |
| Putin, he wants Zelensky to have an election, but nothing about Putin having an election. | ||
| Also, what in the world are we doing messing with the lower level working man? | ||
| And we have all of these people up in Washington that go up there primarily broke and become billionaires and they're not doing anything about them. | ||
| That's Bill in Georgia. | ||
| It's coming up on 9 o'clock on the East Coast. | ||
| The Senate is in in just about an hour at 10 o'clock. | ||
| Here's a headline on what the Senate has been working on this week and the House as well. | ||
| Senate Republicans dig in on their narrower budget plan. | ||
| Donald Trump's saying he'll back a broader House budget bill, throwing, as the Wall Street Journal notes, cold water on the Senate blueprint. | ||
| It was Senate Majority Leader John Thune who was asked about President Trump coming out publicly in favor of the House Republican approach to the budget process. | ||
| Here's about 90 seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good afternoon. | |
| Are you defying the president by going ahead with your own budget plan when he pretty strongly endorsed what the House was working on? | ||
| Well, I think he's made it clear for a long time that he would prefer one big, beautiful bill. | ||
| And we're fine with that too. | ||
| If the House can produce one big, beautiful bill, we're prepared to work with them to get that across the finish line. | ||
| But we believe that the president also likes optionality. | ||
| And the legislation that we'll be working and voting on tomorrow addresses, as I said, those three critical priorities. | ||
| And hopefully in the end, we'll be able, whether it's one bill or two bills, to get all the things that the president has outlined as objectives across the finish line in a reconciliation bill. | ||
| The question right now, again, is a tactical one. | ||
| The strategic objective is still the same, and that is to extend the tax policy, strengthen the economy, rebuild the military, create energy dominance for this country, and secure our border. | ||
| John Thune yesterday at the post-Senate lunch press briefing, that vote that he was talking about taking place today, at least scheduled to do so. | ||
| Also, today, expecting a vote on Kash Patel to head the Federal Bureau of FBI. | ||
| Plenty of stories about that in today's papers. | ||
| You can watch that vote on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Gabble coverage of the Senate on C-SPAN 2 on the House. | ||
| It's here on C-SPAN. | ||
| And here is Dan in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I thought the most important issue in the election was what's going on now with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, and the fact that the President Trump is now leading us to change over a policy that has been carried out for 80 years against and defense against the greatest threat in American history, | ||
| nuclear threat for the last 80 years that Russia has resurged with, with Putin, who, if you look at a map, Putin is our biggest enemy. | ||
| Nobody of any authority, nobody in the military or any other authority, at the time Trump was elected, the first term, nobody thought that full support of Ukraine, giving them anything necessary to win, was not the proper issue. | ||
| But as soon as he got in office, Trump started shaking up the idea of NATO, and he started behind the scenes backing off. | ||
| His actions belie any idea that he ever supported Ukraine, that he's always been backing Russia and waiting for the right time to deal with that. | ||
| Dan, what do you expect NATO to look like four years from now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good question. | |
| God knows. | ||
| God knows. | ||
| NATO is needed now more than ever in its history, at least again, since Putin came back. | ||
| We were free from the problem of Russia when Russia broke up. | ||
| And now it's come back. | ||
| And I think that basically Trump made a deal with the devil. | ||
| Putin helped him get elected. | ||
| And he made a promise that he got something personal for it, which was helped to get elected. | ||
| It was against the interest of America, 100% against the interest, and he has now diverted his cult and his followers to backing up whatever he does, which is his own idea to support Russia. | ||
| It's not supported, again, by any authority. | ||
| And I think it came out of a deal that he made for his personal benefit. | ||
| Got your point, Dan. | ||
| This is Elise in Portland, Oregon. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you, John, and thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| Trump is bringing back the gilded age between 1870 and 1890 during the Reconstruction era and the progressive era. | ||
| These eras were politically corrupt and mob bosses ruled. | ||
| The rich got richer at the expense of the poor. | ||
| I am 70 years old and voted since 1973, 52 years as my duty as a citizen of a democracy. | ||
| I believe that Trump is destroying our country by appointing himself a dictator and directing his minions to threaten anyone who opposes him. | ||
| Finally, the Bible has predicted an Armageddon. | ||
| I believe that Trump is the Antichrist. | ||
| He won't destroy our country. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is Trevor, Washington, D.C., Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning to you. | |
| I'm associated with Notre Dame University in Indiana. | ||
| And my observation is that our country is not as divided as the media leads people to believe. | ||
| We've fallen into the trap called the narcissism of minor differences, which is an authorian concept. | ||
| We tend to think that people who are very similar to us are we focus on like minor differences to get in conflict with them. | ||
| In other words, like white evangelical Protestants, 18-year-old males, they're not that different from East Coast liberals. | ||
| They eat the same food. | ||
| They do the same things. | ||
| They have the same interests. | ||
| Someone's being played here. | ||
| So, Trevor, what should we focus on? | ||
| What are those similarities we should focus on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a great question. | |
| The some language we should focus on are where our values align. | ||
| The party system has failed us. | ||
| Where do our values align, Trevor? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, our parties are. | |
| I challenge you to go to a, you know, I'm left of center, and I challenge you to go to South Carolina and find someone who will not take care of their Hispanic neighbor's dog when they're out of town. | ||
| Like, it's appreciable in human interaction that has been disrupted by digital frenetic communication. | ||
| That's Trevor. | ||
| This is Angela, Bakersfield, California, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There's a couple different things. | ||
| I'm trying to keep it short, straight to the point. | ||
| Okay, Trump's doing what the people asked him to do. | ||
| Why waste money on a never-ending war in Ukraine? | ||
| Then the lady you just had on, Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education, she is an example of why the education needs to be shut down. | ||
| That is like the blind leading the blind. | ||
| I don't know where she went to school, but within the minute that I watched her, she made two grammatical errors. | ||
| Not that I speak any better, but I don't claim to be the best and want to go ahead and not encourage our children to do better. | ||
| Two times in one minute, she had said in her conversation the responses of the administration when that word alone should have been response, not responses. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Robert, Massachusetts, Democrat. | ||
| It's Worcester. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I've got one problem with Mr. Trump. | ||
| I'm very worried about his mental health, to be honest with you, because there's one thing we have to admit, he's a pathological liar. | ||
| So, if you had a child that said that many lies, you would have to send him to a doctor. | ||
| The man also has attention deficit disorder because he has to have attention on him at all times. | ||
| He doesn't want nobody to outshine him. | ||
| That's a disorder. | ||
| He also is a mimic depressor. | ||
| But he gets depressed. | ||
| He gets angry. | ||
| He gets mean. | ||
| People have to make him happy. | ||
| It's Robert's Diagnosis in Massachusetts. | ||
| This is Freddie in Beatrice, Alabama. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted to talk about the lady that was on Insofar's Education. | |
| The problem is, throughout America, is this. | ||
| Children, when they go to school, starting from kindergarten, must have certain disciplines. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you still there? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, children must have certain disciplines. | |
| They must be able to discipline to hear, to listen, and obey. | ||
| If a child leaves a home and do not have the basic disciplines, the foundations of learning, they cannot learn. | ||
| That's all over America. | ||
| That means the problem is at our homes. | ||
| When the parents send the children to go to school, they are not prepared to learn the basic disciplines of listening, being quiet, being respectful. | ||
| They don't have that. | ||
| And when they go in the classroom, the teacher has to be a parent, a mother or father, in order to get that child in the lane to learn. | ||
| That's the problem in America, all over America. | ||
| You can't teach what is unteachable. | ||
| It's like a mechanic that goes to the store to buy a part for a car. | ||
| If the car part is built wrong, it won't fit the car. | ||
| It's Freddie in the Yellow Hammer State to the Old Line State. | ||
| This is Washington in Davidsonville. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Washington is not my real name. | ||
| I hate to say, but it's a crazy time we live in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've worked for the federal government for 16 years, and I've never registered for a political party. | |
| I've never donated to a political candidate. | ||
| And I've never really been on Twitter or social media or anything. | ||
| And so I have been recently during all these Doge goings on and just the level of hate, level of just joy and glutting by people as my colleagues and some of the 2 million plus federal employees are just fired in the most insulting, humiliating, degrading way. | ||
| And I think I just thought. | ||
| Can you say what agency you work at? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, absolutely not. | |
| Absolutely not. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I will not say that because it's a terrifying time, right? | ||
| Because you will be singled out, fired. | ||
| All life turned upside. | ||
| I didn't get distracted. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| The point is this: we are working people. | ||
| We have families. | ||
| We are not rich people. | ||
| I don't know who you guys think in the government is so rich. | ||
| It's just like it bothers my mind. | ||
| We are working people. | ||
| The degrading, the humiliation of the government employee is the final act of grinding the working man into the dust. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All the private sector guys, you've already lost everything. | |
| Any job security, you can be fired for any looking at the boss funny, not sleeping with the boss. | ||
| They'll fire you. | ||
| You don't have any rights. | ||
| Your retirement, ha, you're on your own. | ||
| I hope you invest in crypto or something, right? | ||
| Because we're not going to give you a pension. | ||
| Your health care, I don't even have to explain the health care that you guys get, okay? | ||
| And so instead of saying these people have it so good, why don't I demand the things I used to have? | ||
| It's like, I want to drag these working guys down in the mud with me. | ||
| And I just don't get that at all. | ||
| Just so these people get taxes. | ||
| Do you think you'll stay, Washington in the federal government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, because I care. | |
| I care about the mission. | ||
| That's what all these people think. | ||
| These governments are just sitting there fat ass. | ||
| A lot of us are dedicated public servants who wake up every day to try to make Americans' life better and not just some stupid company that's selling crap to people for cheap. | ||
| When did government service become why are people so lost that government service is not honored over just personal profit? | ||
| Personal nonsense. | ||
| And this is the last point I'm going to make: is I can't dispel all of the false information that's going on. | ||
| The biggest problem I see is people cannot think logically. | ||
| They're presented with a misleading argument that cherry-picks facts and it confirms what they already think is true. | ||
| And they just don't do any critical thinking. | ||
| It's just, oh, this smart guy on my side, my tribe, came up with this. | ||
| So I'm going to beat somebody over the head. | ||
| Even if I looked at it for two seconds, it wouldn't make any sense at all. | ||
| Quick example, and then I'm going to get off the line. | ||
| This is a final example, 10 seconds. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| RFK Jr., his nomination hearing, right? | ||
| The right was going crazy. | ||
| Oh, these Democratic senators, they're so shrill. | ||
| They're all in the pocket of big pharma. | ||
| Look at this chart of all the donations by big pharma to the Democrats. | ||
| And you can guess how upset they're going to be by how much money they get from pharma. | ||
| Nobody bothered to ask: do the Republicans get any money from big pharma companies? | ||
| You think big pharma put all their money in the Democrats' pockets? | ||
| People need to think. | ||
| You need to think basic logical thinking. | ||
| Does the thing you're saying make any sense at all? | ||
| Or is it just absolute federal employee? | ||
| This is Ori, Texas, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| One thing for sure you can say about Trump is, you know, another caller said he's doing the will of the people. | ||
| He definitely seemed like he's given everybody what they voted for, the voted for Trump. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| But sometimes, you know, if something's too good to be true, you have to stop and think: is it too good to be true? | ||
| The Republican Party used to be the party of the Constitution. | ||
| We kind of like what we're seeing, but do we like how we're getting it? | ||
| I mean, from where did Trump get the authority to save TikTok when Congress had already banned it and the Supreme Court approved it? | ||
| What about line Ida vetoing the 14th Amendment with an executive order? | ||
| And where is Elon Musk getting the authority to dismantle the federal agencies? | ||
| Or you're calling in on the Republican line. | ||
| Did you vote for Donald Trump in 2024? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| I voted straight Republican my whole life. | ||
| And, you know, I was, I thought, I voted for change. | ||
| You know, no one wants an unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy running their lives. | ||
| But are we just replacing another unaccountable set of bureaucrats to do the same thing? | ||
| What's Musk even doing? | ||
| He's doing an audit, but what kind of an audit? | ||
| What's his methodology? | ||
| Is anybody asking any questions? | ||
| And, you know, we're talking about billions of dollars and everybody's getting all excited, but we spend trillions. | ||
| It takes $1,000 billion to make a trillion. | ||
| What are we getting? | ||
| Are we getting efficiency or are we just consolidating power under a different set of bureaucrats? | ||
| It's Orient, Texas. | ||
| This is Rich in the Volunteer State, Independent. | ||
| It's Kingsport. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Hey, John. | ||
| I think I heard someone call you Steve the other day and today, Pedro. | ||
| And don't feel bad. | ||
| I heard somebody call Pedro John recently. | ||
| It happens, Rich. | ||
| What's on your mind this morning? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I have a long list I'm going to try to call throughout the year. | |
| I'm going to keep my own journal about various points I don't hear brought up very often, and it's very frustrating. | ||
| And since education came up, I'm a 30-year veteran, retired public school teacher. | ||
| I'll just make two points in response to Becky Pringle. | ||
| I think that my tax dollars, I want them to go to educate children in whatever setting it happens to be, whether it's public school, charter school, voucher, home school. | ||
| The point, the goal is education. | ||
| And if that's taking place, that's where the dollars should go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Secondly, her point about professionals, I will say this. | |
| I was almost never, I mean, it's so rare in 30 years that anyone would ever challenge what I was teaching or the methods used. | ||
| Now, if I were to try to teach values, various things, social engineering, I think that's what parents object to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Parents, she said that give me an example, Rich. | |
| Well, if it were something about gender identity or something like that, something about teaching, I don't know, various sexual education at lower end. | ||
| I taught in sixth grade, I taught middle school, I taught in high school. | ||
| And there are age-appropriate things and literature. | ||
| I taught literature, and there are certain types of books that really are age-inappropriate to be in certain libraries. | ||
| And parents know about parenting. | ||
| That is something if a surgeon tried to tell the parents something about gender identity, they would object to that too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think she was disingenuous. | |
| And it was clear she was talking about parents not knowing that teachers know more than parents. | ||
| Well, about certain things, yes, and the parents would agree. | ||
| About parenting and values, no. | ||
| Rich, what topics did you teach when you were teaching? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What topics? | |
| You mean subjects? | ||
| Subjects, yes, sir. | ||
| Well, in sixth grade, we taught everything, every subject except for music. | ||
| And once a week, they went to the library, and we went with them. | ||
| Middle school, social studies, Tennessee history, English, reading. | ||
| That was pretty much it in middle school. | ||
|
unidentified
|
English in high school. | |
| Rich, I've got 30 seconds left. | ||
| Give me a Tennessee history fact that most Americans don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Well, I guess about the state of Franklin being here in this region in East Tennessee and part of North Carolina, western North Carolina, and being that one of the original. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, this was not what I was calling in about. | |
| It was about Congress. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That's all right, Rich. | ||
| We'll talk again down the road. | ||
| We'll talk to you next month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thanks, Sean. | ||
| That's Rich in Kingsport, Tennessee. | ||
| Last caller in this segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| About 45 minutes left this morning. | ||
| In that time, we will talk with Paul Danz, the former head of Project 2025, about the role that that policy roadmap is playing today. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| We will be right back. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Paul Dance is back at our desk. | ||
| Mr. Danz, the last time you're here was June of 2024. | ||
| You were serving as the director of Project 2025, the presidential transition effort at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| Can you just walk us through what happened with you and with Project 2025 in the months since then? | ||
| Well, you know, Project 2025 was a two and a half year effort. | ||
| We started back in the spring of 2022. | ||
| It was really a coming together of citizens all over the country. | ||
| We ultimately became 110 groups, all focused on helping the next conservative president be ready to hit the ground running day one. | ||
| So what's happened, you know, we got a lot of work done and made a contribution. | ||
| And very happy to see that these ideas have entered the bloodstream. | ||
| And what President Trump and his team is accomplishing right now is miraculous. | ||
| I stepped down from the project in the end of summer 2024. | ||
| But, you know, what's going on, we had basically wrapped our work by then. | ||
| And I should say I no longer work at the Heritage Foundation, so the ideas today are my own. | ||
| But it's been fantastic to watch President Trump really move like Greece Lightning right now. | ||
| How much of Project 2025 is evident in today being the first month of the Trump administration, the second Trump administration? | ||
| Well, this is all Donald Trump. | ||
| If a man didn't get up and say fight, fight, fight, none of this would be happening. | ||
| So, you know, it's really the indomitable spirit of one man, but that's the essence of leadership. | ||
| Many of the ideas that we brought in Project 2025 are common sense. | ||
| They're ultimately about bringing people back into our own government. | ||
| It's a government of, by, and for the people. | ||
| And that was the central postulate of Project 2025, that we needed to deconstruct this unaccountable administrative state. | ||
| How do you deconstruct it? | ||
| Well, you start by making it transparent. | ||
| And you have to show the rest of the country what's been actually happening here in Washington. | ||
| And that's part of the genius of Donald Trump and working with new folks like Elon Musk to really bring to the fore what we've all kind of suspected. | ||
| But, you know, what's being unearthed now is earth-shattering, really. | ||
| And, you know, we're seeing, we have a $2 trillion structural deficit in this country going on $50 trillion of debt. | ||
| Anybody who claims that the status quo defends the status quo and says this thing's working is either in on it or completely confused. | ||
| I guess the question is, is what we're seeing now Project 2025 in action? | ||
| Well, it's common sense. | ||
| There's a lot of commonality in the sense that what we put forward were in the main a lot of Trump ideas from term one. | ||
| So I think what you're seeing is aspirational hopes as well. | ||
| Things that people like I, I served in term one, hoped could have been done, but we didn't quite have the political will to do it yet. | ||
| We had a Democrat Congress at the latter half there, the House. | ||
| And, you know, these were ideas in the main that have percolated through the conservative movement and really just center right for decades. | ||
| Remind people what was in Project 2025 was a Department of Government efficiency in Project 2025. | ||
| The whole thing was about efficiency. | ||
| You know, there wasn't per se a department, but the idea with Project 2025 was that the conservatives had to be ready to help the next president govern. | ||
| That, you know, as particularly independent streak that we all have in us, the conservatives have never come together as a group. | ||
| And it was really important that we put aside the petty differences and support the next president. | ||
| So what we did with standing up Project 2025 was a first of its kind, really looking at our friends on the left, looking how they always get ready and saying to the entire country, like, be ready, be prepared. | ||
| And, you know, Project, to the extent that there's a reflection of Project 2025 and what's being done by President Trump now, it's that his team is ready to roll. | ||
| And they really wanted to be prepared to hit the ground day one. | ||
| What do you think the reputation of Project 2025 was by the end of the 2024 election? | ||
| Well, you know, I think the ideas of Project 2025 and what you see now are extremely popular at base. | ||
| What the Democrats had done was probably one of the great electoral failures of all time. | ||
| That was they put $300 million reportedly into castigating Project 2025 and really a two-part misinformation play. | ||
| One, that it had anything to do with President Trump, and two, that many of these, their so-called ideas were reflected in Project 2025. | ||
| At the end of the day, it just showed a great contempt for their own base. | ||
| And it ultimately, you know, it's the law of unintended consequences. | ||
| What you're seeing now is Project 2025, you know, on a whole nother plane, another order of magnitude. | ||
| During the election, President Trump and Candidate Trump felt the need to respond to his connection to Project 2025. | ||
| This is about 30 seconds during a campaign stop in July. | ||
| Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, and I don't even know. | ||
| I mean, some of them, I know who they are, but they're very, very conservative, just like you have, they're sort of the opposite of the radical left, okay? | ||
| You have the radical left and you have the radical right, and they come up with this project, I don't know what the hell it is, it's Project 25. | ||
| He's involved in Project, and then they read some of the things and they are extreme. | ||
| I mean, they're seriously extreme. | ||
| But I don't know anything about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't want to know anything about it. | |
| Extreme, came up by the radical right. | ||
| I don't know anything about it. | ||
| What was your estimation of those comments? | ||
| Well, there's no person on earth who's been more attacked by fake news than President Trump. | ||
| So he has much leeway. | ||
| I mean, look, he is a genius at politics, and what he said there is true. | ||
| He didn't have anything to do with this. | ||
| You know, the left, though, had taken a lot of effort to misframe Project 2025. | ||
| And at base, you know, I think he's also made statements subsequent to that that say that many of the ideas are very good. | ||
| You know, some of the bad ideas actually are not even in Project 2025. | ||
| They were completely grafted on. | ||
| For example, the IVF contingent. | ||
| There's not a word about IVF, but the Democrats and their allies spent millions of dollars trying to say Project 2025 was going to stop IVF. | ||
| Fake news. | ||
| Was shutting down or folding in USAID into the State Department, was that, did that come out of Project 2025? | ||
| Well, Project 2025 does a very good treatment on USAID and really going at the heart of how this operation has been running counter to U.S. foreign interest for decades now. | ||
| It's a sieve for unaccountable money. | ||
| So what I think that they've done is really take it to another level. | ||
| It certainly flagged the issue and talked about bringing it under the aegis of the State Department. | ||
| And that's being done. | ||
| There's going to be a vote today on Linda McMahon for Education Secretary to move her nomination out of committee to the full Senate, but a lot of discussion in her nomination hearing about reductions to the Department of Education. | ||
| Democrats concerned about shutting down the Department of Education. | ||
| What does Project 2025 say about the Department of Education? | ||
| Well, what I would say, Secretary, soon to be, I hope Secretary McMahon, is one of the dynamic figures of modern life. | ||
| She's extremely accomplished businesswoman and former cabinet secretary. | ||
| So I fully commend what she's going to do. | ||
| You know, with the Department of Education, the Heritage Foundation put out the mandate for leadership in 1980 for President Reagan. | ||
| And at that stage, four years into it, the book was already calling for the abolition of the department. | ||
| I think what we've unfortunately seen. | ||
| What's the book? | ||
| The book was the Mandate for Leadership circa 1980. | ||
| This was published by the United States. | ||
| This was published by the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| This was the original mandate for leadership. | ||
| So fast forward 40 years later, we're making the same appeal. | ||
| Look, I went to public schools K through 12. | ||
| I went on to MIT, undergrad, and graduate degrees in MIT in the University of Virginia. | ||
| My mom was a public school teacher. | ||
| My mother-in-law is a public school teacher. | ||
| You're not going to find someone who more believes in the public school system. | ||
| But I really feel it's broken. | ||
| I have four kids, and we're now having to homeschool two of them because this great system that I wouldn't be where I am today were it not for those public school teachers. | ||
| I saw so much dedication from my own mother doing this work, but the system is not working. | ||
| It needs to be put back in the control of states and localities. | ||
| And the federal mandate needs to kind of relax and be much more accountable to the parents. | ||
| What is your role today? | ||
| Do you have a role in the second Trump administration? | ||
| No, right now I'm on the outside. | ||
| I am very supportive of the work they're doing. | ||
| I just, I'm, you know, every day we wake up, it's Christmas morning. | ||
| I'm down in South Carolina. | ||
| I'm a proud citizen of South Carolina. | ||
| And I'm happy to say that there's a great buoyancy among, I think, just regular everyday Americans that President Trump is delivering on the promises. | ||
| Only a Trump, he's an iconic class. | ||
| And then when he gets into this tremendous kind of tag team duo with Elon Musk cutting through in a way that the deep state never really saw, I think it's just exciting. | ||
| And every day brings a new revelation. | ||
| Would you like to go back into the administration, if offered, would you go back in? | ||
| Well, it's always my honor to serve President Trump and the administration. | ||
| What did you do in the first term? | ||
| I first started at HUD. | ||
| I had been a longtime Trump supporter. | ||
| I worked on the campaign, but I was a New York attorney in white shoe law firms. | ||
| So I hadn't known Washington and how to navigate it. | ||
| What's a white shoe law firm? | ||
| A white shoe law firm are the guys who build $2,000 an hour. | ||
| And many of them are now suing the Trump administration. | ||
| But they're essentially high-end corporate firms. | ||
| They work for a lot of corporate America, defending them, going through regulations. | ||
| There's a big mass of them here on K-Street. | ||
| That's not to say that these are some of the most talented lawyers, but they're expensive. | ||
| And that's where I grew up in New York. | ||
| You come out of law school, you have a tremendous debt. | ||
| You really don't have much of a choice. | ||
| I didn't come from means myself. | ||
| So I basically kind of followed that trajectory. | ||
| That said, it took me two years to get into the Trump administration. | ||
| And I started at HUD in the community planning and development under Dr. Carson, which was an honor to serve. | ||
| I got a quick taste of bureaucracy and the stifling of Dr. Carson and President Trump's homelessness initiatives. | ||
| And then I moved on to the Office of Personal Management, where I was White House liaison and then Chief of Staff. | ||
| Russ Vogt now heading OPM these days? | ||
| OMB. | ||
| OMB, sorry. | ||
| Explain who Russ Vogt is and did you work with him? | ||
| Yes, Russ Vogt's one of the most talented men in the movement. | ||
| He was formerly director of OMB and the end of Trump I and now has been confirmed to be director again. | ||
| He is really in terms of Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| Okay, that's an office that works out of the office of the executive office of the president, and they are charged essentially as putting a break on the agencies and governing them with respect to their finances and the money flow. | ||
| So Russ comes from an entire background on the Hill and then later on at Heritage and really has one of the few all-encompassing views. | ||
| So I'm very excited about the work he's going to do. | ||
| He has invade himself against the deep state and I think that for a number of us this really is kind of a central mission in our life to return government to the people to let us have a handle again on this monolithic government. | ||
| Paul Dan's with us taking your phone call and it is phone lines as usual. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| And plenty of calls for you already. | ||
| Jack is up first out of Massachusetts. | ||
| Republican line. | ||
| You're on with Paul Dance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jackie. | |
| $800 per month. | ||
| What's your question or comment, Jack? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I was wondering how it would impact New England. | |
| How it would impact what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
New England. | |
| I'm in the northeastern region. | ||
| How does Project 2025, how does it all about President Trump and his team right now? | ||
| I think my family actually, my mom was the youngest of eight mill workers from Woonsocket, Rhode Island. | ||
| So I am a Quincy Mass native born there. | ||
| I have seen, you know, part of, I went to MIT, part of why I got involved in this is seeing the degradation of American industry. | ||
| And I don't think few areas in the country have felt it as rough as New England. | ||
| My uncles all went off and fought the war in World War II and came back, worked at Sikorsky and the like, but only to see their shipyards closed down and essentially their livelihoods taken. | ||
| So when President Trump talks about rebuilding America, that's all of America. | ||
| And I really think New England is going to be well poised to really get some of the benefit here. | ||
| It's going to be going back to work and being proud to be an American. | ||
| I really think that there's so much things to offer in the Northeast, particularly with the seat of education being up there. | ||
| But really a great working class of Americans that helped build this country that are going to be called upon to help rebuild it. | ||
| McDonough, Georgia Amelia is a Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Just wanted to make an observation. | ||
| During campaign, President Trump said he had nothing to do or knew anything about the Project 2025. | ||
| But just the first thing is to show you how misleading and deceptive he is. | ||
| And the one thing that this project is set out to do is disassemble the regulatory state. | ||
| This is the state that gave rise to the middle class. | ||
| And people don't do the research. | ||
| I heard this morning several people called and mentioned critical thinking skills. | ||
| You know, they are planning to destroy. | ||
| They are taking away your Medicare, your Social Security, because they want to prioritize everything. | ||
| They have us fighting against each other. | ||
| But the plan is for the rich people to take over this country. | ||
| People, please wake up, stay out of Fox News, and just try to do research and other resources. | ||
| Because when they do this, when the Congress go next week and they're trying to take the money, $2,2 trillion come out of our entitlement programs. | ||
| Our Social Security, our Medicare, and this is what they want to destroy. | ||
| One final mention, Elon Musk is nothing but a crook. | ||
| This man, he didn't start Tesla. | ||
| Two engineers started Tesla. | ||
| He invested some money and then turned around and fired the two guys. | ||
| This man ain't nothing but deception. | ||
| That's Amelia in Georgia. | ||
| Paul Dance. | ||
| Well, respectfully to the caller, she's right that the federal government and really the United States brought the middle class. | ||
| And I'm a beneficiary of that, you know, coming from working class stock. | ||
| But what's happened here is really a perversion of the federal government over the last 50 years, really longer over the progressive era. | ||
| Look, we have $50 trillion going on approaching in a national debt and a $2 trillion structural deficit. | ||
| That cost is paid by the middle class. | ||
| And then when you have a Biden regime that's basically opened the borders and flooded it, that's why the middle class is stagnating. | ||
| You bring in people, you put them on the dole, and at the same time, you're charging the interest to the Americans. | ||
| This is why your 30-something can't even afford a house. | ||
| And people are seeing these astronomical costs and not only fuel, but also car insurance and the like. | ||
| This is the freight. | ||
| It's being paid. | ||
| And why is it? | ||
| Because no one's ever checked this thing. | ||
| And that's not fair. | ||
| You know who checked it? | ||
| Was Clinton Gore. | ||
| And 40 years ago, a guy named Al Gore was sitting in the seat like myself talking about a national partnership to reinvent government to make it more efficient. | ||
| So these are not Republican ideas. | ||
| They're not Democrat ideas. | ||
| They're American ideas. | ||
| And everything over time needs to be reformed and rebuilt. | ||
| And that's really what I think somebody like Elon Musk, who is a genius of our age, he's an Edison-like figure. | ||
| No, he may not have invented it, but he took it to the level. | ||
| He realized that he's the producer. | ||
| And that's the sort of leader that really from private industry can really show dynamic change. | ||
| He makes the pie bigger for all of us. | ||
| The national debt, right now, according to U.S. debt clock, $36.5 trillion, though some projections say that $50 trillion figure not too far in the too distant future. | ||
| To the caller's other point, back to Project 2025, did it call for privatizing Social Security and Medicare? | ||
| You know, funny thing about being the former director, I get quizzed on 900 pages of the book. | ||
| You know, the thing is, Project 2025 didn't even address Social Security. | ||
| There isn't even a chapter about it. | ||
| So all the Project 2025 wants to do is about Social Security, the essence of fake news. | ||
| But, you know, really, at this point, look at Trump 47, that agenda, and President Trump, but certainly the revelations coming out of, you know, that I read a couple days ago about potentially trillions of dollars being sent overseas or to dead people. | ||
| It's going to be very interesting to see where this money trail goes. | ||
| Do you think that Elon Musk can find $2 trillion in savings in the federal government? | ||
| Well, the president's confident he'll find that $1 trillion. | ||
| Look, if you just do the math on something $7 trillion, finding $1 trillion is about 15%. | ||
| Who in our own household budgets couldn't trim off 15%? | ||
| I know I probably could if I really sat down and did it. | ||
| But what they're doing here is also bringing in the next advent, which is artificial intelligence, I believe, in some degree, but taking control of this entire system and reducing it to answers within minutes. | ||
| That's a computing power that was never really able to realize. | ||
| And I think the growth of this behemoth government took advantage of it. | ||
| No one could really ever track the money. | ||
| No one could actually ever see who it ultimately went to or how it was spent. | ||
| But now that information is capable of being assembled within minutes. | ||
| And I think that that is one of the great promises of this age. | ||
| Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this is Mark, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, hello. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| I'm just an average schmoe out in the world, so I probably will not be all that eloquent, nearly as eloquent as your guest, considering this is his business talking. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, he's an outright liar. | ||
| You asked him several times about Project 2025. | ||
| You played a clip about Trump saying he doesn't know a single thing about 2025. | ||
| And here we are in the midst of Project 2025 starting to run our country. | ||
| Everything they've been doing since Trump came in is Project 2025. | ||
| When asked about the reasons for the start of 2025, he said it's because BEMs do the same kind of thing and we didn't want to be left behind. | ||
| Your guy, he's been well educated, obviously. | ||
| He's been well taught, obviously. | ||
| He spent a lot of time talking and expressing his viewpoints, obviously. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is he's so much like the rest of the conservative movement. | ||
| He said he's not a Republican, so let's say conservative. | ||
| They now, thanks to Trump, they've been liberated to lie whenever it suits their needs, whenever it suits their purposes. | ||
| And Mark, let me give Paul Dance a chance to respond. | ||
| Well, respectfully to the caller, I don't consider myself a liar at all. | ||
| But the essence is that Project 2025 was created outside of President Trump. | ||
| Certainly it became a big thing and it was projected into the media. | ||
| So, for example, the book was downloaded 15 million times, I believe, or maybe more. | ||
| These ideas entered the bloodstream, many of which were President Trump's to start with. | ||
| So it's really hard to decipher what is Project 2025, what's President Trump. | ||
| But the only thing that's relevant now is President Trump. | ||
| But, you know, with respect to... | ||
| Do you think it's relevant that so many of the people who wrote various chapters of Project 2025 have gone into the second Trump administration? | ||
| You're not there, but we talked about Russ Vogt. | ||
| We talked about others. | ||
| No, I think it's actually part of what we have here is when we stood up Project 2025, we went to some of the most talented people in Trump term one. | ||
| And these were all volunteers. | ||
| These are real patriots who took time away from their families on weekends to sit down and record what they would like to see four years from now. | ||
| So, you know, I don't find it strange at all that President Trump would turn around and ask back a number of these folks. | ||
| But that's to say that, you know, conservatives are greatly outnumbered when it comes to governance. | ||
| Here in Washington, you have to understand the federal government votes 95% Democrat, the bureaucracy. | ||
| There's 2.2 million federal workers. | ||
| The president appoints 4,000. | ||
| That's 1 to 500. | ||
| Of those 1, many of those folks didn't even get into the position the last time. | ||
| So Project 2025 was really about nurturing people to come in and take that one in 500 spot. | ||
| And when they hit, when they got the spot, that they would know what to do. | ||
| So you're saying the other 499 are liberals, Democrats? | ||
| Well, no, but I think that you see, particularly here in Washington, where the mass of the federal government is, that the voting tallies run up to upwards of 90, 95% for Democrat candidate for president. | ||
| You see donations from a USAID bordering on 90 to 95 percent for one side. | ||
| So whether or not the people themselves, and you know, there's varying statistics. | ||
| I think over time the federal government has become much more to the left in terms of its workforce. | ||
| And that's kind of a function of America demographically in terms of cosmopolitan living in the cities versus kind of the red. | ||
| We all see the map of red versus blue. | ||
| And just for correction of the record, I am a Republican by all means. | ||
| But I, you know, conservative as well. | ||
| But, you know, I think that I would like to put myself in the category of kind of pragmatist, common sense, you know, a Trumpian, if you will. | ||
| And that's really what I think I wouldn't have been in politics if it weren't for President Trump. | ||
| Lancaster, Ohio, Jenny, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I had a question about Medicaid, but I wanted to say this. | ||
| You know, I know the Constitution, but I forgot a lot. | ||
| So I spent a year on relearning it. | ||
| And I think if, you know, you're not going to understand the laws if you don't know the Constitution. | ||
| And I think if people would know the Constitution, they would relax and know what's going on. | ||
| What is going on is really good. | ||
| They're cutting costs. | ||
| Jenny, what in the Constitution brings you comfort? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, if you understand the amendments and if you understand, you're not going to understand the laws if you don't understand the Constitution. | |
| Everything is based on the Constitution. | ||
| Paul Dance, anything you want to add? | ||
| Well, I commend the caller precisely. | ||
| The Constitution is what has given us this freedom and liberty. | ||
| And we're going now on 250-year birthday here in a couple years. | ||
| It's time for a constitutional attic cleaning, which is essentially what President Trump's undertaken. | ||
| You know, we have three branches of government, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. | ||
| But over the last 100 years, a fourth unelectable, unelected, unaccountable branch called the administrative state has grown up. | ||
| And it's really important, as the caller points out, that you understand President Trump works in Article II in the executive branch. | ||
| But the vesting of the power in Article II, Section 1, Clause 1, is purely in a president. | ||
| That is, the executive power of the United States is vested in a president, period. | ||
| So what's happening now is really a constitutional reanchoring back to these precepts that have ensured liberty for the last 250 years. | ||
| early days of the Trump administration, Democratic members of Congress will say that Donald Trump is trying to usurp their powers under Article I, controlling the purse strings with some of his decisions, his efforts to claw back money that Congress has appropriated for various projects, impound money. | ||
| Congress controls the purse strings and Donald Trump is trying to say where the money should go. | ||
| Well, here, you know, President Trump's in charge of executing the law and fulfilling what Congress has ordered. | ||
| The flip side to that is you see here with the Stacey Abrams news and the EPA, essentially a wholesale, I don't know, almost shifting of the money outside the government, $20 billion. | ||
| And this is just one instance. | ||
| It's very important that we reframe the political powers. | ||
| Over time, Congress has what we call unduly delegated its authority to this administrative state. | ||
| They've not made regulations and they've not enforced taking away bad regulations and that growth has really stalled the economy. | ||
| President Trump, as commander-in-chief, as chief executive officer, and as the chief legal officer, that is the magistrate of the United States, he is in charge of the executive branch. | ||
| So this idea that post-Watergate, that there could be checks and balances from within the executive branch, that is an independent DOJ, is a fallacious one. | ||
| And I think that that's one of the key things that President Trump is reforming the executive branch. | ||
| Is this the story you're referring to? | ||
| This is the New York Post headline, but there's others. | ||
| Lee Zeldon, EPA administrator, discovers $2 billion stashed away by Biden administration for Stacey Abrams-linked climate groups. | ||
| It's extraordinary. | ||
| Apparently it's up to 20 billion, 10 groups or so, that the money was, you know, they saw President Trump coming, and six months ago, there was a lot of what they call Trump-proofing of the government. | ||
| That was idea to hustle the money out the door and keep Democrat nest feathered for the next four years. | ||
| But the level, I don't think anybody could really contemplate this. | ||
| The facts really come to fore. | ||
| This is $2 billion being given to an organization that had never received more than $100. | ||
| So it's extraordinary to just think, yeah, $2 billion, that's a drip in the bucket. | ||
| I heard a caller earlier this morning saying that. | ||
| But, you know, $1,000 billion is a trillion. | ||
| And that's where we start. | ||
| But certainly, like, when you go at these kind of wholesale, I don't want to use the term theft, but that's what it's appearing to be. | ||
| You know, we have to look and find this all over the United States government. | ||
| And I believe it exists. | ||
| Belcher, Kentucky is next. | ||
| This is Tommy, Line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Glad to talk to you again. | ||
| The thing I look at is common sense. | ||
| I'm not college-educated or nothing like that, but I do have common sense. | ||
| A man like Trump gets up there and lies about everything in the world. | ||
| And Project 25, they want the rich to get it all. | ||
| And the people, I worked all my life. | ||
| I went in the military. | ||
| I done everything that they said at the time. | ||
| And I was born in 48. | ||
| And at the time I grew up, I'd done everything that they told me I needed to do that when I got old, I could relax and get my social security through Mr. Roosevelt, Hoover about killed us. | ||
| Now, people don't think back on all this stuff. | ||
| They don't think back about Donald Trump telling all these lies. | ||
| He wasn't connected with them. | ||
| He didn't know of them. | ||
| He lied. | ||
| He lied about paying the porn star. | ||
| He's a born liar. | ||
| And Project 25, all they do is sit back. | ||
| That dude look as smug as he can be at his little education. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Tommy. | ||
| Paul Danson. | ||
| Give you a chance to respond. | ||
| Well, I commend the caller for his life of work. | ||
| And he's the sort that really built this country. | ||
| I mean, I came from the same sort of folks, and I aspire to be that same person. | ||
| That is, the caller should understand that a lot of the promise, his future, was robbed from him by inflation. | ||
| And inflation is driven by excessive government spending. | ||
| That is, the Liberal Party, the Democrats, have, you spend $300 billion in Ukraine, and we don't know the ostensible national interest that is. | ||
| Someone has to pay for it. | ||
| Who pays for it? | ||
| It's when this caller goes to the gas pump. | ||
| It's when he goes to the pharmacy and has to pay for his prescription drugs. | ||
| All these costs end up somewhere and they get balanced on your back, sir. | ||
| When this money starts being spent properly and much more efficiently, you're going to get the future you've always been promised. | ||
| But as far as President Trump, no, I do not believe he's a liar one bit. | ||
| I feel that he's been the sole victim of the greatest misinformation campaign from the second he came down the escalator to today. | ||
| So Project 2025 is a thing of the past. | ||
| Right now, focus on what President Trump and his team are doing. | ||
| And it's extraordinary. | ||
| Project 2025 is a thing of the past? | ||
| Well, you know, it was, you know, there's elements of it. | ||
| And I should say, again, I didn't work at the Heritage Foundation, but the work was in the main completed. | ||
| And I believe it's a resource that the public can always look at. | ||
| But right now, the most important thing is what President Trump and his team are doing. | ||
| And they are taking things I never could have dared to dream. | ||
| My folks used to do quotes around the house. | ||
| And my mom was, she was what you'd call, you know, she could do needlepoint knitting, whatever. | ||
| I remember this Longfellow needle point that she had up. | ||
| It said, give what you have. | ||
| It may be better than you dare to think. | ||
| And that's essentially how I think of Project 2025. | ||
| We brought into the bloodstream that change was needed, that it's either us or the administrative state. | ||
| And I'd say us, the people. | ||
| And what President Trump and his team are doing is something really kind of beyond the contemplation, I think, of even a lot of us that we dare to dream. | ||
| The federal workforce as of 2024 was a little over 2 million federal workers, is that correct? | ||
| Maybe 2.2. | ||
| What do you think is the ideal number for a federal workforce? | ||
| Well, you know, it's also the federal contracting force is about 15 million, so there's a huge penumbra about that, the total, and that's non-military with the 2.2. | ||
| Look, when we would talk about Project 2025, I actually, part of my stump speech was turning to Elon Musk for inspiration and what he had done at X and Twitter. | ||
| And I would say, well, we don't intend to cut 80% because that's reportedly what he was able to do, and it hums along. | ||
| The reality, though, is there's a lot of redundancy. | ||
| I don't know what percentage it is, and they're discovering it. | ||
| But anytime any organization hasn't gone through essentially a house cleaning in 40 years, you're going to find just enormous inefficiencies. | ||
| Why wasn't that house cleaning done in the first administration, first Trump administration? | ||
| Well, you know, they hit him out of the bat with the bogus Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, and they had him on his back feet. | ||
| And that, you know, look, this whole weaponization of government is the deep state. | ||
| You know, when I came on here, I guess 18 months ago, a caller was like, there is no deep state, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Well, what's happened in the last 18 months? | ||
| The New York Times actually came out and said, yes, there is a deep state and it's a good thing. | ||
| And now we're like talking every day about draining the swamp in the deep state. | ||
| But the deep state is the group that constructs this Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. | ||
| The deep state is the one that trots out, you know, the vaccine, the jab, and the lockdown. | ||
| And people, you know, the J6 kind of psyop. | ||
| So a lot of that, people are taking a massive red pill with Trump. | ||
| And I think you see, and I know this on the ground from my own experience, people who are, you know, center left went through COVID and just really reassessed what the role of government is in their life and really saw some, you know, over time, some really disturbing decisions by the federal government. | ||
| So I think we're at a great age here for reform. | ||
| I'd encourage liberals to basically join a hand. | ||
| Like, the thing that's boxed in a lot of the left is that everybody wants things more efficient. | ||
| You know, like, tell me why you wouldn't want to save $2 billion, like, even if it's $2 billion. | ||
| So what Trump is doing is very, very popular. | ||
| And I think the left, in terms of the fake newsing about Project 2025, that's over. | ||
| You lost, and you lost bigly on that. | ||
| Now is probably the time for them to almost kind of look at, look critically and start cutting themselves. | ||
| And you see that with Galvin Newsom. | ||
| He reportedly kept a copy, a highlighted copy of the book on his desk. | ||
| And he's actually appropriating the ideas. | ||
| Look, these ideas were not meant for a Republican president. | ||
| They were meant for any president. | ||
| We thought there would be more receptivity with a conservative. | ||
| But a lot of those ideas in the main are common sense. | ||
| About five minutes left with Paul Danz this morning taking your phone calls. | ||
| This is Clara, Wayne City, Illinois, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| It's Carla. | ||
| Carla, go ahead, Carla. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I didn't hear nothing about Project 2025 until it came out like two months before President Trump was elected. | |
| But I was wondering how come nobody's ever addressed the federal prison system and how much we spend. | ||
| We spend almost $43 billion on our federal prison system. | ||
| It's $33,500 per person in prison to keep for a year. | ||
| That means it's $120 a day. | ||
| And I don't know why nothing's been addressed about that. | ||
| That's a lot of money to go into the prison system, state and federal. | ||
| Paul? | ||
| The caller is exactly right. | ||
| That's something I hope that I'm in, and I believe they will get to. | ||
| President Trump was a great advocate of criminal justice reform. | ||
| And the prison system, like all particularly aspects of the administrative state, has been neglected. | ||
| It really does need a top-down assessment, reassessment. | ||
| And I think that's coming, especially in the wake of what happened to the J6 hostages, if you will. | ||
| These were abominable conditions. | ||
| These were against really the rights of man and Magna Carta being held without charge, without trial for years in solitary confinement. | ||
| So I think a lot of those outrages will give rise to a reform in the federal prison system. | ||
| In a few minutes, we're going to head to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference taking place here in D.C. Guests are gathering their C-SPAN coverage beginning in just a little bit, showing you some of the speakers this morning and also this afternoon until that begins your phone calls, this conversation with Paul Dance, Section 5 of Project 2025, Independent Regulatory Agencies, four different chapters about that. | ||
| Viewers can see it on their screen. | ||
| Then want to show this headline from the Washington Times today. | ||
| Donald Trump seeks to exert control over independent agencies. | ||
| We're talking the FTC, SEC, FCC. | ||
| What's an independent agency? | ||
| Well, that's really a good question. | ||
| I think it's a fiction is what it is. | ||
| It's unconstitutional at base, but it's an outgrowth of the progressive era, which was really, you know, the idea with the progressive era was that a few elites, elite cadre of people, of experts, would organize life for the rest of us. | ||
| And independent agencies were essentially a usurpation of the president's executive power, investing it in a new group that would essentially be less accountable to political control. | ||
| So I think, you know, where you see that, some of them certainly have existed well and have performed much more ably than others. | ||
| But overall, the notion needs to be challenged. | ||
| And that's what I believe the administration is going to do. | ||
| In your mind, who's the most able independent agency and who's the least able? | ||
| Well, you know, things like the CFPB are just complete Consumer Financial Protection Board. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You know, that's basically been just a leftist grab bag exerting, you know, stealing basically regulatory powers from other areas of the government, the Treasury Department, the commerce and the like, and vesting them in an unaccountable agency which exacts major penalties against industry and then doles out that money to their own causes. | ||
| So that's one of the worst offenders. | ||
| You know, I think that we have done well with the Securities and Exchange Commission and others, but they have a lot more accountability, I believe, electorally to the president. | ||
| So there's a spectrum there, to be sure. | ||
| What's your view of the Federal Reserve? | ||
| Federal Reserve, you know, that it has been independent, and that's a major touchstone. | ||
| That's like a third rail live. | ||
| I do think that the president's correct in saying that ultimately the Secretary of the Treasury and the President should be able to guide the economy and the Federal Reserve needs to kind of work in tandem with them, not against the president. | ||
| Unfortunately, the last four to 10 years, we've seen a very politicized Federal Reserve making interest rates kind of a function of upcoming elections. | ||
| And I think that that's kind of damaged their credibility. | ||
| Time for just one or two more calls. | ||
| This is Steve. | ||
| Thanks for waiting in Lexington Park, Maryland. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| I have a very simple question to ask this gentleman here. | ||
| Why, first thing, I've been around for 71 years, so I've seen a lot of presidents. | ||
| I can remember President Eisenhower going back there. | ||
| My question to this person is, why are you supporting a criminal, a felon? | ||
| He is a disgrace to the presidency. | ||
| Why are you supporting a criminal for president? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Paul Dance, give you the final 60 seconds. | ||
| Well, I think Donald Trump is really one of the great dynamic leaders, really, in American history. | ||
| I think that you've seen somebody who took private sector expertise, but always caring about the little guy. | ||
| But the other half of my family grew up in a cold water flat in New York City. | ||
| So we built that town doing all the dirty jobs. | ||
| And it wasn't until somebody like Trump came along that pulled that city out of its malaise in the late 70s and really made New Yorkers begin to believe again. | ||
| What he did with the Walman Rink in four months was something that municipal government couldn't do in 10 years. | ||
| So you see somebody who just has this perception to cut to the core. | ||
| Look, the felon stuff is so erroneous. | ||
| That was one of the great stains on our judicial history. | ||
| And I think that's going to be coming out more and more. | ||
| But, you know, as far as the tagline, I'd encourage the left to really look at the caliber of this man. | ||
| And somebody who gets up off the mat and says, fight, fight, fight. | ||
| That's an indomitable spirit. | ||
| That's what made America great, and it's going to make America great again. | ||
| We're going to have to end it there today. | ||
| Paul Dance, appreciate your time. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| That's going to do it for us on the Washington Journal. | ||
| We're back here tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern, 4 a.m. Pacific. | ||
| We now take you over to CPAC. | ||
| Live coverage begins here on C-SPAN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A live look now at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference being held near the nation's capital. | |
| In just a moment, Vice President JD Vance will sit down for an interview with conservative commentator and host of the conference, Mercedes Schlapp. | ||
| You are watching live coverage of CPAC here on C-SPAN. | ||
| And you're looking at a live picture of the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference being held at National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of the nation's capital. | ||
| We are waiting for someone to come up on stage. | ||
| Later this afternoon, we expect to hear from House Speaker Mike Johnson, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and former Trump administration advisor Steve Bannon. | ||
| During this four-day event, multiple Republican lawmakers and conservative advocates are scheduled to deliver remarks. | ||
| You can watch our live coverage of CPAC here on C-SPAN on our free mobile app, C-SPANNOW, or our website, c-span.org. | ||
| Becky Pringle is the president of the National Education Association, one of the country's largest labor unions representing teachers, those in the education field. | ||
| And Ms. Pringle, in about two hours, the Senate Health Education and Labor Committee is going to hold a vote on whether to advance Linda McMahon's nomination to be education secretary. | ||
| If you were voting, how would you vote? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would vote no. | |
| Why? | ||
| I actually had the opportunity to be in the hearing, and I wanted to go so I could listen to her answers. | ||
| And she did nothing to assure teachers and educators who work in our schools every day that she was going to protect them from the cuts that the Trump administration is proposing, that she would do nothing to protect the most vulnerable students in our schools, our students with disabilities, 95% of them go to public schools, that she would do nothing to protect their civil rights. | ||
| All of those specific jobs that the federal government in education plays. | ||
| And so I would say to you that it left a chilling effect on educators all around this country, scrambling about what they could and could not teach and whether their school would lose funding because they were teaching it. | ||
| Thinking about how they would have to stand in even more gaps to make up for gaps that already exist for our kids, and we know teachers do that all the time. | ||
| So I left the hearing not having confidence that she was qualified for the job and certainly that she was going to take care of our most vulnerable kids. | ||
| You talk about the cuts that Donald Trump wants to make in this area. | ||
| He's even talked about eliminating the entire Department of Education. | ||
| Let me give viewers a sense of some of that hearing that you attended. | ||
| Linda McMahon answering some questions on that front. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order requiring the Secretary of Education to develop a plan for downsizing the Department of Education and working with Congress to eliminate entirely. | |
| Yes or no, do you agree that since the department was created by Congress, it would need an act of Congress to actually close the Department of Education? | ||
| And certainly President Trump understands that we'll be working with Congress. | ||
| We'd like to do this right. | ||
| We'd like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with and our Congress could get on board with that would have a better functioning Department of Education, but certainly does require congressional action. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And in terms of the plans to downsize, what would be the components of that plan that would not require congressional approval? | ||
| Well, I do believe, Senator, that there are departments of education that are established by statute. | ||
| And those particular departments we'd have to pay particular attention to. | ||
| But long before there was a Department of Education, we fulfilled the programs of our educational system. | ||
| Are there other areas, other agencies where parts of the Department of Education could better serve our students and our parents on a local level? | ||
| And I am really all for the President's mission, which is to return education to the states. | ||
| I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child and not certainly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If it is downsized, would the states and localities still receive the federal funding which they currently receive? | |
| Yes. | ||
| It is not the President's goal to defund the programs. | ||
| It is only to have it operate more efficiently. | ||
| Becky Pringle, play out what you think would happen if the Department of Education is downsized in the ways that they were discussing there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We know that every level of government has responsibility in the education of our students, the federal government, the state, and localities as well. | |
| Our school boards, all of them play a role. | ||
| If the U.S. Department of Education was downsized, we know that there are vital services that our students wouldn't get. | ||
| I was talking to a parent from Virginia, actually, who was concerned because they depend on the services that the Department of Education provides for her student with special needs. | ||
| And we know that the federal government actually, the funding from the federal government supplies over 420,000 jobs, almost a half a million jobs. | ||
| So we know that if those jobs aren't there, that class sizes are going to balloon. | ||
| We know that that one-on-one attention that students need will not be there. | ||
| And it will affect our most vulnerable students, those who are living in poverty, those who have disabilities. |