| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Flash of tight. | |
| Thank you so much, Peter. | ||
| Keep up the great work. | ||
| All Q&A programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Charter Communications. | ||
| Charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers. | ||
| And we're just getting started, building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. | ||
| Charter Communications supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, your calls and comments live. | ||
| And then we'll talk with Daniela Diaz of Notice about the week ahead in Congress and Republicans' work with the Trump administration on advancing its legislative agenda. | ||
| And we'll continue the conversation on White House News of the Day with Washington Post White House reporter Kat Zakreski. | ||
| Also, Dawn Royal and Andrew McClanahan of the United Council on Welfare Fraud discuss efforts to track fraud and abuse in public assistance programs and the role of Doge. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Monday, February 24th, 2025. | ||
| The House is in at noon Eastern today. | ||
| The Senate returns at 3 p.m. | ||
| And we're with you for the next three hours. | ||
| We begin with Elon Musk's directive to federal employees to detail what they did last week. | ||
| According to an email sent Saturday, federal employees have until midnight tonight to respond with a list of five accomplishments from last week. | ||
| Failure to reply, Mr. Musk said, will be taken as a resignation. | ||
| We're getting your reaction this morning, beginning with a special line for federal employees. | ||
| 202-748-8003 is that number. | ||
| Otherwise, phone lines, as usual, Republicans, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also send us a text and 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 Monday morning to you. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling in now. | ||
| It all began on Saturday with a tweet from Elon Musk saying that consistent with the president's instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week, saying failure to respond will be taken as a resignation. | ||
| That email went out on Saturday afternoon. | ||
| Jay O'Brien of ABC News with an image of what that email said. | ||
| Please reply to this email with approximately five bullets of what you accomplished last week and CC your manager. | ||
| Do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. | ||
| And the deadline set for Monday today at 1159 p.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| That email getting a lot of reaction within federal employee agencies. | ||
| Here's the front page of today's Wall Street Journal agencies pushing back over the Musk ultimatum. | ||
| One more headline from the New York Times this morning. | ||
| That headline, federal standoff, as some agencies urge their staff not to obey Elon Musk's order. | ||
| Was also the subject of plenty of conversation on the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| Chris Van Holland, Democrat from Maryland, a state with a lot of federal employees, was on Face the Nation. | ||
| Here's what he had to say. | ||
| So there was this email that went out yesterday to federal employees. | ||
| We know that at the FBI and the State Department, management inside those agencies have told employees, don't respond to the personnel email saying respond with your five bullet points. | ||
| Can people working at the State Department feel safe not responding? | ||
| Are they putting their jobs at risk? | ||
| I don't think so because what we are witnessing are illegal actions by Elon Musk. | ||
| And a number of courts, as you know, have issued temporary restraining orders on their efforts to seize important private information, but also on their overall conduct. | ||
| So what the head of management, the State Department, said is Elon Musk doesn't have the authority to require State Department employees to answer these questions. | ||
| That has to happen in the chain of the command. | ||
| Even though the president says he wants them to be more aggressive. | ||
| So the reality is we don't know what President meant, but as you pointed out, you've got Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to the federal government and important services. | ||
| And there's no Article 4 in the Constitution that gives Elon Musk that authority. | ||
| And the way that he's been sort of, quote, delegated this authority is illegal. | ||
| And the actions he's taking are illegal. | ||
| And we need to shut down this illegal operation. | ||
| Chris Van Holland on Face the Nation yesterday, Elon Musk following up with tweets in response to some of the reaction that this email has gotten, saying at one point yesterday that this email is a very basic pulse check. | ||
| He went on to say the reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their emails at all. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal with a little bit more background in their reporting about how this all came together and why it happened this weekend from their story today, their front page story. | ||
| Elon Musk plan came together in a matter of hours on Saturday, they report. | ||
| That, according to people familiar with the situation, earlier in the day, President Trump posted a social media tweet that said he wanted the Tesla chief executive to get more aggressive with his role. | ||
| In response, Musk and his team at Doge sent the What Did You Do last Week email, according to the people the Wall Street Journal interviewed. | ||
| Musk and Doge officials then communicated the concept to the Office of Personnel Management, the human resources arm of the federal government, which sent the email to some 2 million federal workers on Saturday evening. | ||
| Musk said in his post on X announcing the email that it is consistent with Donald Trump's instructions. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal this morning. | ||
| We want to hear from you, especially federal employees. | ||
| 202748-8003 is the number for federal employees this morning. | ||
| Otherwise, phone lines as usual, Republicans, Democrats, Independents setting aside this first segment of the Washington Journal today to talk about this effort, this latest effort from the Department of Government Efficiency. | ||
| Tim's up first out of Fairview, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Line for Republicans. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't think this is unreasonable at all. | |
| I think of many professions and occupations. | ||
| I made my entire career almost 40 years in sales. | ||
| And we had to do call reports. | ||
| At the end of the day, at least at the end of the week, you wrote down all of your sales calls and what was discussed on the sales call and what are your action items. | ||
| And I think of like nurses and doctors in the medical profession, they jaw everything down. | ||
| Everything has to be accounted for. | ||
| Even, you know, the FedEx guy comes up to the house, he drops a package off, and they get on their devices, and they put in, they input information. | ||
| There are dozens and dozens of occupations and professions where people have to account for and note what they did on the job. | ||
| I don't think what they're asking of the federal employees is that I think it's minuscule compared to other occupations. | ||
| And that's my point. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Tim in Pennsylvania. | ||
| This is Deacon, a Democrat here in D.C. Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| And I think that the process by which they're shrinking down government is one that's somewhat draconian, but necessary. | ||
| Now, where the real crux of the matter is, or the real issue is the unintended incidentals that are going to take place. | ||
| Look at a guy like in somewhere in a rural part of America, like in Appalachia, who works at some type of steel mill or some kind of metals plant that gets contracted by the federal government. | ||
| Well, if he just got hired and he has three hungry mouths to feed, this guy is going to be X'd out because X'd out because he was just brought into the system under the contracting system. | ||
| So therefore, they're going to cut him out so that you can save money on the budget or reduce waste. | ||
| So, you know, you got to, the inconsequential incidentals is what's really affecting me. | ||
| I got concerned about that. | ||
| I mean, Musk doesn't even wash his own dishes. | ||
| Trump doesn't even change his own tires. | ||
| They don't know what it's like to get dirt up under their fingernails during work. | ||
| So really, come on, guys. | ||
| There's some sane people, Democrat and Republican, that are on here that we can settle the matter, call God's vertical down to our horizontal, then we'll be able to settle the matter with man. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| Come on, guys. | ||
| That's Deacon in Washington, D.C. On some of the numbers that we're talking about here in his column today in the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Justin Layhart goes through the federal workforce numbers and some of these layoffs that have happened already and potential for more. | ||
| As of January, the U.S. government had 2.4 million civilian employees, excluding the Postal Service. | ||
| That accounts for about 1.5% of total non-farm jobs. | ||
| When President Trump took office, he ordered a hiring freeze, and then Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency announced a deferred resignation offer to nearly all full-time federal civilian servants, saying that if they didn't want to work, they could be paid through September. | ||
| The White House has said about 75,000 people accepted that offer. | ||
| And then on February 14th, the House began firing workers who are still on their probationary period after getting hiring, hired or promoted. | ||
| He says, if you add up the 75,000 resignations to the 200,000 fired probationary employees and perhaps 200,000 people for a usual year of attrition of the federal workforce, the federal employment might drop by 475,000 jobs or about 20% of the total. | ||
| Those are some of the estimates of the numbers that could happen. | ||
| The federal workforce, again, about 1.5% of the total non-farm jobs here in the United States. | ||
| This is Douglas in Southfield, Michigan, Independent. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, how you doing? | |
| Doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's good. | |
| I got a two-part question. | ||
| The first part is this. | ||
| Whenever you do an audit of any type of business, I don't care what it is, whether it's a tech, grocery store, or whatever, you send in CPAs. | ||
| You don't send in programmers. | ||
| Why would you send in a programmer that doesn't know anything about how that particular organization runs? | ||
| So, what is the point of them having their laptops and loading software that we don't know what the software is on these different organization computers? | ||
| And, second, how can a tech guy cut government workers by saying you're fired? | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| It seems to me that half of America has given up on America. | ||
| We still are a country that is ruled by laws. | ||
| So, what are we saying that all of us should just forget the laws, run traffic lights? | ||
| You know, there's no law and order no more. | ||
| We need a president that's able to stand up with a rule of law. | ||
| That's Douglas in Southfield, Michigan. | ||
| This is Albert in Kalamazoo, Michigan. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, none of this stuff that Trump and Musk are doing is legal. | |
| I mean, all cuts, if you don't like a government agency, you have to pass a law in Congress to get rid of that agency or to cut that agency. | ||
| So, none of this is constitutional. | ||
| Congress has to do the cutting. | ||
| Trump doesn't want to go to Congress. | ||
| I don't think many of these cuts would pass Congress. | ||
| And to me, the bottom line is they're not that interested in saving money. | ||
| They want to destroy the federal government. | ||
| That's what Musk wants to do. | ||
| I think Trump wants to do that. | ||
| And so you've got all these agencies that they don't like. | ||
| And it's surprising, what? | ||
| They don't like the Postal Service. | ||
| They don't like the FAA. | ||
| They don't like the FDA. | ||
| They don't like the CDC. | ||
| And so they're doing all this unconstitutional, authoritarian, fascist-like cuts. | ||
| It's just, it's horrible. | ||
| It should be stopped. | ||
| That's Albert in Michigan. | ||
| President Trump was at the Conservative Political Action Conference, took place here in Washington, D.C. last week. | ||
| He spoke on Saturday about his efforts to streamline the federal government. | ||
| This is what he had to say: We're removing all of the unnecessary, incompetent, and corrupt bureaucrats from the federal workforce. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| And under the buyouts, we offered federal employees more than 75,000 federal bureaucrats, think of that, have voluntarily agreed to surrender their taxpayer-funded jobs. | ||
| We want to make government smaller, more efficient. | ||
| We want to keep the best people, and we're not going to keep the worst people. | ||
| And you know, we're doing another thing. | ||
| If they don't report for work, we're firing them. | ||
| In other words, you have to go to office. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Look at her. | ||
| If you don't report to work, you know, that's another scam. | ||
| I was President Trump on Saturday at CPAC. | ||
| By the way, if you want to watch C-SPAN's coverage of CPAC, you can do so on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Taking your phone calls this morning, though, on that email to all federal employees. | ||
| What did you do last week? | ||
| Talking about the week of President's Day last week. | ||
| It was a four-day work week for the federal government. | ||
| And that email going out on Saturday asking federal employees to respond with a list of five bullet points of what they did last week. | ||
| The deadline is tonight at midnight, according to the instructions given to those 2.4 million federal employees. | ||
| This is David, Democrat, in Florida. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I'd like to ask you a question there, if I may. | ||
| As one of the hosts for C-SPAN, can you see yourself hosting the program, say, back when President Obama was in office and he appointed, say, someone like Lewis Farrakhan to be the overseer of Dodge? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I mean, can you even imagine that? | |
| So, David, I'm hosting this morning and asking for what you think about this email to federal employees responding with what they did at work last week. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think he doesn't have very much authority to do anything. | |
| That's my whole point. | ||
| That, I mean, he walks around saying, wanting people to respond to him. | ||
| He doesn't have as much authority as I do. | ||
| I mean, from the way I understand it. | ||
| That's the reason I posed the question that, like I put it, what if Obama had appointed Louis Farrakhan? | ||
| Do you think the country would have stood by and allowed that to happen? | ||
| That's David in Florida. | ||
| This is William, also in Florida, Riverview. | ||
| Good morning, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Go ahead, William. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I would like to say that I agree with Trump. | |
| Years ago, when I worked in sales, I worked for a tobacco company. | ||
| I worked for some food service companies. | ||
| I traveled. | ||
| I was a regional manager. | ||
| And I had to account, just like these people do. | ||
| I had to fill out reports. | ||
| They wanted to know where I've been, who I talked to, and I had to do it. | ||
| And one time I did, and I falsified it. | ||
| Yeah, and I put down a bad report and I got fired. | ||
| So I agree with what Trump's doing. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are obviously, it happens everywhere, are not doing their job, and they're just waste, just like Trump said. | ||
| So I think they should be held accountable. | ||
| And if they're doing their job and doing the right thing, I don't see what the problem is, why they're scared to fill out a questionnaire of what they've been doing. | ||
| A lot of people are scared because there is a lot of waste. | ||
| And I just wanted to say that this morning, and I agree with Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's William in Florida, Elon Musk saying yesterday that this is a very trivial task. | ||
| Lisa Murkowski, the Republican sender of Alaska, had this to say about this effort that came up this weekend. | ||
| If Elon Musk truly wants to understand what federal workers accomplished over the past week, he should get to know each department and agency and learn about the jobs that he's trying to cut. | ||
| Our public servants work hard to ensure that our national security is protected, that planes land safely, that forest virus does not spread to our homes, that social security checks arrive on time, that research for the breakthroughs needed to cure diseases like cancer and ALS continues, and much more. | ||
| Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs that they perform. | ||
| The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn't it. | ||
| The Senator Republican sender from Alaska, a phone line for federal employees this morning. | ||
| It's 202-748-8003. | ||
| If you want to share your reaction and how and if you have responded, again, we will bump up those calls when and if you call in. | ||
| In the meantime, this is Robert Waldorf, Maryland Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, sir. | |
| I cannot tell you over the last two years how many federal workers have been on the golf course. | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| I'm on the golf course. | ||
| These guys are on the golf course playing golf, getting paid. | ||
| You're sitting here, you watch these guys for the past four years. | ||
| They have shown that 90% of the federal workforce has sat home, Which is showing you that the federal government is bloated. | ||
| To watch Trump cut this government is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. | ||
| To watch these people in this area lose their minds is great. | ||
| They do nothing for us. | ||
| The biggest cut I think Trump could make right now that the American people would get behind is to change the name on the FBI building to the Donald J. Trump FBI building. | ||
| If we could do that, we could cut a bunch of money. | ||
| And the last thing I'd like to point out to you, John, Donald Trump, and there's a law out there that states no president can run for no more than two consecutive terms. | ||
| Well, Donald Trump would be eligible for a second term in 2028. | ||
| So run in 2028, Trump, and keep kicking their butt. | ||
| We love it out here. | ||
| That's Robert in Waldorf, Maryland. | ||
| You mentioned the FBI, Kash Patel, the FBI director, writing in an email to federal employees this weekend in the wake of this email that went out about five bullet points about what they did. | ||
| The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, telling workers that they should for now please pause any responses at the Justice Department and the FBI. | ||
| The threatening signals for Musk, as New York Times writes, were met with a mix of anger and amazement that anyone would issue such a blanket demand without consideration for the sensitive areas such as criminal investigations, such as legal confidentiality, or grand jury materials. | ||
| Some law enforcement supervisors advisors have quickly told their employees to wait for more guidance from managers coming today before responding to the email, according to some of the officials interviewed by the New York Times. | ||
| The headline of that story, federal standoff as some agencies urge their staff not to obey Donald, to obey Elon Musk's order, is how they put it in the New York Times. | ||
| This is Chris, a federal employee, Springfield, Virginia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| Hi, yes. | ||
| My name is Chris. | ||
| I am a federal employee. | ||
| And as regards to the Elon Musk email, I mean, I do that all the time already. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I have a supervisor. | ||
| So, you know, people think that government workers aren't doing anything. | ||
| That is just not true. | ||
| I report every week to my supervisor. | ||
| Every year I have to report everything I did in the entire year. | ||
| So this isn't really an issue. | ||
| The issue is, why are they asking this from everybody in all agencies and not through their senior management? | ||
| I mean, that's what an agency is. | ||
| So I just don't get it. | ||
| What sort of guidance have you gotten this weekend, Chris, about if, how to respond? | ||
| Have you gotten any guidance from your supervisor or higher up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not yet, but we will. | |
| They've already told us we will. | ||
| So, but yeah, I have five things I did last week, and I only worked three days last week because we were on holiday on Monday, and I was on leave on Thursday. | ||
| So that's not the issue. | ||
| The issue isn't I can't report what I did because I didn't do anything. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| It's just that I don't know what this is all about. | ||
| I don't know who's going to get it. | ||
| I don't know why they need to know. | ||
| You know, they should be talking to their agency heads, not people like me, right? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I do my job and that's what I do, just like everybody else. | ||
| Chris, when Elon Musk says on X that this is a pulse check for federal employees to make sure that they're even checking their emails, it's a trivial task. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I check my emails constantly. | |
| I check my email all weekend long. | ||
| I saw this when it came in. | ||
| What do you think I was doing? | ||
| I mean, I've been on my email Every day, probably for years. | ||
| That's just what you do. | ||
| It's what the job is. | ||
| So I don't get any of this. | ||
| Chris? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know what they think they're going to find, I guess. | |
| How long do you mind saying how long you've been with the federal government? | ||
| And has this made you rethink your federal service or no? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to probably consider, you know, retiring early. | |
| I've been working for the federal government for about 34 years. | ||
| I do what I do very well. | ||
| I know what I'm doing. | ||
| I have a lot of education to do what I do. | ||
| So it's a loss for the government if I go, I suppose. | ||
| But again, we're not getting, this is not a good atmosphere to work in, okay? | ||
| It's really hard to stay on your mission, get your work done, and feel good when all you hear is all this nasty, horrible, oh, guys are playing golf. | ||
| I don't play golf during the work week. | ||
| I don't actually play golf. | ||
| I'm sorry, I couldn't afford that. | ||
| You know, I just don't see why people don't understand that we're human beings too. | ||
| We're your neighbors. | ||
| We go to your stores. | ||
| We get our cars fixed at the car places. | ||
| You know, we're just normal people, right? | ||
| I just happened to work in this profession, and I liked it until now, actually. | ||
| This is the worst I've ever experienced. | ||
| I mean, it's just horrible when what you do is not respected. | ||
| It's not honored. | ||
| It's not even, it's basically you're being turned into a criminal for doing your job. | ||
| And that makes people feel terrible. | ||
| Chris, thanks for the call from Springfield, Virginia. | ||
| Al is in Plymouth, Mass, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You know, first of all, I want to remind everyone, Bill Clinton went before Congress and said the era of big government is over. | ||
| Did everyone forget that in the 1990s? | ||
| Meanwhile, the bureaucracy just blumbers along. | ||
| Right away, 70,000 employees decided to take an early buyout. | ||
| Well, how important can their job be? | ||
| How virtuous and holy is their work every day if they don't feel they need to stay there? | ||
| I mean, you have everyone's gone to the division of motor vehicles. | ||
| That hasn't changed in 50 years. | ||
| But these billionaires that everyone seems to hate has allowed us to press a button on our device and get a package this afternoon. | ||
| Meanwhile, the post office is losing money. | ||
| So it's, you know, this whole promise of the great society under Lyndon Johnson, where is the great society? | ||
| A $36 trillion failure. | ||
| Liberals, we have tried it your way. | ||
| It hasn't worked. | ||
| Your grandkids are $36 trillion in the hole. | ||
| Apple just announced this morning they're making investment in America due to the tariffs. | ||
| 20,000 new, high-paying jobs. | ||
| So let's trust the process. | ||
| Trust this process of ending this era of big government like your shiny thing, Bill Clinton, said in the 1990s. | ||
| That's Al. | ||
| This is John, a federal employee in Middleburg, Florida. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| So I have to agree that, you know, the email that comes out and everybody is up in arms because, well, what am I doing? | ||
| What am I doing? | ||
| Well, I've worked for the federal government multifaceted for a long time. | ||
| Department of the Army. | ||
| You worked for the post office. | ||
| And I hate to say it, but there's a lot of misefficiency. | ||
| And I think a lot of it comes down to the purchasing contracts of what they do. | ||
| I mean, we'll just take the post office, for example. | ||
| They pivoted away from a vehicle that cost them roughly $4,000 or $5,000 a year to operate. | ||
| Their mid-gap vehicle was a Mercedes that cost $40,000, but came with no warranty, at least not one to speak of, because the dealerships were saying everything was non-repairable. | ||
| John, it was not under warranty. | ||
| There was a Postal Service Mercedes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, the Mercedes Metris. | |
| It's the stopgap in between the old LLV and the new vehicles that are under contract to be manufactured. | ||
| And the repairs were astronomical. | ||
| They were spending $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 of repair on those vehicles, which threw the budget way out of proportion. | ||
| I want to know whose kid went to college on that contract that the post office came up with. | ||
| But we were given no repair manuals, no way to scan the vehicles for efficiency. | ||
| So we had to contact dealerships and manufacturers to figure out what was going on with these vehicles. | ||
| Same thing with the Army. | ||
| The Army purchases these massive vehicles from Oshkosh and all these other defense contractors, BAE, and there's no guidance. | ||
| It's not a normal vehicle. | ||
| It's not a vehicle that you can just plug a scan tool in like you can a Ford or a Chevrolet. | ||
| So the misefficiency that's out there in trying to diagnose, repair, and overhaul these vehicles. | ||
| And then you see these vehicles sitting for years and years and years on end because of contracts that are written up by some government bureaucrat. | ||
| So yeah, there's a lot of misefficiency. | ||
| I see a lot of people sitting around doing, I mean, they're working. | ||
| Let's not understand they're not working. | ||
| But the fact is, is that it takes so much to do one singular job because of all the red tape and everything else that you spend days upon days where it should be in the private sector hours upon hours to get the same accomplished. | ||
| That's John in Middleburg, Florida this morning. | ||
| More from the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| This is Republican Representative Mike Lawler of New York. | ||
| He was on ABC's this week and was asked about this email of what government employees did last week. | ||
| This is what he said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, I don't know how that's necessarily feasible. | |
| Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under a union contract. | ||
| But there's no question as the Department of Government Efficiency moves ahead, what they are seeking to do is ensure that every agency and department is effectively and efficiently doing their job. | ||
| With a $7 trillion budget, there is no question that our government has become bloated and in many respects inefficient. | ||
| And so the task at hand, obviously, for Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency at the direction of President Trump is to find efficiencies and savings and make sure that our federal workforce is doing their jobs and doing it effectively. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have many, many, many people who do a phenomenal job on behalf of the American people. | |
| But I think ultimately, in any government, when a new administration comes in, whether it's a state government, whether it's a local government, and I've served at every level of government, a new administration is always going to do a review and try to find efficiencies across the board. | ||
| When you're staring down $36 trillion in debt and counting, Obviously, something has to give. | ||
| Republican Mike Lawler yesterday on ABC's This Week, this is Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, the Democrat, listing what he believes Elon Musk and Doge did last week, his five bullet points. | ||
| They attempted to access IRS taxpayer data, accidentally fired workers researching the bird flu, fired hundreds of workers at the FAA risking flight safety, got caught lying about Doge savings, and his fifth point threatened all federal government workers. | ||
| The senator from yesterday afternoon, one of many members of Congress responding, we're going through those and hearing from you with a special line for federal employees: 202-748-8003. | ||
| Bills on that line, Springfield, Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, how are you doing on this, Bill? | |
| I'm a retired federal worker, 45 years with the government. | ||
| And I have to tell you that this email from Musk is just insane. | ||
| First of all, the threat of if you don't answer, you're fired. | ||
| What about people that are sick, on leave, PDY, traveling, doing any number of things? | ||
| There's a whole bunch of people that are not in a position to answer for one thing. | ||
| Second of all, the people, the viewers or listeners that are thinking people are afraid to put in their five points for some odd reason. | ||
| Every job I've had, I had to report to my boss on a weekly basis the key things I did. | ||
| It goes on in every government office. | ||
| You're reporting every week the stuff. | ||
| The problem with Musk is this is going to be all out of context. | ||
| If it's individuals coming in, he's not going to have a clue how it relates to anything else. | ||
| And it's just plain stupid. | ||
| The other thing is much of the work that the government does is classified. | ||
| And you can't say five key things you did if half of them or all of them are classified. | ||
| And there's no consideration for that either. | ||
| So the whole thing is just absolutely insanely ridiculous. | ||
| And Doge is just doing nothing but creating a sense of tension and confusion. | ||
| Bill, 45 years, what agency or line of work were you in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do Dired as military officer, but then worked for the Department of the Army and then DOD. | |
| And it's just the stuff that he's doing is taking no consideration of the bigger picture. | ||
| It's just numbers and it's power. | ||
| What's the bigger picture? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The bigger picture is how it impacts on how one office or how one, what people are doing impacts on the rest of the stuff. | |
| He's looking at numbers. | ||
| You're not looking at fraud, by the way, because the people he's got working for him are computer hackers. | ||
| They're not CPAs. | ||
| They're not people that will be doing accounting. | ||
| They're hackers. | ||
| So there's no fraud that they're looking for. | ||
| They're looking for ways to cut places where they can gain power. | ||
| It's Bill Springfield, Virginia. | ||
| This is David out of West Virginia, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, you just give me a few minutes. | |
| I'm a retired state worker. | ||
| And every week we had to fill out an activity report of what we done. | ||
| Every day we had to do a TNA, which is your time. | ||
| And we had a supervisor who, I'm sure, checked it. | ||
| And if there was any discrepancies, he let you know. | ||
| And if you were falsifying, you would get caught because I know people had got in trouble. | ||
| And I was three hours from where our main place is in Charleston. | ||
| We had to go down there for meetings. | ||
| I'd go in there and I'd see people who was not doing their job doing nothing. | ||
| So I have to agree with Mr. Musk and Trump 100%. | ||
| I will guarantee you, they are people in Washington who are not doing their job, who are staying home, falsifying their records of what they're doing, just like the gentleman said, out golfing or whatever. | ||
| I've seen it firsthand, and this guy getting on there saying, oh, we're accountable for everything. | ||
| I will personally guarantee you it is happening because I've seen it for 25 years when I worked for the state. | ||
| So if it's what happened in the state, you know it's happening in the federal government because they can get by with it a whole lot easier than you can in the state. | ||
| That's David in West Virginia. | ||
| This is Ella out of North Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| What do you think about this effort, Ella? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is not Ella. | |
| This is Emma. | ||
| Emma, go ahead out of North Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| My thing is everybody needs to put a pause on it because it's all about money. | ||
| Y'all don't see them dollar signs hitting them in them. | ||
| It's all about money. | ||
| They show no paperwork or nothing that they got across. | ||
| I want to know where is it at? | ||
| Show us the facts. | ||
| America wants to see the facts. | ||
| Y'all have a good day now. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| That's Ella out of North Carolina. | ||
| This is Democrats on the House Oversight Committee putting out this statement in the minutes after Elon Musk's email to federal employees saying, consistent with our congressional oversight, we seek to understand what Elon Musk did last week to better the lives of the American people, saying failure to respond to them will mean his resignation. | ||
| Also on the Sunday shows yesterday, it was former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Republican critic of Donald Trump. | ||
| This email that to federal employees was brought up during his interview. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But Chris, the Trump administration has had some wins in these legal battles. | |
| In fact, a federal judge agreed that they can now put thousands of USAID employees on leave. | ||
| So any surprise there? | ||
| And take a look at all the wins they have had. | ||
| No, Martha, look, I think that if you follow an organized process, the executive will have a lot of authority to be able to lay people off, reorder priorities within the government as a whole, and within particular departments as well. | ||
| USAID as an agency, but working very closely with the State Department. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's not that they can't do it. | |
| It's just you can't do it in this haphazard way where you have one guy, Elon Musk, and his Doge area, which isn't really even a department of the government, sending emails out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then you have the people the president has appointed. | |
| And in some instances, like in Kash Patel's instance, are Senate-confirmed people saying no, disregard that. | ||
| And that's where the person at the top has to give appropriate direction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that has not come from the President of the United States at this point. | |
| He's giving different opinions to different folks, giving different direction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It leads to this type of thing. | |
| And that's where they're going to get in trouble in court if people sue because there's no process for these folks to be dealt with fairly and appropriately, like any employee in the public sector or the private sector needs to be dealt with. | ||
| Chris Christie, yesterday on the Sunday shows, by the way, when it comes to USAID, more news yesterday on that front, that part of the federal government notices sent Sunday by the Trump administration said that they will eliminate 1,600 jobs at USAID and place all but a very small number of remaining employees on leave. | ||
| That's the headline in the story from the Washington Post there. | ||
| This is James Branson, Missouri, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| This is James Lance, man of the living God. | ||
| There's a lot of problems. | ||
| I want to say a few things. | ||
| I would like it if I would catch the ear of the American people, Democrats and Republicans, independents also. | ||
| You know, this is part of a larger problem, a systemic problem that the Americans have dealt with a long time. | ||
| Look at the streets of America. | ||
| Look at Dubai. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's very evident there's fraud, waste, and abuse in our government, federal and state, et cetera. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| By the commentary of the left today, it's evident they're indoctrinated by a corrupt party. | ||
| Simple. | ||
| The Dems don't have respect for the will of the American people. | ||
| We voted in power. | ||
| We didn't vote what we thought we wanted. | ||
| We vote what the law says, and the people aren't respecting it. | ||
| The Democratic Party should just simply go on and mind their own business, take the hit, okay? | ||
| In other words, you're not eating a doughball in the street. | ||
| You're not eating out of a grain bag that's thrown from the back of a truck. | ||
| They need to take responsibility and they need to be responsible for their own actions and put the time they're wasting in condemning and pointing a finger at the American president. | ||
| We, the American people, have voted him in for a reason, and it's because the majority of Americans see the tremendous amount of waste, fraud, corruption, abuse, misuse, deceit, etc. | ||
| It goes on and on. | ||
| This is an out-of-control problem, okay? | ||
| You can see it in the bills and the policies that the Democratic Party is voting in. | ||
| There's more things that have to be done. | ||
| How about the calling treason treason? | ||
| It's James in Missouri. | ||
| This is Rick in Georgia, federal employee line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| How are you, sir? | ||
| Doing well, Rick. | ||
| What line of work are you in? | ||
| Can you say? | ||
| And what are your thoughts about this email that went out this weekend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to say, Department of Veterans Affairs, and let me start off by saying this, John. | |
| There was a comment that I saw on C-SPAN yesterday morning by a caller with Pedro, and he urged C-SPAN to, during these times at least, perhaps open up an additional line for callers who seek to unite America, who can be common in our cause, whether Republican, Democrat, or Independent, to find solutions for the current climate here. | ||
| And it's bad. | ||
| Now, back to being a federal employee. | ||
| John, I almost wish that you had limited the calls today to federal employees only. | ||
| I will tell you personally, I'm an avid C-SPAN listener, watcher. | ||
| Every day I start my day with you guys. | ||
| And it's almost infuriating to hear callers comment on things that they have little or no knowledge upon at all. | ||
| Now, when it comes to this email that went out, not a lot, a lot of problems. | ||
| Number one, it came to our email addresses on Saturday when I would probably say 80 to 90 percent of federal employees weren't even on the clock, didn't have access to our email, and then urged to respond within essentially 24 hours of a business day for us waking up to this morning on our email accounts. | ||
| And then, lastly, I wish I could have more time to discuss some of these things. | ||
| But, John, you know, if this is a department of efficiency, why are they being so redundant? | ||
| Our primary system of work as veterans employees is called VBMS. | ||
| Check into it. | ||
| It happens to track every keystroke that we make. | ||
| It tracks every claim that we work on, and it also looks at the amount of time that it took us to complete that task. | ||
| And then we get a scoring system whereby our quality is assessed. | ||
| I don't understand why this email goes out asking us to give bullet points of the work that we did last week when it was already recorded on a daily basis with the primary system that we use. | ||
| It's ridiculous, and it's very concerning as to why they'd ask for this information. | ||
| It's not necessary. | ||
| And for those people calling in who talk about federal employees as if we're not living people, as if we're not Republican, Democrat, and independent, I happen to be a Republican. | ||
| And let me just say this: that it's shameful that you would include American workers, the federal American workers, in this divisiveness, which has been going on for so long. | ||
| It's shameful. | ||
| We work for the American public. | ||
| I work for veterans. | ||
| I happen to be a veteran myself. | ||
| And I'm just upset with the entire process. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call, John. | ||
| And again, go ahead. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You mentioned you're Republican. | ||
| Are you a Republican who voted for Donald Trump in Georgia in 2024? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I voted for him in the first election after the shameful display that went on when he spoke. | |
| I've never seen Donald Trump walk behind anyone. | ||
| And when he willingly came out and allowed Putin to walk ahead of him as a U.S. veteran, as an Army combat veteran, I was disgraced with it. | ||
| And I could not bring myself to vote for him in the second term. | ||
| I could not vote for Kamala Harris. | ||
| So for the first time in my adult life, I did not cast a vote for the president of the United States. | ||
| That's Rick in Georgia this morning. | ||
| Retired federal employee Vincent in Georgia as well. | ||
| It's Lilburn, Florida. | ||
| Lilburn, Georgia. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| How are you doing this morning, John? | ||
| Advocate listener to C-SPAN retired from the military, went up through the ranks, enlisted service, proud, known Republicans and Democrats in the military. | ||
| Both are my friends. | ||
| And I would say I was proud to work with each and every one of them. | ||
| We had, of course, of a chain of command. | ||
| So at the end of the day, I retired from the military. | ||
| And I thank God for allowing me to have that experience. | ||
| I then went into the Postal Service after retiring. | ||
| So at the end of the day, there are not necessarily any good or bad for federal workers because we get our orders through a chain of command. | ||
| And in the Postal Service, when I retired, I was a letter carrier. | ||
| A letter carrier has to conduct itself preceding the representation of the United States Postal Service. | ||
| We have generally routes that we took every day. | ||
| There was no machines giving us our mails, our letters, and our packages that we have to take. | ||
| We generally had a minimum of 400, maybe 500 stops per day. | ||
| That's getting in and out of a vehicle, going up to the door, delivering packages, whether they were small or large for the customers. | ||
| So that being said, there's a chain of command within the Postal Service. | ||
| So I really would like people to understand that nothing is easy whether you in the military or you a postal worker or federal employee. | ||
| They have rules and regulations. | ||
| They have different stuff. | ||
| There's no sitting around. | ||
| There's no coffee. | ||
| When I was in the post office before I retired from the post office, I had a 30-minute lunch break, maybe a 15- or 10-minute break just once a day. | ||
| And you cannot go anywhere to eat. | ||
| I had to bring my lunch. | ||
| I had to do all these things within the allotted time and continue to do what I needed to do to get the job done. | ||
| It's Vincent in Georgia. | ||
| This is Beth, federal worker out of Baltimore. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Actually, I'm on leave today. | ||
| So if I really had to respond to that email, I'm in trouble. | ||
| I work for the Pentagon. | ||
| I work for the DOD, excuse me, not the Pentagon. | ||
| And I understand that I think the DOD is asking us to hold back on that email. | ||
| Don't respond. | ||
| There's another alternative, go through the supervisor. | ||
| They're going through management or something. | ||
| But I've been a federal employee for coming on 20 plus years. | ||
| I did not take the Doge buyout because I'm wanting to retire peacefully. | ||
| And I just think it's appalling. | ||
| I mean, yes, there is waste. | ||
| There's waste everywhere. | ||
| I mean, there's even waste in the current administration, if you want to look at that, what they're doing. | ||
| But that's a matter of opinion. | ||
| I just, I mean, it's just waste at every agency. | ||
| They can take a scalpel, they can go through it and not just make one general blanket over, okay, everything, you know, throw this, everything out, throw this program out, throw that program. | ||
| See the effects of it. | ||
| I mean, they think everyone thinks that they're saving money at this time? | ||
| Not necessarily. | ||
| Wait till the effects of this come down in two or three, four years. | ||
| Beth. | ||
| The New York Times reporting about the instructions that went out from the Department of Defense, this is from their story today. | ||
| Quote, the Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures. | ||
| That according to Darren Selnick, the acting Pentagon official in charge of personnel, instructing Pentagon employees to, quote, for now, please pause any response, end quote. | ||
| And that's where you are, Beth? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is where I am. | |
| I think I answered to my supervisor. | ||
| We have performance reviews every quarter, this fiscal year, it's going to be every month, check-ins with our supervisor. | ||
| We get midpoint reviews. | ||
| We get end-of-year reviews. | ||
| You can look at those and see where they go. | ||
| You don't need to just cut or ask everyone because what I do may not be significant to you, but it's significant to my program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So there's a better way than doing it. | |
| Like this way, watch in two or three years, you will see the American people will see the effect because it's not, yes, it's having the effect. | ||
| And where's that money going to go? | ||
| Not going to go in my pocket. | ||
| It's going to go, and Congress is going to up the ante for their pockets. | ||
| And in addition, they're going to be asking, they're going to be raising the federal benefits for asking us to pay more. | ||
| Which truly is not, it's not good. | ||
| So thank you for letting me speak. | ||
| I've wanted to say that for years. | ||
| That's Beth in Baltimore this morning. | ||
| This is Virginia out of Orlando, Florida. | ||
| Good morning, Lynn for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| I worked for the federal government for 40 years. | ||
| I just want to say this to you and to your listeners out there. | ||
| I've listened to C-SPAN since it came on the air back in the 70s. | ||
| It's not fair to the federal employees what is going on here right now with even with C-SPAN. | ||
| You should have someone from civilian personnel to come in and explain the process that government employees, federal employees, have to deal with with the evaluations. | ||
| I worked for the Department of Defense for 40 years, and we had evaluation every six weeks about what we were doing, how we did it, the processes, what was your job, what did you do outside of your job duties. | ||
| I've worked in the top secret capacity as well for Missile Intelligence Agency and for the acquisition. | ||
| I want you to know that every federal, there were one or two people out of my 40 years that I witnessed that didn't do their jobs, and they were reprimanded. | ||
| They were verbally reprimanded. | ||
| They were given a letter, and then a process of being terminated. | ||
| I've known some being terminated for not doing their duties. | ||
| I worked at Redstone Arsenal. | ||
| But I want to ask you to ask your audience a question. | ||
| How many of them have worked on their job for 24 hours a day? | ||
| I have. | ||
| During the acquisition center, there comes every year, comes September, the new physical year, you have contracts that you have to get awarded, and you have to do it over a period of time. | ||
| I've stayed on my job for 24 hours. | ||
| I've had my family bring my clothes to me on my job, and I've washed up in the bathroom and continued. | ||
| I have, they always give you a performance appraisal. | ||
| When I first went to work for the government in 1968, I know that I was doing outstanding work, but my supervisor told me, Virginia, I hope that you understand that you're colored. | ||
| And if I give you an outstanding performance appraisal, these people here are not going to like it, but you are doing a great job. | ||
| That was unfair. | ||
| Later on, the unions got involved in different situations dealing with so-called colored people, and we began to get awarded for the duties that we did. | ||
| All of my work was outstanding. | ||
| I received bonus. | ||
| I received on-the-spot cash award. | ||
| I don't know where these people are that don't do work, that work for the federal government. | ||
| I've heard that. | ||
| But where are they? | ||
| Everybody that I know, Democrat, Republicans, Independents, they worked hard. | ||
| We took pride in our work. | ||
| We went beyond the call of duty. | ||
| We did what nobody else would do. | ||
| And we made sure that our evaluation, that we got outstanding, because we had pride in our work. | ||
| Elon Musk, and I want to tell you this, John, I want you to remember this. | ||
| And I want everybody that I'm talking to out there remember this. | ||
| Elon Musk is going to start a digital company and is dealing with money. | ||
| What do you think he's going to do with all that information that he's receiving now from the federal government, Kunte Block? | ||
| It is unfair for Donald Trump to come in. | ||
| I'm not going to talk about him. | ||
| We know his character. | ||
| You knew his character when you voted for him. | ||
| But to allow someone to take a chainsaw, what about a scaffold? | ||
| We've had reduction in forces. | ||
| I was involved in a reduction in force, but I never went out the gate. | ||
| I always got a job. | ||
| They are going to happen. | ||
| And that is always resolved with people retiring. | ||
| Most of the times when the government has a reduction in force, those that are eligible to retire, they retire. | ||
| And then they have enough people that have gone out the gate. | ||
| Our government is going to suffer, John. | ||
| I agree with the caller they called in before me. | ||
| Our government is going to suffer because there are things that federal employees have to do that no other employees has to do. | ||
| Virginia, running short on time, want to get a few more callers in, especially those on the federal employee line. | ||
| Joe in Washington, D.C., go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he said, Jump up. | |
| My name is Shell. | ||
| Shell, go ahead, Shell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, so nobody is saying that there shouldn't be an evaluation of what's happening in the federal government fiscally. | ||
| But the way that it's being done is unlawful and it's perpetuating more lies about federal government employees. | ||
| From my perspective, most of the blow is in the management of the higher-ups. | ||
| There's a lot of them, not in the line workers and the people who do the real work. | ||
| So if I can, it's just like three points that I wanted to say about that email. | ||
| Go ahead, Shell, and I'm running short on time. | ||
| So run through it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the email was disrespectful and unprofessional. | |
| That email should have been sent to Congress, who are also federal government employees. | ||
| And whoever made the comment about federal government employees being on the golf course, he should have asked them where they on annual leave, which we earn. | ||
| We can be on the golf course if we're on leave. | ||
| Also, there are people who have called in the past who commented that we don't do work during increment weather. | ||
| That's another lie. | ||
| We have options when the weather is increment. | ||
| We have options to take leave or telework. | ||
| Some people have designations as essential and emergency workers, and they must work. | ||
| They must report to the office. | ||
| So stop saying that because we're not in the office, we're not working. | ||
| And the last thing I'm going to say is what we did last week as far as that email, my work is measured by my work product, by my performance evaluations. | ||
| And we take annual federally mandated training, which I wish Musk and his crew and members of Congress would take. | ||
| This is all just creating a hostile work environment. | ||
| And that was really all I wanted to say. | ||
| That's Shell here in D.C. | ||
| This is Rhonda in Illinois. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think the American people need to wake up and that it's all about the money. | |
| If they can cut all these people, they don't have to pay all these people. | ||
| Then all the money, guess what? | ||
| They can give it tax cuts to the little wealthy wealthy, which Donald Trump, that's all he cares about because he cares about three things, money, power, and his stupid last name, which is phony as a $3 bill. | ||
| All right, Joel, La Crosse, Wisconsin, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to say I'm 100% disabled veterans service connected. | ||
| And my view is that if you ask the people that are on the lines at the VA, the lower people that do the day-to-day stuff, they know how to save money. | ||
| They know where the system is inefficient. | ||
| The problem is it hits a wall when it goes up to the higher echelons of government. | ||
| And if you could have the bottom-up people outlining how to save money in the government to not necessarily bypass their higher-ups, but to give them an idea of where to really clean up efficiency, I think that would go a long way to help in the situation. | ||
| That's Joel in Wisconsin federal employee line, Deborah, Parkersburg, West Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm calling in to tell all Americans they need to go to congress.gov and read what their Congress is doing. | ||
| Andrew Biggs introduced a bill that repeals Obamacare. | ||
| It's the bill repeals the Patients Protection Act, Affordable Care Act, and the Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. | ||
| It will be in effect in the fiscal year 2026. | ||
| If they want to know what the government's doing, what the government is wasting our money on, and everything else, they need to understand and read what Congress is going, is doing. | ||
| Deborah, are you planning, as a federal employee, are you planning to respond to this email that came out on Saturday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I don't respond to anything that Trump does. | ||
| How long have you been a federal employee, Deborah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Over 25 years. | |
| Do you want to say what agency? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't. | |
| That's Deborah, Parkersburg, West Virginia, our last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| A lot to talk about this morning, including we will take a look at the week ahead in Congress. | ||
| Daniela Diaz joins us from Notice for that conversation. | ||
| And later, a look at the White House today and this week. | ||
| This morning, Emmanuel McCrone arrived for a meeting with President Trump at the White House. | ||
| We'll go through what they're talking about today and the president's meetings with other foreign leaders this week. | ||
| And also today, Don Royal and Andrew McClenahan of the United Council of Welfare Fraud will join us to talk about efforts to track down fraud and abuse in public insurance assistance programs. | ||
| That's all this morning on The Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Looking to contact your members of Congress? | |
| Well, C-SPAN is making it easy for you with our 2025 Congressional Directory. | ||
| Get essential contact information for government officials all in one place. | ||
| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
| Contact information on congressional committees, the President's Cabinet, federal agencies, and state governors. | ||
| The Congressional Directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling, and every purchase helps support C-SPAN's nonprofit operations. | ||
| Scan the code on the right or go to c-spanshop.org to pre-order your copy today. | ||
| 100 years ago this past August was the beginning of what's often been called the Great War. | ||
| World War I had military casualties of over 9 million and millions more of civilians. | ||
| Professor Sean McMeekin of Bard College, located in New York State, has written nine books since 2003 on subjects that include German history, Russian history, the Ottoman Empire, communism, World War II, and one titled July 1914. | ||
| This last book will be the focus of our conversation with Professor McMeekin. | ||
| World War I was triggered in late June of 1914 by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, Bosnia. | ||
| They were gunned down by a Serbian 19-year-old by the name of Gavrilo Prince. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Sean McMeekin talks about his book, July 1914, Countdown to War, on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| On Mondays, when Congress is in session, we'd like to take a look at the week ahead in Washington. | ||
| To do that this week, we're joined by Notice Political Reporter Daniela Diaz and Ms. Diaz start on the congressional budget. | ||
| Where are we as of today? | ||
| What's expected to happen this week? | ||
| Well, let's flash back a week because that's important in the context of where all of this is. | ||
| Senate Republicans move forward with their own version of a budget resolution, version, I should say, budget resolution, that would split up Trump's massive agenda on border security, on taxes, on energy legislation into two bills. | ||
| Now, what we're going to see today and tomorrow is House Republicans, Speaker Mike Johnson, talk about having one big, beautiful bill. | ||
| That's really the drama that's taking place on Capitol Hill and has been taking place on Capitol Hill since the Republican trifecta entered office was whether they can really enact this massive agenda that they want to push through a process called budget reconciliation, which means they wouldn't need Democratic votes to pass this legislation, this massive bill that they want to push forward. | ||
| So the drama here being Trump endorsed the House version for one bill, Senate Republicans are moved forward with two as their plan B. | ||
| And we're going to see the House put this measure, their version, on the floor for a vote tomorrow night. | ||
| But right now, Speaker Mike Johnson doesn't have the votes. | ||
| Why is it important, two bills versus one bill? | ||
| What's the difference here? | ||
| Well, the problem being they need all the votes in the House Republican conference. | ||
| And as you know, as I know, as our viewers know, there are a lot of personalities in Congress. | ||
| And so trying to get all of them united, because Republicans have such a slim majority and can only afford to lose one Republican vote behind a bill as important as this one to enact the Trump agenda. | ||
| That's why they want to push forward one bill in the hopes that if there's certain provisions in that measure, in that legislation that one Republican, two Republicans don't agree with, they agree with the others. | ||
| They can push that forward. | ||
| Of course, this legislation would extend Trump's 2017 tax cuts, would have billions of dollars in border security measures. | ||
| But the other thing is they want to push this forward without trying to increase the national deficit by more trillions of dollars. | ||
| So that's really the discussion that's taking place and why we're seeing a lot of political infighting within the Republican Conference on both sides about how to handle this. | ||
| When it comes to the congressional budget, the ongoing cuts by the Department of Government efficiency certainly playing into that process and what the federal budget could look like in the weeks and months and years to come. | ||
| President Trump on Saturday at the Congressional Political Action Conference spoke about his efforts to streamline the federal government. | ||
| This is a little bit of what President Trump had to say. | ||
| We're removing all of the unnecessary, incompetent, and corrupt bureaucrats from the federal workforce. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| And under the buyouts, we offered federal employees more than 75,000 federal bureaucrats, think of that, have voluntarily agreed to surrender their taxpayer-funded jobs. | ||
| We want to make government smaller, more efficient. | ||
| We want to keep the best people, and we're not going to keep the worst people. | ||
| And you know, we're doing another thing. | ||
| If they don't report for work, we're firing them. | ||
| In other words, you have to go to office. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Look at her. | ||
| If you don't report to work, you know, that's another scam. | ||
| It was President Trump on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. | ||
| By the way, if you want to watch the conference in its entirety, you can do so on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| We're talking about the week ahead in Washington this morning, and we're asking you to join the conversation. | ||
| To do so, phone lines are as usual. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, it's 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also send us a text this morning, that number, 202-748-8003. | ||
| We'll have you join us throughout this half hour as we're joined by Danielle Diaz of Code of Notice this morning. | ||
| We've been talking about the ongoing budget along with the budget and the reconciliation process. | ||
| There's also the appropriations process. | ||
| Remind viewers where we are on actually funding the government past 14 days from now. | ||
| Well, right now, there is no top-line agreement between Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| That basically top line means how much they're planning to spend to fund the government this next fiscal year. | ||
| Republicans are blaming Democrats, saying that they haven't brought forward any good faith negotiations, good faith top-line number in their last recent conversation. | ||
| Democrats are saying that Republicans are the ones that are not negotiating good faith. | ||
| Lots of back and forth between Republicans and Democratic appropriators in the last two weeks as they try to figure out how they're going to fund the government because government funding runs out on March 14th, and we're running out of time. | ||
| So we've been operating right now under a CR, a continuing resolution as it's known up here on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Is there a potential for another one of those to kick the appropriations fight down the road, as it were? | ||
| That is definitely in the conversation. | ||
| But if you remember, Republicans hate continuing resolutions unless it cuts government spending. | ||
| The idea being that they actually put forward appropriations bills for all the government agencies and actually figure out how to properly fund these agencies, one of them being, of course, the Department of Defense. | ||
| Them, a lot of Republicans and Democrats arguing that you can't continue to always fund the Department of Defense by the same numbers that it's always been funded by. | ||
| You need to make sure that the numbers are appropriate to what they need each year. | ||
| So it could be a national security issue, and that's why they don't like using continuing resolutions. | ||
| And if you remember, flashback to, oh my goodness, a year ago, that's how Kevin McCarthy lost the speaker's job, is because he put forward a continuing resolution to continue fundering the government. | ||
| So lots of questions that they're trying to figure out, but really appropriators would like to see government funding bills that are, you know, cut spending, Republicans specifically, also aid to states that need disaster funding. | ||
| Those sorts of things are huge priorities as we continue through the year to address. | ||
| Can Congress this week sort of walk and chew gum on this, do appropriations for fiscal 2025, which is what we're in right now, and then also budget for 26 and all of that reconciliation process that you were talking about? | ||
| I mean, if we look at how Congress has functioned for the last couple of years, which you and I know very well, viewers know very well, they're not very good at handling a lot of things at the same time. | ||
| These are two major issues that they have to address in the next couple of weeks. | ||
| Of course, Democrats not part of the budget reconciliation debate. | ||
| To be clear, that's a Republican issue, but Republicans have the majority in the House and the Senate and the White House. | ||
| So they have a lot on their plate, and it's likely that these two issues will collide. | ||
| That's what a lot of Democrats are saying. | ||
| That's what a lot of Republicans are worried about. | ||
| So expect a lot of drama on this. | ||
| When you say that Democrats are not part of the budget debate, explain why that is, why Republicans can do this without Democratic votes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm not going to try to be too in the weeds because it can get very nerdy very quickly. | ||
| But budget reconciliation is a process that the majority party can use in the House and the Senate to basically move forward legislation with a simple majority. | ||
| Bills already passed the House with a simple majority, so this is really what happens in the Senate. | ||
| Instead of the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster, Republicans or Democrats, this is how they passed the Inflation Reduction Act, if you remember. | ||
| Flashback Democrats use this tool when they had the majority. | ||
| They can pass legislation just with 50 votes and they have the majority in the Senate right now. | ||
| But really, the only way that they can pass these measures is if their budget measures, if they can prove to the Senate parliamentarian who decides whether these bills can be passed using this process, have budgetary provisions. | ||
| So that is why they can pass these bills, or this massive bill with lots of provisions, without any Democratic votes. | ||
| But that's the trick here, too, right? | ||
| They need every single Republican in both chambers to get behind this legislation. | ||
| So it's going to be really, really tricky. | ||
| As we know, uniting conferences is very difficult in Congress. | ||
| It's another busy week on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Daniella Diaz is with us this morning as we take you through the budgeting and the appropriation process and the week ahead in Washington, D.C. Phone lines, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. | ||
| This is Kevin out of Dunkirk, Maryland, Republican. | ||
| Kevin, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, everyone. | |
| I just had a comment. | ||
| I delivered packages in Washington, D.C. for 15 years. | ||
| I was in and out of every single federal building, and all I seen was people playing video games on their computer all the time. | ||
| Couldn't even get anyone to sign for a package. | ||
| It was very inefficient from what I saw. | ||
| I can't say everybody, but I also knew a few people that worked in the federal government, and they would get these things called it's a clicker on their computer so the mouse would click every so often to make it look like you're busy. | ||
| So, Kevin, suffice to say, you agree with the efforts to reduce the federal workforce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| I talked to one of my guys in my area that owns an automobile shop, and he said he's never seen so many federal employees going on these extravagant vacations in the past three years. | ||
| He's just never seen it. | ||
| Kevin, got your point, Dunkirk, Maryland. | ||
| We talked about it in the first hour of the Washington Journal today, just the reaction to that email from the Department of Government Efficiency. | ||
| I guess the email essentially came from HR at the U.S. government, but Elon Musk leading this effort. | ||
| Who are you going to be talking to this week in response to this effort and this deadline tonight for federal employees to respond with bullet points about what they accomplished last week? | ||
| You know, Republicans, who, again, have the majority in the House and the Senate, have largely defended Elon Musk's efforts to cut down government spending and his Doge efforts, his steps that he's been taking to try to have less government workers or have them leave their jobs. | ||
| I think they're the ones that we are going to be asking questions, or I will in just a few hours because I'm going to head to Capitol Hill, asking them, do you think that he's gone too far? | ||
| And having federal workers prove in bullet points what they did in the last week. | ||
| And I mean, some of these measures, or some of these government officials that were asked to do this, could be disclosing government secrets. | ||
| We saw Tulsi Gabbard tell her office that they should not respond to this email because they deal with classified information. | ||
| We saw FBI Director Kash Patel tell his office, don't respond to this email. | ||
| I mean, is this going to be the extent of Elon Musk's power for cutting government spending in the federal government? | ||
| We are waiting to see whether Republicans say that maybe he's gone too far. | ||
| There's Lisa Murkowski over the weekend, her tweet that she put out: our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs that they perform. | ||
| The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn't it. | ||
| She has been very critical of Elon Musk and the Doge plan to cut government funding. | ||
| She's very concerned, and I spoke to her last week specifically about this, that the cuts to government funding that Musk is putting forward could affect energy projects in Alaska, where she's from, could affect wildlife conservation efforts in her state. | ||
| She is seeing the effects directly, and that is why she is speaking out against this. | ||
| And she's not the only one. | ||
| We've seen other Republicans come forward saying they are already sensing that back home, some of their government officials back home are being affected by this and losing jobs when they're essential and need to continue working for the federal government. | ||
| This is Victoria out of Chesterland, Ohio, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hope everybody is satisfied with the way our country is going. | |
| What will it take to drain your accounts? | ||
| What will it take? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Victoria in Ohio. | ||
| Go to Craig in Florida, in Palm Coast, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Two million emails. | ||
| This is duplication of effort. | ||
| First of all, these guys are definitely being watched over by their supervisors. | ||
| And secondly, I just cannot imagine somebody sitting down into their office tomorrow morning opening up 2 million emails and doing anything with them. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Plenty of discussion on this Doge effort. | ||
| What's been the most interesting part of this from your perspective on Capitol Hill? | ||
| You talked a little bit about that dynamic on Democrats responding and Republicans responding. | ||
| But at what point do you think it will, besides a Lisa Murkowski email, what will signal to you that something has shifted, that this has gone too far? | ||
| I mean, this email last week, or I'm sorry, over the weekend, from Elon Musk asking for federal workers to prove that they're working could be the power, the extent of his power and the hold he could have over the federal government when we're seeing leaders, Republican leaders like Kash Patel, like Tulsi Gabbard, others, tell their workforce don't respond. | ||
| Up until this point, we've seen those same people incredibly praise Elon Musk for moving forward on this process to try to cut the federal government workforce. | ||
| This could be the end of what they praise for what he's trying to do. | ||
| I mean, he himself tweeted over the weekend, federal workers are going to receive this email. | ||
| We expect them to respond or they will resign. | ||
| Well, that does will count that as a resignation correction. | ||
| What we're seeing is that, regardless of that tweet from him, there will be people not responding in powerful positions who likely won't be losing their jobs. | ||
| So that's already one step toward his lack of power that we'll probably see considering that all these people were endorsing him and supporting his efforts to cut the federal government. | ||
| Paul, Louisiana Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I want to understand that we do have a problem in trying to meet our obligations concerning the needs of people. | ||
| But if we don't have control over spending, we won't have control over anything. | ||
| Is this I think this is a good direction for people to take and stop pushing and let's work together about eliminating heavy debt and making it right for our country because of our billions, trillions of dollars we are behind and we need to shut it down. | ||
| Danielle Diaz, as Republicans are talking about budgeting for the next fiscal year, are they talking about eliminating debt or reducing the deficit, not adding to the debt, as it were? | ||
| What's the top line here? | ||
| Are we going to see an actual debt reduction if they get their drothers in terms of the budgeting process? | ||
| Well, that's what a lot of Republicans would like to see. | ||
| I mean, right now, what we're seeing for the specific House resolution that you're trying to put forward, it would contain $2 trillion cuts in the national deficit, but it would also increase the 2017 tax cuts that Trump put forward, you know, just recent just a few years ago, and that would add to the deficit. | ||
| So it's a balancing act between Republicans to try to figure out how to, of course, put forward their provisions that they want to see, but then also cut back on the national deficit. | ||
| You know, we're seeing folks like Chip Roy, who fully are against increasing the national deficit, support this budget resolution that they're going to put forward for a vote tomorrow. | ||
| The bigger problem here being moderate Republicans who don't want to see cuts to essential programs such as Medicaid or SNAP that their constituents rely on, which could be affected by whatever provisions are put forward by Republicans to try to pass this massive bill. | ||
| And just a reminder for viewers of where we are financially in this country, the U.S. national debt right now, $36.5 trillion. | ||
| Right now, this year we're running a $2 trillion deficit and the debt being the accumulation of all those deficits over the years. | ||
| U.S. debt clock is a great place to go for a breakdown of federal spending and try to understand these numbers. | ||
| There it is ticking, and you can see the debt per citizen and the debt per taxpayer on the U.S. debt clock. | ||
| This is Josephine out of Livingston, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| My concern is that unfortunately we're playing like a magician. | ||
| I want you to look over here because they don't want you to look over there. | ||
| What am I saying? | ||
| I'm talking about the budget. | ||
| They put under the guise of, oh, we have a lingering debt and it was so bad and all that. | ||
| We're the only nation in the world that writes a law and doesn't fund it when it writes the law. | ||
| That would be simply ended. | ||
| That's simple. | ||
| But we don't do things the right way. | ||
| But having said that, they are going to give a $4 trillion tax cut, $4 trillion on the back of Medicaid. | ||
| 40% goes to children, 60% goes to seniors. | ||
| They get rid of the CFPB. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because Elon Musk is going into the finance business. | ||
| You don't want them to look over his shoulder. | ||
| They only brought back $40 billion to John Q Citizen. | ||
| They were our watchdog to protect the little guy. | ||
| Anything to protect us, screw us, but give it to the rich. | ||
| It's like the old saying, steal from the poor, give to the rich. | ||
| Josephine in New Jersey, what do you want to pick up on? | ||
| I think that's interesting from Josephine because that's what a lot of Republicans heard over the weekend at town halls. | ||
| Richard McCormick took a town hall in Georgia. | ||
| He's a Republican from Georgia. | ||
| He had a full house and lots of grievances from his constituents saying that that exact thing, that they do not want cuts to their Medicaid. | ||
| They do not want cuts to snap. | ||
| They do not like Elon Musk's overreaching of the government and they want him to answer to that. | ||
| So it's rare and rare these days that we're seeing Republicans have in-person town halls. | ||
| They tend to do more virtual town halls, teletown halls over the phone. | ||
| So it's interesting to have seen a couple of them have them over the weekend coming back from recess, which is today they were off. | ||
| They were not off, but back in their districts next last week. | ||
| Congress wasn't in session in the House. | ||
| But it is what a lot of voters in more moderate districts are hearing, which is why we're going to see a lot of them, including the Congressional Hispanic Conference, who are Latinos in Congress that are Republican, | ||
| a lot of them representing moderate or swing districts, battleground districts, who are planning to meet with Speaker Mike Johnson at 5 o'clock today to ask why, or at least get some sort of reassurance that they're not going to cut Medicaid snap these essential programs for their constituents. | ||
| Lots of drama in that sense. | ||
| So that leads to Alexis's question from X, who writes, with divisions in the House GOP, how is Speaker Johnson managing the competing demands from the moderates and the hardline conservatives in these budget negotiations? | ||
| I mean, that's always been Speaker Mike Johnson's problem as he, when he took the gavel a year ago, is trying to unite his conference and make sure that he doesn't necessarily make any promises to certain members. | ||
| He has been different than former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in that sense. | ||
| But he does have to figure out a way to make sure that every single member is able to go back to their district and win reelection, especially vulnerable members who might have tough reelections in the next two years in the midterms. | ||
| He is going to, of course, take this meeting with moderate Republicans in just a few hours. | ||
| He is going to have to also speak to his really conservative members who are also outspoken against certain provisions of this legislation. | ||
| So it's going to be interesting to see how he threads that needle. | ||
| And that's always, you know, what we write on Capitol Hill as congressional reporters, the stories of this is a test for Speaker Mike Johnson, because really all of these moments on Capitol Hill are tests for him. | ||
| Jimbo in Bakersfield, California is always helpful with good questions. | ||
| He writes in, wants to look farther down to the appropriations process and the government funding deadline, saying, does Ms. Diaz see a government shutdown in March as a near certainty? | ||
| I don't like to make predictions because if you had asked me Friday in December, when if you remember, Elon tanked through a tweet that CR that they were going to pass that Thursday afternoon, and I thought maybe there would be, and I was covering all of this in person on Capitol Hill leading up before the holidays, and they were able to pass the House, if you remember, a bill very last minute on Friday afternoon that narrowly avoided a shutdown. | ||
| I did not see that coming. | ||
| So I will say I don't make any predictions when it comes to Congress, but I do think that there is a handful of Republicans that would like to see a shutdown, that their constituents, especially from very, very conservative districts, would like to see a shutdown. | ||
| And those voices have grown louder considering that they're now in the majority in both the House and the Senate and that Donald Trump is in the White House. | ||
| So I would say it's worth keeping an eye on to see if that happens on March 14th. | ||
| Time for just a couple more calls. | ||
| This is Lisa in Georgia. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| And Lisa, if you could just turn down your television, we'll be able to hear your question better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay, so what I want to say is this right here. | ||
| Elon Musk and Donald Trump, it is not about trimming the fact. | ||
| It is trimming oversight. | ||
| And the fact is the social programs, people better be very careful what reality that you're in, because the reality that they're telling you that they're trimming the fact, what they are doing is trimming oversight. | ||
| Now, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, SNAP, all those social programs that I know that Donald Trump's base received. | ||
| And they want to play into that reality with Donald Trump and Elon Musk. | ||
| I would like to ask the guests a question. | ||
| What does consumer protection, what does that have to do with trimming the fact? | ||
| This is our protection from big corporations that they can't come in and prey on the American people. | ||
| What does that have to do with cutting that program? | ||
| Is that fact too? | ||
| That's Lisa in Georgia. | ||
| Well, the problem being, a lot of Republicans, Lisa, always saw the CFPB as a Democratic-led institution. | ||
| Democrats, of course, are the idea, were the people that put forward the idea of having this agency. | ||
| I covered Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign when I was at CNN a long time ago, five years ago, and she, of course, was the person that put forward the idea of having the CFPB. | ||
| And that has not been able to be disconnected in the sense of associating that agency with Democrats. | ||
| And that's why we saw Republicans, Elon Musk, cut that agency and also its funding. | ||
| So that's a lot of what's happening here is this is what happens when there's a new president. | ||
| This is what happens when there is new majorities in Congress is a lot of this becomes political. | ||
| And unfortunately, that's a lot of how Washington operates. | ||
| And that seems to be what happened with the CFPB and why Republicans chose to cut it. | ||
| Running short on time. | ||
| Let me just ask on a different topic, but it's the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| How much discussion is that going to get on Capitol Hill this week? | ||
| Well, staunch defenders of Ukraine aid are absolutely going to try to make this a huge issue today. | ||
| But remember, Republicans are, especially Republican leaders, are not eager to send more funding to Ukraine anytime soon. | ||
| So that's a problem. | ||
| And Democrats, of course, very staunch defenders of also helping Ukraine in its efforts to end Russia's war in Ukraine. | ||
| But the bigger picture here is that Republicans, the majority, not all of them, I should say, there are some Republicans who, of course, are very supportive of having Ukraine aid, but the majority, especially the most conservative members, do not want to help Ukraine anymore in its efforts. | ||
| And it's not helping that we saw, of course, President Donald Trump say last week essentially blame Ukraine for the war when it was Russia that invaded Ukraine to do a quick fact check. | ||
| So while we will see members try to bring attention to this, it's not going to be the main issue. | ||
| Daniella Diaz is a political reporter with Notice. | ||
| You can see her work at notus.org. | ||
| And we always appreciate your time in the Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Later this morning on our program, we will talk about public assistance programs and efforts to track fraud and abuse. | ||
| We'll be joined by two members of the United Council on Welfare Fraud. | ||
| But first, more of your phone calls. | ||
| It's our open forum coming up after this break. | ||
| Lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents on your screen. | ||
| go ahead and start calling in now, and we will get to those calls right after the break. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listening to programs on C-SPAN through C-SPAN Radio is easy. | |
| Tell your smart speaker, play C-SPAN Radio, and listen to Washington Journal daily at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Important public affairs events throughout the day. | ||
| And weekdays, catch Washington today. | ||
| Listen to C-SPAN anytime. | ||
| Just tell your smart speaker, play C-SPAN Radio. | ||
| C-SPAN created by cable. | ||
| Non-fiction book lovers, C-SPAN has a number of podcasts for you. | ||
| Listen to best-selling non-fiction authors and influential interviewers on the Afterwords podcast and on QA. | ||
| Hear wide-ranging conversations with the non-fiction authors and others who are making things happen. | ||
| And BookNotes Plus episodes are weekly hour-long conversations that regularly feature fascinating authors of nonfiction books on a wide variety of topics. | ||
| Find all of our podcasts by downloading the free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, cspan.org slash podcasts. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea, it's a process, a process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's where we are on Capitol Hill today. | ||
| The House returns at noon Eastern. | ||
| The Senate is in at 3 p.m. Eastern, and you can watch them on C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2, respectively. | ||
| Also, several events we're covering on the C-SPAN networks today, including a look at Donald Trump and the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| That event taking place at the Brookings Institution. | ||
| You can watch at 10 a.m. on C-SPAN, C-SPAN.org and the free C-SPANNOW video app. | ||
| At noon today, Speaker Mike Johnson will talk about the upcoming budget process. | ||
| That event is taking place and being hosted by the Americans for Prosperity. | ||
| Also on the C-SPAN networks, it's C-SPAN2 for that, C-SPAN.org and the free C-SPANNow app. | ||
| Also, a discussion on antitrust law and the cost of living. | ||
| That event features Democratic Representative Charice Davids of Kansas. | ||
| That's from the Progressive Policy Institute here in D.C. Again, 2 p.m. today, C-SPAN 2. | ||
| And finally, the Veterans Affairs officials from that agency testify on modernization. | ||
| That is taking place in the House before the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee at 3 p.m. Eastern, and it's C-SPAN 3. | ||
| A lot going on today. | ||
| You can check your listings on the C-SPAN networks for now and for about the next 40 minutes. | ||
| It's our open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, phone lines are yours. | ||
| Now's your chance to call in. | ||
| And we will begin with Shirley in Frederick, Maryland, Republican. | ||
| Shirley, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm calling in. | ||
| I was a Democrat, but I changed to a Republican. | ||
| So I have several little things here to talk about. | ||
| And the one main thing is that I am a retired federal employee. | ||
| I've been retired for 12 years. | ||
| And anyway, I'm listening to all these reports on retirement and in the local, my local newspaper about people getting laid off, they're crying, and what am I going to do and stuff. | ||
| When Clinton came into office with Al Gore and a hammer saying that he did and I got caught in the downsizing. | ||
| And I have a sister that was employed with the government back then too. | ||
| And I was with the Department of Defense and she was with DOE, Department of Energy, and she got caught in it. | ||
| And he had about three downsizings. | ||
| We got into the first one in 1993. | ||
| And it was around Easter time. | ||
| And my grandmother had just passed away that week. | ||
| And Easter was on a Sunday. | ||
| And I go back to work on a Monday, and I was downsized, and so was she. | ||
| And then these people in Ms. Nalton like this, nobody stood up for us. | ||
| We didn't go to the newspaper. | ||
| We didn't cry boo-hoo-hoo. | ||
| And we just packed up and went out. | ||
| And we had to go on with our lives. | ||
| And I believe he had two others. | ||
| Clinton did downsizings within his terms, two terms he had. | ||
| And Obama, I can't remember what he had, but I do know Clinton and Al Gore was really bad in his two terms. | ||
| Shirley, thanks for sharing your experiences. | ||
| It's tonight at midnight is the deadline for federal employees to respond to that email that they received on Saturday requesting that they send an email with a list of five things that they accomplished last week. | ||
| Elon Musk said that failure to respond would be seen as a resignation by federal employees. | ||
| That getting a lot of attention over the weekend and likely today as well when the House and Senate return. | ||
| This is Barb in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm just calling. | ||
| Yesterday I was driving and I was listening to C-SPAN and I was so disappointed that you played the entire speech, incoherent, rambling speech packed full of lies from Donald Trump at CPAC, which has become a very hateful group of people, by the way. | ||
| But just with no fact-checking, when he does that, why does C-SPAN not come on and say that's not true? | ||
| That's not true, that's not true. | ||
| Because that's all he does is lie. | ||
| And people, if they keep hearing it, they'll never get out of that disinformation bubble. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Barbara, before you go, are you still with us, Barbara? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I am. | |
| Just so you understand, the idea here for us is to allow people to see things unfiltered, to watch it in their entirety. | ||
| We certainly talk about these events on shows like the Washington Journal's, but the philosophy here is it's best to let you see it and let you experience things unfiltered, whether it's events like CPAC or events on Capitol Hill, the Republican and Democratic conventions, to give you the opportunity just to watch it yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I understand that. | |
| Unfortunately, there are too many people that are just, and I know it's an overused word, but they're so brainwashed by him. | ||
| And hearing it on a respectable source like C-SPAN without fact-checking, it just solidifies it in their mind that, oh, yep, he's right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it's just so obviously wrong. | ||
| I just wish that you could somehow, and I know this is a recorded speech that you replayed, but somehow they could come and say, you know, as other channels do, this is not true. | ||
| This is not true. | ||
| And Barbara, people need to hear it. | ||
| I actually think we aired that speech over the weekend live when it happened. | ||
| But in terms of your idea on fact-checking, would you want to see that on the floor of the House and Senate? | ||
| Jumping in and coverage of the House and Senate saying this is true, this is not true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And how do you do that? | |
| And on both sides. | ||
| I mean, if the Democrats are telling something that's not true, also, I don't know, run Chiron across the screen. | ||
| You know, this is proven false. | ||
| You know, this, I don't know. | ||
| It's just, I'm so afraid for this country with the disinformation. | ||
| I don't know if we'll ever, ever recover from him making people believe that everything that they don't hear from, you know, their right-wing propaganda wing is fake news, fake news. | ||
| It's just, it's terrifying. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And I understand that, you know, people should be able to make their own minds up and stuff, but their minds are kind of brainwashed, for the lack of a better word. | ||
| But thank you. | ||
| I appreciate your time. | ||
| That's Barb in Iowa. | ||
| This is Chris, Jacksonville, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just actually a flip side of the caller you just had on. | |
| I wanted to tell you, thank you. | ||
| There is a lot of noise out there now, and I appreciate your fact-focused, not opinion, balanced reporting. | ||
| I've also spent a bit of time on whitehouse.gov just reading for myself what the president has been doing. | ||
| It's very difficult to get truth. | ||
| So with a combination of whitehouse.gov and you guys, I just really wanted to tell you, thank you. | ||
| That's Chris in Florida. | ||
| This is Nita here in D.C., Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| I just wanted to talk about the federal workers. | ||
| I used to work in the federal building doing security there. | ||
| And when I say some of them, I'm not going to say all of them, take a lot of smoke breaks. | ||
| They were like, some of them were just working there and just not doing nothing. | ||
| Some of them was like bringing their video games to work, working or playing games. | ||
| Like, yeah, it was horrible. | ||
| But I also wanted to say something about why did he get rid of the Consumer Protection Bureau? | ||
| Who's going to help the consumers? | ||
| Who are we going to go to? | ||
| Who's going to help us? | ||
| So Nita, when it comes to cuts in the federal government, then what do you want to see? | ||
| Sounds like you're in favor of some cuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When it comes to the federal government, what cuts do I want to see? | |
| It sounds from your comments that you're in favor of some cuts, but you're concerned about others. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, because I know it is some good workers. | |
| And I think they should reply to that email. | ||
| Like, yeah, what are you doing? | ||
| Some people do not belong there. | ||
| They're just playing games and taking 30 and 40 smoke breaks. | ||
| And like, they've been there 30 years. | ||
| And give that job to someone else. | ||
| Give it to someone younger, you know, that will do the work. | ||
| That's how I feel about it. | ||
| Nita in Washington, D.C., this is Albert in the Magnolia State. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| The reason I'm calling is community committees in Congress have been suing the executive branch forever. | ||
| When is the Democratic Party as a whole in the Congress going to sue for their sue the president, the executive, because they are taking their power that they have? | ||
| They say this is authorized by Congress. | ||
| The president is overstepping this bounds. | ||
| They want the court to do it, but somebody got to be able to have standing to take it to the court. | ||
| So if a committee in Congress can sue an executive for not showing up for a subpoena, then of course it should be logical that the Democrat Party as a whole in Congress can sue to have their to have the court look at what the president's doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And as far as firing, there's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it. | |
| When did Twitter or ICTS become the official channel for government information, for government command channel network in order to do business? | ||
| That's all I have. | ||
| One story today on another executive branch staffing change that's getting attention. | ||
| The Trump administration has ousted the head of the government's deportation force, reportedly, because President Trump was upset with the slow pace of deportations. | ||
| This is in the Washington Times today, Stephen Dinan with the story. | ||
| Caleb Botello had been Mr. Trump's pick in December to take over as acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the president became disillusioned that his promise of mass deportations has not yet materialized. | ||
| ICE said that Mr. Botello has now been reassigned. | ||
| ICE data indicates the agency deported about 640 people a day between January 16th and February 14th, which is a close approximation of Mr. Trump's first week in office. | ||
| But, Mr. In contrast, Mr. Biden's team averaged about 840 people a day from November 21st through January the 16th. | ||
| Mexican officials also reported last week that repatriations from the U.S. had dropped from 570 a day in 2024 to 499 a day in the first four weeks of Donald Trump's second term. | ||
| Again, that story from the Washington Times today. | ||
| This is Marvin in Atlanta, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, Marvin. | ||
| I just want to say to the federal workers, I worked at the railroad 30 years, but I was never guaranteed a job. | ||
| There's no guarantee there. | ||
| You could get laid off who have financial problems. | ||
| And that's what's happening. | ||
| We're having financial problems here in America, and something has to be done. | ||
| I know it's going to be messy, and people are going to holler, but something's got to be done. | ||
| This is going to be a whole lot messier than this. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Buffalo, New York. | ||
| This is Debbie, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, John. | |
| This is Debbie from Buffalo. | ||
| I just want to remind all Republicans that the millions of people that are being fired and laid off will vote blue in the midterms. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Larry, New Jersey, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning, John. | |
| Thank you for all the work that you and the people with you do. | ||
| I'd just like to report a federal employee who is playing a lot of golf and spending an exorbitant amount of money doing it. | ||
| And I think everybody knows his name. | ||
| Do you want to say the name, Larry? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it's Mr. Trump. | |
| That's Larry in New Jersey. | ||
| This is Sheila in Massachusetts, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you, John, for taking my call. | ||
| I have to say that I am just so tired of hearing that Trump, all the Trump negative aspects. | ||
| I wish that just a few times you would ask these Democrats if they know what his convictions were about and what are the lies that they keep talking about. | ||
| And so far, I don't remember seeing Donald Trump on any golf course since in the month that he's been president. | ||
| And I really wish that people would give him a chance. | ||
| And if there is shenanigans going on in the federal government with our money, we have a right to know there isn't a business around that doesn't get audited regularly to see that their money is being spent efficiently and for that company to be successful. | ||
| And I think Donald Trump, maybe you don't like his personality or the people that he has chosen to work with him, but we need to know where all of this money is going. | ||
| And specifically in Ukraine, that there is no accountability to what they are doing with that money. | ||
| When I heard that they were sending designers to New York and Japan and whatnot for shows on our dime, there's something wrong with that. | ||
| I don't want to be supporting their retirement funds when our retirement funds are supposedly going short in five or ten years. | ||
| And thank you very much. | ||
| I hope that people settle down. | ||
| Let's see what he can prove and what he can do about our budget. | ||
| And thank you so much. | ||
| Sheila, to your question on golfing and then the previous caller's point, Philip Bump of the Washington Post with a column from last week taking a look at that issue. | ||
| Half of Trump's first month in office on visiting Trump properties on one-third of the first 31 days of his second term. | ||
| He played golf is according to the number cited by Philip Bump. | ||
| You can read that story yourself if you'd like. | ||
| This is Cheryl in Houston, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| For all of my parents' lives and my husband's and my life, we've been Republicans when still my favorite president, George Herbert Walker Bush and his lovely wife Barbara, moved back to Houston. | ||
| My parents went to St. Martin's Episcopal Church with them. | ||
| What I want to talk about is the insanity of a man, Elon Musk, who is not from the United States, who knows really nothing about how the government works, knows nothing, and has absolutely no respect for our Constitution, is basically running the country. | ||
| He's running circles around Donald Trump. | ||
| Donald Trump wants access to all of Elon Musk's money, so Elon Musk can keep buying elections for him. | ||
| But what bothers me more than anything is the insane cuts to all of the research for deadly diseases, especially cancer. | ||
| I live in Houston, where MD Anderson is located. | ||
| MD Anderson is the largest cancer research and treatment facility in the whole entire world. | ||
| The statistics on cancer are one out of every two men and one out of every two and a half women at some point in their life will receive a cancer diagnosis. | ||
| It's one of the most expensive diseases and nastiest diseases that anyone can contract. | ||
| And to cancer all of the research from all of the research, especially the NIH facilities, when you cut off that research, it cuts it off for years. | ||
| And it's totally insane. | ||
| And what I don't understand, Donald Trump is one of five children. | ||
| And the youngest child in the family, Robert, who was Donald Trump's little brother, died of cancer during Trump's last year of office when he was president the first time. | ||
| And when he was asked about it, Trump remarked that cancer was a really nasty disease and his brother Robert had suffered a lot from it. | ||
| And Donald Trump said he that he said his brother Robert was the best friend of his life. | ||
| I cannot imagine why he would let all of the cancer research programs, the funding stop, why he wouldn't want anyone else to die from cancer, and especially why he would let a man who is not from America, who knows nothing about how the government works, who has no respect for our Constitution, | ||
| basically have the power to decimate a whole lot of very important functions of the government. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Cheryl in Houston. | ||
| This is Gene in Missouri Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want to know how they let Trump up there get away with everything. | |
| It's like everybody's afraid of him. | ||
| He's a narcissist and the biggest liar. | ||
| And look what he did when he was in there four years, eight years ago, whatever. | ||
| He's had four years to put all this together. | ||
| All he wants is revenge. | ||
| And if you don't do what I say, then he's just a horrible person. | ||
| It's Gene in Missouri. | ||
| This is Holton in Miami. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| So I'm in my eggs right now. | ||
| It's $5. | ||
| $5 for eggs. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why is President Trump not raising the price on egg? | |
| I mean, lowering the price on eggs? | ||
| All right, Doug, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just something that I've seen this morning that kind of caught my attention about the debt clock. | ||
| I'd just like to say that they need to just take that thing down there in New York and just get rid of that debt clock and quit intimidating people with it. | ||
| We know where all the money's going. | ||
| Where's all the money going, Doug? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's going to the debt. | |
| All the industry that's causing it, you know, like the mortgages going not mortgages, but rents gone up. | ||
| And, you know, the price of products have gone up so much that price gouging. | ||
| You know, that's what it's cost of our government to operate, you know, and the military that we have to support and all the things we support. | ||
| It's just a way of intimidating people the way I look at it. | ||
| Just take the debt clock down, get rid of it. | ||
| That's Doug in Arkansas. | ||
| The U.S. national debt: $36,520,112,000,000 and counting U.S.debtclock.org. | ||
| If you want to see the real-time updates, this is Edwin in Union, New Jersey. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Yes, I have a question for all these. | ||
| I am a retired federal worker. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| My wife is a federal worker. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I have a question for all this fire new federal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Hi, Edwin. | ||
| Edwin, you have a question. | ||
| What? | ||
| Don't listen through your TV. | ||
| Just speak through your phone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I have a question to all these fire federal employees. | ||
| I am a retired federal employee. | ||
| My wife is a federal employee. | ||
| I have a question to all these fire employees. | ||
| Who did you vote for? | ||
| Who did you vote for? | ||
| Did you vote for Donald Trump? | ||
| Look, you voted for him and he took your job. | ||
| How do you feel now? | ||
| You voted for Donald Trump and he took your job. | ||
| How do you feel to all these Republican federal employees who are without jobs? | ||
| How do you feel now? | ||
| That's Edwin. | ||
| This is Kevin in Ridgeway, Illinois. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
| Good morning, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, thank you very much. | |
| Love your show. | ||
| I love Trump. | ||
| I love God. | ||
| I'd like to pray for our country again if I could to say a prayer. | ||
| Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. | ||
| Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. | ||
| Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. | ||
| Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. | |
| And we pray, God, that you'll keep your hand on this country. | ||
| You'll keep your hand on Israel. | ||
| You'll keep your hand on Donald Trump. | ||
| We don't need a president like Kamala Harris smoking blunts and drinking beer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need a man that's going to stand up for our country. | |
| We love your show. | ||
| And we love you. | ||
| That's Kevin in Illinois. | ||
| This is Janet in South Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That gentleman just before me. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| I'm listening, Janet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hey. | |
| I heard the little bell ring. | ||
| Listen, the gentleman before you said the prayer, that was wonderful. | ||
| He was going to tell you what a great job you did, so I'll finish it. | ||
| You do a great job. | ||
| That gentleman in the call from New Jersey is example number one, because I am also a retired federal employee. | ||
| And I'm going to tell you, there is a lot of waste. | ||
| The gentleman from New Jersey just proved his point. | ||
| They need to cut so many of us out. | ||
| I am ashamed to say, OPM, I get a check from them every month, and I sometimes don't even think I've deserved it myself. | ||
| But that's my comment. | ||
| And the other thing is what's the check? | ||
| Federal retirement benefits? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, IRS. | |
| I'm OPM. | ||
| I'm hired. | ||
| And I know there's a waste everywhere. | ||
| You bring it up. | ||
| Do you mind saying what you get a month from retirement benefits? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nearly $5,000 a month. | |
| How many years did you work in the federal government? | ||
| 32. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I want to make a comment. | |
| Elon Musk, I want one more comment I want to make. | ||
| I hope all the listeners are listening, all the callers. | ||
| You've got three lines. | ||
| Elon Musk needs to be hired by you guys. | ||
| You've got three lines. | ||
| How come when you answer phone lines, you ask Democrat, Independent, Republican, how come you don't have an even amount of callers? | ||
| I mean, the lines are always busy. | ||
| All three before. | ||
| They're all busy, so there's someone waiting at all the lines. | ||
| Have a blessed day. | ||
| That's Janet on the Independent line. | ||
| This is Paul on the line for Democrats out of Miami. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just got to say, this is a first. | ||
| You know, after COVID, that was the new norm. | ||
| Now, this is the new norm. | ||
| Just two weeks ago, people were showing up to government, their federal jobs that they said were not going to be touched like the VA. | ||
| And I know some people that work at the VA because I wanted to do some volunteer work for PTSD people that suffer from PTSD vets because they're overlooked severely. | ||
| That was pre-COVID. | ||
| And after COVID, I couldn't do anything. | ||
| But my friends are telling me that two weeks ago, they show up and there's like almost 100 people that couldn't even get into the building. | ||
| And now with this email, we have the higher-ups in certain departments saying don't respond to the email, to the report. | ||
| But yet, the people that are lower downs, they're being told that they need to fill out the reports. | ||
| So why are the people that don't have the higher clearances having to fill out this report of what they've done if the keystrokes are recorded, but the higher-ups don't? | ||
| It's not making sense. | ||
| So Paul. | ||
| Some agencies are urging their staff not to respond to that email. | ||
| Some agencies urging their staff to respond. | ||
| There's been various stories on it today, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journals, all the major papers with a story on this topic. | ||
| Some pushback coming from the Department of Defense. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the Office of National Intelligence, ordered all intelligence community officers not to respond in a message to intelligence officials. | ||
| Kash Patel, the FBI director, wrote in an email to employees that the FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, telling workers that they should, for now, please pause on any of their responses. | ||
| So we'll see what happens today. | ||
| That email that went out on Saturday gave until a midnight tonight deadline for federal employees to respond with that list of bullet points of what they accomplished last week. | ||
| This is Tim out of Florida, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have a question for Congress. | ||
| The federal government is being reduced, which I agree with. | ||
| It's a behemoth. | ||
| But I don't hear anything about the congressional staffers and the congressional offices being subjected to the same level of reduction. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| And Tim, one of the reasons is the separation of powers issues, that the congressional staff are part of the legislative branch. | ||
| What Elon Musk is focusing on for these federal employees that these emails are going out to is the executive branch. | ||
| So that would be something that would pretty quickly fall into a separation of powers issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, but if the Congress, if the Republicans, and I'm a Republican, if the Republicans are in support of what President Trump is doing, and I am also to some extent, maybe not to the extent that he's doing it, then they should get on board and they should cut their staffs by 8% to 10%. | |
| So a congressional doge is what you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
However, the congressional staff, if they've got 1,000 employees spread across the congressional offices, I know they've got more than that. | |
| So, you know, cut 80%, 80 people out of that staff, just like they're cutting 8% out of the other offices in the federal government. | ||
| That's Tim in Florida. | ||
| This is Johnny out of Granite Falls, Washington, Independent. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thanks, John, for taking my call. | ||
| I'm calling for a couple reasons quickly. | ||
| I think that this replacement of, they're basically trying to replace federal employees with loyalists to Donald Trump. | ||
| This is straight out of the 2025 project playbook. | ||
| And the other thing that I wanted to comment on quickly was a couple of callers, or at least one caller, mentioned that Trump hasn't been playing golf or anything. | ||
| And I just looked at an article from the Independent saying that he has spent almost $10.7 million of taxpayer money funding his golfing hobby since he was inaugurated. | ||
| He's spent all four weekends on the green and has spent nine of his 30 days in office playing golf. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Johnny, on the Project 2025, did you catch the interview last week on this program with Paul Dance, who is one of the original directors of Project 2025, came on to talk about the presidential transition and what's happened and his thoughts on how much of what's happened in the past month was laid out in Project 2025. | ||
| Did you watch that interview? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I did. | |
| And I saw him when he was first on way back when. | ||
| I believe it was the first time he was on. | ||
| I saw it, and I was horrified by it then. | ||
| And I just believe that this is all part of a plan. | ||
| I don't believe for a minute that Trump didn't know anything about it. | ||
| This is just part of the plan to get his people in there and everybody else out. | ||
| That's Johnny. | ||
| This is Max in Vienna, Virginia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| With all this chaos in D.C., I think there are two fundamental questions that need to be addressed. | ||
| The first is, should the government be more efficient? | ||
| As someone who spent time in government and many more years in the private sector, yes, there are many things that the government does that are slow, bureaucratic, unwieldy, but there for good reason because we're dealing with taxpayer dollars and not shareholder dollars, and there's a huge difference out there. | ||
| But the way in which it's being done, just arbitrarily throwing people out of work, even in the regular private sector, not the tech sector, these things have never historically happened. | ||
| You do it in a way that dignifies the work that people have done. | ||
| And if you're going to make government more efficient, why not benchmark against governments in other countries that are efficient, places like Singapore, Finland, that are routinely at the height, the top of indices for government efficiency. | ||
| So that's the first point. | ||
| The second is, should government be run as a corporation? | ||
| And I think that's what Republicans and others have said for a very long time. | ||
| Think about it this way: corporations can fire a whole bunch of workers. | ||
| The top CEOs can make all the money, and the corporation can go bankrupt. | ||
| Do we really want the government of the United States going bankrupt? | ||
| And what is the alternative if that were to happen? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Mac in Max in the Old Dominion. | ||
| This is Teresa in the Wolverine State. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Morning, John. | ||
| Why doesn't Trump just focus on what he promised? | ||
| You know, he keeps blowing money. | ||
| Like, what about the Gulf of Mexico? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That's my money, my taxpayers' money. | ||
| NASCAR, golf. | ||
| Come on, he wants a new airplane. | ||
| I just as a Republican, did you vote for him in 2024? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I'm a Democrat. | |
| I must have called on the wrong line. | ||
| Do me a favor. | ||
| Call in on the lines that best fit you. | ||
| This is Vince in Houston, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing today? | |
| I just want to make some observations about people that are calling in, and I try to stay open-minded on all of this. | ||
| We're all yelling and screaming about Elon Musk. | ||
| I agree with some of it. | ||
| I don't agree with some of it about him being an outsider. | ||
| I don't know many big companies in Houston, Texas, that when they do an audit of their company, they hire outside people. | ||
| They do not hire people from within their company. | ||
| Number two, I think the media, not y'all, and I listen to everybody, is still trying to put fear in people's minds. | ||
| I saw a clip, and I wish y'all would show it, and maybe some, a lot of viewers haven't seen it. | ||
| I saw two clips of Bill Clinton, who I voted for, and Obama make speeches to the American people about how they got a trim government and account for every penny that's being spent. | ||
| The difference is they never did it. | ||
| So I don't understand why everybody's up in an uproar about that. | ||
| One more thing about the media: I watch Rachel Maddow talking about how Trump only supports the rich people. | ||
| And she made a comment that she wished that she was rich. | ||
| Well, everybody, I want y'all to know she took a million-dollar cut on her salary this year. | ||
| She now makes $20 million a year on MSNBC. | ||
| We talk about the educational system. | ||
| Where did she go to school? | ||
| Because where I'm from, if you make $20 million a year, you're pretty darn rich. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Vince in Texas. | ||
| This is Kanish in South Carolina. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm calling because I'm just appalled and amazed at some of the things that these people are saying, and which of why we know we've got to educate our kids, care of our children, but they kick things and make it be partisan. | ||
| Children aren't punished. | ||
| Our elders aren't puns. | ||
| What we need to do is what God really told us to do. | ||
| Take care of our young, take care of our old. | ||
| Take care of our society. | ||
| Because even down Jesus said, render unto Caesar those things which are his, which means taxes. | ||
| So as people who are limited with income pay their taxes on a percentage base, then people who are blessed by God should pay more. | ||
| That's Kanish in South Carolina to Minnesota. | ||
| This is Carol, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm just curious, since Elon Musk is going for all the people working for the federal government, why doesn't he go after all these people that are sitting home collecting welfare checks, doing absolutely nothing? | ||
| I mean, I can see that they have to clear out a few government people, but this country is going down for all the welfare they're paying out because I live, I moved to an apartment after I sold my house, and I'm in a 55 and older building. | ||
| I've been retired for six years. | ||
| And across from me is the younger people. | ||
| I just counted 23 cars in the parking lot that stay there all day long, and I'd like to know what they're doing. | ||
| Carol. | ||
| Thank you for your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye-bye now. | |
| Carol, you may be interested, and you probably will be interested coming up in less than 10 minutes. | ||
| We're going to talk with two members of the United Council on Welfare Fraud. | ||
| It was a group that recently testified before Congress about welfare fraud and their efforts over the years. | ||
| So stick around for that conversation, speaking directly to your call. | ||
| This is Edward in Toms River, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Edward, you with us? | ||
| Then we go to Kate in Michigan. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| First of all, my lived experience as a social worker in my community with Head Start for years, people no longer get cash money. | ||
| That stopped a long, long time ago. | ||
| Bill Clinton put a stop to that. | ||
| But the point I wanted to make today is I'm one of those people that watches C-SPAN all the time, and I watch the House come in, and they immediately walk out with their gigantic posters. | ||
| And I want to know what the poster budget is. | ||
| Does anyone know the answer to that? | ||
| A magic category comes out of each office's allowance that they get each year, but certainly something we can ask one of these congressional budget officers next time they're in. | ||
| This is Mita in Milford, Ohio. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just ask that everybody give Donald Trump a chance. | |
| He's doing the best he can. | ||
| We voted for him on what he run for. | ||
| Give the man a chance. | ||
| We are better off today than we was before. | ||
| Rachel in Delaware, the first state, this is Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| How are you today? | ||
| I'm doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I primarily called in regarding my concerns about Musk and his ability to gain access to such valuable information. | |
| I don't know if you've seen that show, Zero Day, that came out recently. | ||
| I'm like, I'm watching it in real life. | ||
| So that's kind of scary. | ||
| And also, I believe in the freedom of religion, but I don't think it should be shoved down their neck, you know? | ||
| And I also, you know, am very concerned about the Project 25 issue. | ||
| I mean, that's what's happening. | ||
| And we gave them four years to plan it. | ||
| That's Rachel in Delaware. | ||
| This is Felicia, Arlington, Tennessee, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| There was a gentleman who called earlier who said that he watched Obama and Clinton say they were going to take care of getting waste out of the government and that they didn't do anything about it. | ||
| Well, Bill Clinton left us with the first budget that was balanced in I forget how many years. | ||
| And then we got $250 checks from a Republican next and the money was wasted. | ||
| We had a balanced budget. | ||
| Second, if we don't put civics back in our schools so people can understand what the government expects from them and what they should expect from the government in this constitution, if we still have one, that's one of the things where we've gone wrong. | ||
| Last, the first inauguration when they said they want the systematic destruction of the institutions of government of the United States, there should be a cash register on the resolute desk in Washington because President Trump and his crew, there's not going to be anything that's going to be done where he's not going to collect a fee or some money for them to tell a destroyed nation that looks like a wasteland, | ||
| we will help you if you give us 50% of whatever you have left for us to take is so mafioso. | ||
| It hurts my heart to see my nation, America, who has been built on the principles of being the best and the better. | ||
| We used to walk softly and carry a big stick, and now we just got a big stick beating people over the head. | ||
| People wake up and understand this is a money-making scheme. | ||
| One man wants absolute power, Elon, and Donald Trump wants absolute money. | ||
| And every institute we have is about to be turned into a privatized, just like he's doing the Postal Service attempting to do. | ||
| Everything is closing because Trump wants everything to become a privatized situation where him and his cronies can make money off everything. | ||
| That's Felicia in Tennessee, our last caller in this open forum. | ||
| We now want to take you down to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue today, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House. | ||
| It's Kat Sakreski, a Washington Post White House reporter joining us this morning, a morning that it's already a busy day at the White House. | ||
| French President Emmanuel Macron arriving a little bit earlier today. | ||
| What's on the agenda for the French president and President Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we're expecting that Ukraine will be a heavy focus of these meetings between the French president and President Trump. | |
| Certainly, you know, the discussion about how President Trump may negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine has dominated the political conversation here at the White House in recent weeks. | ||
| We've seen in just the first month of his second term, Trump really remake the global order and how the United States acts in the world. | ||
| And it's created a lot of fear and anxiety among European leaders. | ||
| And we expect that will be a top topic of discussion between Trump and the French president today. | ||
| Are we going to get one of those bilateral press conferences? | ||
| And if so, what are you expecting with the dynamic that we'll be seeing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It will be really fascinating to watch. | |
| I mean, so I recently traveled in December to Macron and Trump's first post-election meeting where they really showed a friendly display, but also President Zelensky from Ukraine was there. | ||
| And there was really a sense that Macron was acting as a unifying force between the United States and Ukraine. | ||
| Obviously, since then, we've seen President Trump falsely accuse Ukraine of starting the war with Russia. | ||
| We've seen him call President Zelensky a dictator. | ||
| And so certainly that will have an impact on his relationship with Macron and how the two may interact today. | ||
| I think during the first administration, there was often talk of this warm, almost bromance between Macron and Trump. | ||
| But given Trump's recent statements and his posture toward Ukraine, I think we're all watching to see whether that has devolved today. | ||
| And that press conference expected early afternoon look for coverage on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Of course, it's a busy day on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| The House in at noon, the Senate in at 3. | ||
| We're expecting that press conference around 2 p.m. | ||
| Kat Zakreski, not the only European visitor to the White House this week, Kier Starmer, also expected to be at the White House. | ||
| When and what's the topic of conversation when he joins? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I think the relationship with Keir Starmer is really a fascinating one at this moment. | |
| Obviously, the United Kingdom post-Brexit has a different relationship with the rest of the European Union. | ||
| Keir Starmer, a liberal leader, has been able to position himself as someone who Trump views as a friend and an ally. | ||
| He told reporters when we were on Air Force One during his first trip as president that he had talked to him. | ||
| And despite the fact that they had very different political views, that he really saw him as an ally. | ||
| And then, you know, certainly during the Munich Security Conference, we heard the UK talk to JD Vance, the Foreign Secretary Lamy, talk about, you know, the need for the country to spend more on defense. | ||
| And certainly that is what Trump wants to hear from these European leaders at this time that he's talking about pulling out of Ukraine. | ||
| And so certainly we're watching for how that relationship evolves at this moment and how the United Kingdom as one of the wealthier countries across the Atlantic could play a role in paying more for defense at this time where Trump seems very interested in decreasing the amount of American support there. | ||
| It's Emmanuel Macron of France today, Kier Starmer, later in this week. | ||
| Has there been any response today from the White House about the results of the election in Germany and what that relationship is expected to be like going forward? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we saw President Trump strike a somewhat conciliatory tone in his comments congratulating Germany on the results of the election. | |
| Obviously, we had seen in recent weeks Trump's top ally, Elon Musk, really endorsing the AFD, the right-wing party in Germany. | ||
| And we saw when Vice President Vance visited Germany just a couple weeks ago that he visited with all of the German leaders. | ||
| But now that we saw the more centrist German Party prevail. | ||
| You see Trump talking about a way forward to work with them. | ||
| And, you know, when the German president met with JD Vance during their meeting in the Munich security conference, he also talked about German playing a bigger role in spending on defense. | ||
| JD Vance said that was a positive development. | ||
| We heard national security advisors like Rick Grinnell talk about, you know, how the mood had really shifted in Europe. | ||
| And so I think you do see, even at this time where Trump is being so critical, so you know, negative about the transatlantic relationship, these European leaders really scrambling to figure out: okay, if we can't count on the United States, how do we fill that void in terms of defense spending and protecting Ukraine? | ||
| From the front page of Kat Sakreski's Washington Post, Germany's far-right surges, but stopped short. | ||
| Conservative Christian Democrats claim victory and now must build a coalition. | ||
| Also, this week at the White House, we're expecting the first cabinet meeting. | ||
| What are you looking for when President Trump gathers his top cabinet officials for the first time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, I think one of the things that we're all watching for as the cabinet gathers is obviously President Trump and Elon Musk through Doge have been involved in really a remaking of the executive branch. | |
| We've seen obviously countless changes to some of these agencies, the email that went out to federal workers this week about justifying what they're working on. | ||
| And we've seen some top officials in the administration telling their employees not to respond to that email. | ||
| And so, I think one of the questions moving forward, when we watch the cabinet and how they interact with the president, is how are the leaders of these individual agencies responding to the changes that Doge is making? | ||
| And is there any tension over these plans to really shrink the size of the federal government among the top leaders within it? | ||
| And then, finally, what's next for the Pentagon in the wake of President Trump dismissing the Joint Chiefs Chair and changes in top leadership there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, you know, I think that move has set off a lot of alarms in the military establishment about President Trump violating long-standing norms and putting loyalists in place in these positions. | |
| And so, it's just a question moving forward of, you know, how is President Trump expanding his power over every facet of the government? | ||
| And the military is a huge part of that, obviously, at this critical time amid the ongoing negotiations related to Ukraine and Gaza. | ||
| No lack of news for a White House reporter these days. | ||
| Kat Sikreski is a White House reporter for the Washington Post. | ||
| You can, of course, read her work at WashingtonPost.com. | ||
| Appreciate the time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| About 40 minutes left this morning in the Washington Journal. | ||
| In that time, we will be joined by Don Royal and Andrew McClenahan of the United Council on Welfare Fraud to discuss the efforts of their group to track fraud abuse in public assistance programs. | ||
| Stick around for that conversation. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPANshop.org is C-SPAN's online store. | |
| Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan, and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Shop now or anytime at cspanshop.org. | ||
| 100 years ago this past August was the beginning of what's often been called the Great War. | ||
| World War I had military casualties of over 9 million and millions more of civilians. | ||
| Professor Sean McMeekin of Bard College, located in New York State, has written nine books since 2003 on subjects that include German history, Russian history, the Ottoman Empire, communism, World War II, and one titled July 1914. | ||
| This last book will be the focus of our conversation with Professor McMeekin. | ||
| World War I was triggered in late June of 1914 by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, Bosnia. | ||
| They were gunned down by a Serbian 19-year-old by the name of Gavrulo Prince. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Sean McMeekin talks about his book, July 1914, Countdown to War, on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| If you ever miss any of C-SPAN's coverage, you can find it anytime online at c-span.org. | ||
| Videos of key hearings, debates, and other events feature markers that guide you to interesting and newsworthy highlights. | ||
| These points of interest markers appear on the right-hand side of your screen when you hit play on select videos. | ||
| This timeline tool makes it easy to quickly get an idea of what was debated and decided in Washington. | ||
| Scroll through and spend a few minutes on C-SPAN's point of interest. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea, it's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| A focus now on fraud and abuse and public assistance programs. | ||
| To do that, we're joined by two guests from the United Council on Welfare Fraud. | ||
| Andrew McLenahan works on the Council's Intergovernmental Committee, and Don Royal serves as the Council's director. | ||
| Don Royal, who makes up the Council? | ||
| What's your mission? | ||
| We're a group of investigators from across the country, and I am a director. | ||
| We have a board of directors, regional directors, and I sit in that capacity as a former past president. | ||
| Again, we have investigators, people who collect claims that have been established, administrators from across the country. | ||
| To do what? | ||
| We are the only national organization focused on the prevention, detection, and prosecution of welfare fraud. | ||
| So we provide a forum and a place for our members to gather to develop their skills. | ||
| We offer training for our members, and then we also advocate for, again, the things that would help with the prevention, detection, and prosecution of fraud. | ||
| How much do we spend on welfare in this country each year? | ||
| And what percentage have you found goes to fraud, waste, or abuse? | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| When I first heard the number, I was actually stunned. | ||
| In the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which of course is known by SNAP, the predecessor of which was food stamps, 1 20th of 1% of the entire SNAP budget is spent on the prevention, detection, and prosecution of fraud. | ||
| Andrew McLenahan, so what does the intergovernmental committee do at the council? | ||
| And what did you do before you joined the group? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, thanks. | |
| The council, as Don mentioned, has investigators around the country. | ||
| So these are employees of the state agencies that are administering these programs. | ||
| It's not an independent organization that does this, sort of like a Doge or something. | ||
| So the investigators that we train, that we provide certified welfare fraud investigator training for, are primarily detecting fraud at the beginning on eligibility fraud or the trafficking of benefits, and then trying to recover that money back. | ||
| The problem to which you asked is like what is how much money is being lost to fraud. | ||
| That number is not known. | ||
| We have two different issues. | ||
| We have a SNAP fraud issue and then we have an error rate issue. | ||
| And they're not the same. | ||
| Prior to my current decision in the private council, in the private sector, I was the director for the Office of Program Benefits Integrity in the state of Florida. | ||
| So administering all of the SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, WIC, those sort of programs. | ||
| What are the most common types of fraud? | ||
| Explain what you mean when you talk about these fraud. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you have eligibility fraud, which is usually a first person, maybe somebody is hiding members of their household who are receiving income or adding members to their household that do not truly belong within the household there. | |
| And that's the type of fraud that we most commonly see. | ||
| And Dawn, as an investigator, works on that day in and day out. | ||
| We also have trafficking and benefits. | ||
| That's when somebody's going to sell their benefits. | ||
| That primarily takes place within SNAP and the going rate 50 cents on the dollars or exchanging money for the EBT benefits that are meant to go to food to cash, guns, human trafficking, things that are non-food approved items. | ||
| And then finally, you've got eligibility fraud, which is the hot topic right now with the EBT skimming and the account takeover issues that are impacting real eligible citizens. | ||
| And that's primarily done through both skimming devices and the lack of identity verification tools that have provided a vulnerability that transnational fraudsters are exploiting currently and stealing benefits. | ||
| Don Royal, you recently testified before Congress. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What did you tell members of Congress? | ||
| I testified in front of the Doge Committee and just told them about our antiquated processes. | ||
| Fraud investigators often get hamstrung because of old rules, conflicting rules. | ||
| We're challenged with different administrations and their interpretation. | ||
| There's the old saying, if you will, that integrity should never interfere with access, meaning whether somebody is actually eligible for the benefits should never interfere with their ability to give the benefits. | ||
| So if somebody makes a false statement on an application, the administration just wants to get the benefits out the door as quick as they can. | ||
| Then they throw it back on the investigators to collect it, the pay and chase model. | ||
| So we were bringing that to the attention of the committee, that that's very frustrating. | ||
| There's a lot of technology that's available that's used in the private sector. | ||
| And the different states and counties that administer the benefits just don't have access to that type of technology. | ||
| So it's costing the taxpayers billions of dollars. | ||
| We wanted to bring it to the committee's attention that the taxpayers have a stake in this. | ||
| And it's time that somebody started to look out for the taxpayers. | ||
| When the investigators, Don Royal, who are looking into this, who are part of the council, when they find the fraud and the waste and abuse, what is the penalty? | ||
| Is it just that somebody loses their benefits, or can people be prosecuted? | ||
| Can they be put in prison if the fraud is extensive enough? | ||
| It varies by program. | ||
| So specifically in SNAP, there are sanctions that are available, a disqualification sanction that's available. | ||
| So the investigator would need to prove that somebody intentionally made a false statement in their application. | ||
| Their first offense would be a 12-month disqualification, their second, a 24-month disqualification, and the third would be permanent. | ||
| And that's generally speaking. | ||
| There are specific conditions that carry different penalties. | ||
| And then there are statutes, both state and federal, that allow somebody to be criminally prosecuted. | ||
| So depending on the severity of the misstatement, the amount of money that was paid, either to or on behalf of the individual, then the states have a criteria that they use to determine whether they would refer that for criminal prosecution. | ||
| In Medicaid, it's a little bit different. | ||
| There aren't penalties other than criminal prosecution. | ||
| Somebody can't be disqualified from future use of Medicaid. | ||
| So, you know, again, if you have an infraction, if you will, an intentional program violation that doesn't necessarily warrant criminal prosecution, then we can claw back and recover some of the money. | ||
| But essentially, there are no repercussions in Medicaid. | ||
| We're talking about fraud and abuse in public assistance programs. | ||
| Our guests are Don Royal, a director with the United Council on Welfare Fraud. | ||
| Andrew McClanahan, a co-chair of one of the committees. | ||
| They are taking your phone calls on phone lines as usual. | ||
| It's Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| And then a special line just for this segment. | ||
| If you receive federal government assistance, if you have questions on this topic, 202-748-8003 is that number. | ||
| Andrew McClanahan, as folks are calling in, what is a fraud investigation that you've participated in that sticks out in your mind in terms of how egregious it was? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that that's an easy one for me to answer. | |
| It's involving the Opelaca flea market. | ||
| Back in around 2010, the state of Florida welfare fraud investigators with the Florida Department of Children and Families identified trafficking with retailers that were inside a flea market that hadn't been approved. | ||
| It was originally, I believe it was five to eight retailers. | ||
| The USDA Office of Inspector General is responsible for the authorization and the administration and the monitoring of the retailers. | ||
| However, in a trafficking case, you have both a willing recipient and retailer that's involved in that pro se or that Hand-to-hand sort of transaction, that similar transaction that you have. | ||
| And we were finding millions of dollars coming out of a flea market. | ||
| We went down there and there was no food. | ||
| It was food that was from a nearby produce distribution center that was their dumpster food that was put out on display. | ||
| You had plastic fruits and vegetables that would be on grandmother's Thanksgiving room table. | ||
| We were looking at over three and a half, about $3.6 million a month coming out. | ||
| After we stopped it the first time, the fraud stopped for about three days, and which had picked right back up. | ||
| And FNS kept approving these dishonest retailers. | ||
| There's an issue that they have in not being able to vet retailers that are committing crimes. | ||
| When it was all said and done, back in, I believe it was 2017 when we finally went down and raided the flea market. | ||
| There were 18 retailers that were charged. | ||
| It was over 100,000 households just within the state of Florida. | ||
| And we were looking at over $100 million in fraud. | ||
| It was for cash, guns, drugs. | ||
| In fact, one retailer even had a human trafficking, I think they referred to it as a boom-boom room where you could exchange sex for EBT. | ||
| That was, I think, the ugliest side of the fraud and the waste that we see that's occurring within any of our safety net programs. | ||
| And it shouldn't be the face of SNAP for sure. | ||
| Don Royal, what's an investigation that stands out in your mind? | ||
| We recently prosecuted a case. | ||
| I would say our most common recipient fraud is when a member of the household fails to disclose the non-custodial parent. | ||
| So last year we prosecuted a case where the father of the children actually lived in the home and the applicant failed to list him, his employment, and his income. | ||
| So he was making a six-figure income, providing a very enviable lifestyle for his family. | ||
| They took vacations. | ||
| They had snowmobiles, four-wheelers, motorhomes. | ||
| Their house was paid for. | ||
| The wife even was very generous and gifted a $1,200 bottle of bourbon. | ||
| And they were all very, in a very small community, braggadocious, if you will, on social media. | ||
| So here you have their children walking through the lunch line, not paying for their school lunches because they receive SNAP benefits. | ||
| And, you know, the Monday morning after they just posted pictures about their great trips. | ||
| So it was offensive to the community. | ||
| It was offensive to the struggling families who weren't eligible for assistance. | ||
| And it was a good case to prosecute, again, showing the egregiousness and the ease of which these programs are exploited. | ||
| Don Royal, how did you get into this line of work? | ||
| Why do you want to be a welfare fraud investigator? | ||
| I'm a paralegal with my background and training. | ||
| And when I moved to the part of the state, I was working for the U.S. Attorney's Office and wanted to move to a different part of the state and literally just stumbled into welfare fraud investigation. | ||
| It was a job that I felt I was qualified for. | ||
| And it turns out to be my niche. | ||
| It's something that I'm very passionate about. | ||
| I'm very fortunate that when I was growing up, I was aware that there were welfare programs, but I came from a very solid, very stable home and never had any firsthand knowledge of the programs. | ||
| So it wasn't until I became an investigator that I learned how incredibly important they are. | ||
| I don't think the United States can call itself the most powerful country in the nation if the citizens are hungry or if they don't have access to medical care because of their inability to pay. | ||
| So I see my role and the role of my colleagues across the nation to make sure that these programs stay strong. | ||
| So when somebody needs assistance, then they're ready and able to help. | ||
| Andrew McClenahan, same question. | ||
| Why do you do this work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm retired law enforcement. | |
| I also spent a decade in the inspector general community. | ||
| I've dedicated my entire life, I think, to both public service and to protecting these safety net programs. | ||
| I believe that they're important. | ||
| I believe that they help. | ||
| But I don't believe that we should have fraudsters, both domestic and foreign, that are taking up the same cue lines that our citizens are in seeking assistance, or that they should be taking money from out of our taxpayer resources that are devoted to this. | ||
| I mean, just the amount of fraud, waste, and abuse that is occurring within all of our safety net programs. | ||
| I mean, we could end homelessness overnight if we were focused on preventing fraud, as Don said, in that pay and chase model, where it just doesn't work. | ||
| It needs to be at the front end. | ||
| You mentioned the inspectors general. | ||
| What is their role? | ||
| Should they be the ones overseeing these sort of investigations into fraud, waste, and abuse? | ||
| And what was your opinion of Donald Trump in one of his first moves, removing most of the inspector generals at government agencies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I have no opinion on politics. | |
| We're a politically agnostic organization that works with both sides of the House and Senate, as well as the executive agencies. | ||
| So I don't really have an opinion on that. | ||
| The inspector generals at the federal level are primarily responsible for overseeing the retailers or the, if it's in Medicaid, it's your organizations and the licensed physicians and those sort of things, the providers that provide health care benefits. | ||
| The states, the counties, and the territories are responsible for the recipients. | ||
| And that is done at the state level or at the county level in some organizations. | ||
| And state inspectors generals also are involved in this, looking at the recipients. | ||
| It's the United Council on Welfare Fraud, UCOWF.net. | ||
| If you want to check out the group that Don Royal and Andrew McClenahan both represent, and they're here to take your phone calls, and we've got about 20 minutes left to do that. | ||
| This is Kathleen in Mississippi up first on that line for those who receive federal government assistance. | ||
| Kathleen, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| What's your question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The problem is they have a report. | |
| If you don't report to your Medicaid office, you can get cut off. | ||
| The other problem is you can make $1 over and you can get cut off. | ||
| The other problem is you have to go through extreme things just to get to tell the people what's happening. | ||
| With me, I had Social Security Insights out of Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| They cut me down from $343 a month that I had to go back and pay $10 a month for three years just to get me down to $107 because I was getting, I think, $811. | ||
| So I have worked our whole life. | ||
| So I don't understand. | ||
| We don't have pensions. | ||
| We live in the real estate where the house get one tax thing cut down and the Senate get another tax cut for trucks. | ||
| Kathleen, thanks for sharing your story. | ||
| Don Royal, to her statement that it's hard to get on these programs and easy to get cut off of these programs. | ||
| So we recognize that there is a benefit cliff, meaning that when somebody reaches the maximum amount that they could lose their benefits, then of course the family could be less better off, if you will, struggling harder without those benefits. | ||
| But we need to keep in mind that these are safety net programs, that they were devised to prevent involuntary hunger or to help somebody in a crisis situation bridge that gap until they're able to help themselves. | ||
| So while the caller's scenario sounded very difficult, and I do have compassion for that, broadly speaking, we want to make sure that people, again, that are using the program are eligible for the program. | ||
| And families should feel great at that point where they're no longer receiving their benefits. | ||
| And again, I understand that it's hard, but that you don't need to rely on these social welfare programs should be a source of pride. | ||
| Robert in Indiana Independent, good morning. | ||
| You are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking the call and thank you folks for doing what you do to try to protect these programs from fraud. | ||
| My question is, how do we stop lawyers from helping people who aren't eligible and shouldn't be getting it from spending years beating down the people who authorize it until they finally find a way to give people something they don't deserve? | ||
| And then on top of that, they even get back pay for all the years that they were trying to get it. | ||
| And I have specific examples that I know personally of people that have done that. | ||
| Andrew McLenahan, let you start on this one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a great question. | |
| So of course, due process is important, whether it's on the eligibility determination or if somebody's benefits are being reduced or even cut off. | ||
| All recipients have an opportunity for what's called a fair hearing to determine if those benefits were issued correctly. | ||
| Just so you know, nationally, we're just at about under 12% for states correctly administering the programs for either overpayments or underpayments. | ||
| But the due process is important to have there. | ||
| Now, the issue to your caller's point here is that we've got, because these are entitlement programs, primarily you're looking at a clear and convincing burden of proof to remove somebody off the program. | ||
| It's kind of a nebulous description, and it's somewhat more difficult to get to that other than the preponderance of the evidence, which is the typical standard to remove somebody from the program. | ||
| So I'm glad that people seek legal representation if they've been incorrectly served or administered these programs, that prior caller, obviously having to repay something for three years, that should be avoided. | ||
| And all of these things can be prevented if we shift to that sort of front end eligibility verification, verifying somebody's eligibility, verifying their identity to prevent those overpayment collections that need to occur, as well as the tying up the legal process in both the administrative and the criminal courts. | ||
| Don Royal, a question for you from Sheila on X, who's been watching along and tweeting, saying, Is it still true that when people who needed these services at some point in their lives die, any money or property that they have left is then reclaimed by the federal government? | ||
| It depends on the program. | ||
| So that would be a specific Medicaid, a type of Medicaid. | ||
| And that's the only program that I'm aware of where that type of recovery is done. | ||
| And again, that's something that's done at the eligibility level that the applicant would be made aware of at that time. | ||
| And why have that process? | ||
| Explain the reasoning. | ||
| That generally, and again, I'm speaking in a very broad term here. | ||
| You see that with elderly people who go into nursing homes. | ||
| And so that Medicare, Medicaid overlap benefit then does attach a lien to their property. | ||
| So if you have a surviving spouse, they continue to live into the home until the survivor passes away. | ||
| And then that lien for the care in the nursing home then is definitely exercised. | ||
| And again, we're talking about a very specific type of one program. | ||
| So we're not talking about SNAP. | ||
| We're not talking about a lot of the other welfare programs. | ||
| So I wouldn't want that type of almost draconian type of collection to be the thought for all of the programs. | ||
| That's just not how those other overpayment type claims are collected. | ||
| Earl is next, just across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia. | ||
| Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| For me, I wanted to make a comment. | ||
| I think it is helpful for me to get actual numbers and percentages. | ||
| For example, get a sense of what's the total number of safety net benefits that are given out. | ||
| What percentage of that you think is fraudulent? | ||
| And what percentage, you know, you mentioned about this couple, one father making $100,000. | ||
| That seems more like an exception than the rule. | ||
| And so I think what you all are doing is great work. | ||
| And so I don't want you to mistake what I'm saying, but it seems like there seems to be a lot of righteous type of outrage for some of these small areas as opposed to you have a lot of tax fraud going on and other types of fraud that people seem not to be outraged about. | ||
| And so again, help me in saying, okay, we're dealing with $2 billion of safety net. | ||
| This percentage is being abused or fraudulent because just throwing out fraud and abuse doesn't help me put a percentage on it because we know with any program, there's going to be an acceptable level of fraud, whether you're dealing with military spending, whether you're dealing with Social Security. | ||
| So that is more helpful to the average citizen to understand. | ||
| Got your point, Earl. | ||
| Mr. McClanahan, let you jump in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Well, the numbers change, and they're also dependent per state on the numbers that you're receiving. | ||
| And the USDA Food and Nutrition Services has a dashboard that they provide with the amount of benefits that are issued, what the average amount is per person, and those sort of things. | ||
| Now, they have a state activity report that shows everything from the amount of benefits that were issued to how much it costs to administer the program, all the way to how much fraud was stopped, the number of people who were removed by the programs, and the different methods of recovery and what type of overpayments there are. | ||
| So, that sort of changes. | ||
| Now, those reports are not published online. | ||
| And when they are, they are sort of commingled together in those state activity reports. | ||
| And I believe the last one that they have posted was the fiscal year 2021 for the federal fiscal year. | ||
| And if you're looking at around $120 billion being pushed out every single year, and even if it's only 10% of that is fraud, now we know that at least 11.6% of that is improperly issued. | ||
| That is just from the administration of the program. | ||
| But if you're looking at fraud rates where our members have experienced everything from 8% to 40% in fraud, the cost of fraud as just sort of the cost of doing business is just not acceptable. | ||
| And in fact, last year there was a true cost of fraud report that shows that every dollar of fraud actually costs $4.04. | ||
| And if you take that dollar of benefits out of that amount, you're still looking at $1.52 being the cost borne by the states and another, and that $2.52 being borne by the federal government. | ||
| So fraud is extensive. | ||
| And the other point that I'd like to make is that it's not just siloed in one program. | ||
| So for example, if you apply for Social Security insurance for the disability and you receive it, it's a two-year certification. | ||
| You're also going to be put on Medicaid, which at capitation rates of about $14,000 a year per person. | ||
| And you're going to be on a two-year certification for SNAP. | ||
| And so you really rely on the Social Security Administration properly administering those programs because the impact is across programs. | ||
| And that's so the fraud rate is compounded and it makes it quite difficult to actually put your thumb on the true number there. | ||
| When you were talking about states and participants with percentages of fraud, you said upwards of 40%. | ||
| When and where was there a program that had 40% fraud rate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, that was directly from the state of Pennsylvania's inspector general that was testifying in front of the state legislature and then media reports about the 40% rate. | |
| There was the back in 2000, I believe it was 10, the Florida state of Florida issued a directive for agencies to come together in a Florida Medicaid and public assistance strike force. | ||
| They did a study just on SNAP eligibility, not on the trafficking, not on the identity fraud, and they found 7.5% of it was dedicated just solely to fraud. | ||
| If you look at the state-by-state level, I mean, I don't want to shame or call out the state of Alaska, but I believe they were at a 60% overpayment rate for issuing benefits in 2023. | ||
| That's an unacceptable number. | ||
| And I think that they're aware of that too. | ||
| So we're talking about real money here. | ||
| This isn't monopoly money. | ||
| What states are the best at limiting fraud? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think it's sort of like who does it? | |
| The least worst is probably the better example here. | ||
| I mean, I think the state of Florida, Mississippi, some of the southern states have done a good job of being involved in the original National Accuracy Clearinghouse to eliminate duplicate participation across states. | ||
| That was saving, I think last year it was $1.7 billion for checking verifications to make sure that just somebody wasn't on benefits in another state. | ||
| I mean, it's not that hard. | ||
| Identity verifications at the front end. | ||
| The state of Florida's been doing that since 2013, saving around $250 million per year on that system. | ||
| But the problem is that the directives and the regulations that currently exist have just been added on and added on and added on. | ||
| You've got millions of words of regulations just for the single program. | ||
| It's not easy for states and local counties to administer those programs. | ||
| Those dollar values add up. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
| Time for a couple more calls. | ||
| Don Royal, you have Rachel here in Washington, D.C., line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, so I have a question. | ||
| So, part of the money that you guys are speaking about is federal money given to the states to implement programs, and part is state money. | ||
| Can you speak for a minute about how that is unwound or savings are realized and who is responsible for ensuring the benefit gets to the appropriate person? | ||
| Also, I assume a dollar loss adds up to more than $1 when time and labor and other costs are considered. | ||
| So, any insight into that? | ||
| So, it depends on the program. | ||
| SNAP is 100% federally funded, and then there's a 50% cost share with administration. | ||
| So, when we determine that benefits have been issued incorrectly, the states establish, they call it an overpayment claim, and the states are required to recover that based on how that money or how the claim was established. | ||
| So, if it was an inadvertent household error, then the recovery amount or the amount that the states would retain would be less than if we are able to prove that it was the result of a fraud error. | ||
| So, states again retain a portion of that money. | ||
| The problem is with that state retention is that it's not always used for the detection, prevention, and prosecution of fraud. | ||
| Oftentimes, that money is just rolled into the general fund. | ||
| So, there isn't a lot of incentive for states to spend state money to protect federal money. | ||
| And that's one of the problems that we run into. | ||
| It's one of the things that we advocate for is that struggle to even prevent fraud because states are hesitant to spend their own money to do it. | ||
| Go ahead, finish your thought. | ||
| No, that's so again, we advocate a lot for increasing that retention amount and then mandating that it be used for the prevention, detection, and prosecution of fraud. | ||
| Also, when you keep in mind that USCA is spending less than 1/20th of 1% of the entire budget, we also think we're at the place where there should be direct funding to make sure that states have some sort of incentive to prevent fraud. | ||
| Because, again, right now, very few do. | ||
| A follow-up question: this from XMLB wants to know who funds the council, who funds your group. | ||
| We're a nonprofit, so we generate our own funds. | ||
| Our primary source is our annual training conference. | ||
| But we are, again, a nonprofit and we're self-funded. | ||
| And how many people make up the group? | ||
| We have just under a thousand members nationwide. | ||
| Dave, next, with just a couple minutes left in our program. | ||
| Hail Michigan Independent. | ||
| Dave, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| And yes, Don or the other fellow there, maybe answer a question. | ||
| I and my neighbors had conversations with each other about what goes on and what we see about this welfare stuff. | ||
| I call it hiving up. | ||
| And what they do is they first, maybe when they first get on and apply for this aid or all this thing, oh, maybe the mother's taking care of them so forth. | ||
| Oh, the mother should have some money too because they're taking care of them. | ||
| Well, pretty soon, next thing you know, you got three or four or five of them that keep going from house to house. | ||
| They move in from other houses. | ||
| And now I'm retired, man. | ||
| I mean, I only make just the minimum. | ||
| And these guys are living like crazy. | ||
| They're driving all over the place. | ||
| They're burning all this gas, exchanging cars. | ||
| Just like some people just mentioned to you, how do you keep track of where everybody is and what's legitimate for the overhead they're staying in? | ||
| Dave, we'll take the question. | ||
| Just about a minute left here. | ||
| Andrew McLenhan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a great question. | |
| I think some of that is part of the issue, and that's why we advocate for moving to a trust but verify instead of the honor system. | ||
| These safety net programs were meant to be primarily means-tested programs so that income and assets are something that are verified. | ||
| The household composition is something that in the residency, whether somebody's incarcerated or deceased, there's basic eligibility verifications that can be done. | ||
| In Florida, myself, I saw that firsthand they use the broad-based categorical eligibility for recipients. | ||
| So we don't do asset testing. | ||
| So you can have millionaires receiving food stamps. |