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June 3, 2025 11:41-12:01 - CSPAN

19:56

Washington Journal John Hart

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mimi geerges

cspan 03:36

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amy klobuchar

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peter navarro

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stephen moore

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mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back to Washington Journal.
		Joining us to talk about federal spending cuts and the future of Doge is John Hart.
		He is the CEO of Open the Books.
		John, welcome to the program.
unidentified		Mimi, thanks for having me.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		So tell us about Open Books and what your mission is.
unidentified		Yeah, Open the Books is a transparency organization.
		We've been around about 15 years, and it launched in part through legislation that I helped write when I was with Senator Tom Coburn.
		We teamed up with Barack Obama, who was then a senator back in 2006, and passed a bill called the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act that put all federal spending online for the first time.
		So Open the Books took that data and then expanded it way beyond federal to state and local.
		So we have 10 billion lines of code.
		It's the biggest database of government spending in history.
		And it's the Spending Genome Project.
		And we're trying to advance the founders' vision of transparency.
		Transparency is a foundational principle of freedom, of democracy.
		We can't have truth without transparency.
		And transparency was written into the Constitution.
		It's a requirement that precedes the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment itself.
		So transparency is like oxygen in the public square.
		We can't speak if we can't breathe.
		So we're trying to provide that information to keep people free.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Does your organization have an ideological point of view?
unidentified		I think we believe in transparency is the answer.
		So we're trying to create a reality-based conversation.
		So our politics today is profoundly polarized, and there's a lack of information that people can trust.
		So I'm very transparent and open about what I believe about the size and scope of government.
		I think Thomas Jefferson was right when he said the natural order of things is for liberty to diminish and for government to gain ground.
		So I think the founders' vision is what we ought to restore.
		And the founders had a very clear vision of transparency.
		I believe they would have insisted on real-time transparency if they had access to today's technology.
		And again, it's about giving the American people the tools and power they need to hold government accountable.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		You know, we're hearing a lot about waste, fraud, and abuse.
		Fraud obviously is against the law.
		It's breaking the law.
		But how would your organization determine what is waste and what's abuse?
		Because that seems very subjective.
unidentified		Sure.
		I think the standard is, I would go back to the social contract theory, okay?
		So the reason we have government is that we give up a little bit of our freedom to get more freedom in return.
		And when that contract is broken, that's what we're concerned about.
		So in other words, if you're spending $100 billion or a trillion dollars on defense, the expectation is you get more freedom in return.
		You get the safety, security, and knowledge that you can do commerce freely.
		You can pursue happiness on your terms.
		And that's really the measure, is that when government starts spending money that doesn't lead to a net gain of freedom, then we're concerned about it.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Elon Musk ended his formal role in government just this last Friday.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		What would you say was his impact on the federal government?
unidentified		Well, it remains to be seen.
		And maybe I come at this from the perspective of not just a person in a think tank or an outside group or an activist group, but I worked on the Hill for 15 years.
		And I worked for a senator who successfully cut spending by over a trillion dollars.
		So we didn't just talk about cutting spending, we did it.
		So during the Tea Party, I worked in the Senate for 2004 to 2014, but was in the House before that for a number of years.
		And what Coburn and the Tea Party era was able to accomplish was we cut spending for the first time year to year since the end of the Korean War in 2011 to 2012.
		We cut spending by about $150 billion.
		And this was when there was a Democrat in the White House, Barack Obama.
		We also got rid of earmarks for a decade.
		That's $140 billion.
		We required the Government Accountability Office to do an annual duplication report that, according to GAO, has saved $725 billion.
		So that's over a trillion dollars in savings.
		So I believe there is a lot of waste, or I would, again, spending that doesn't advance freedom within the federal government, and Elon and Doge have taken steps.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		How do you really define spending that leads to freedom?
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		That seems very up to interpretation.
unidentified		Well, it's up to the interpretation of every taxpayer.
		And we believe that if you give people information, they get to make that decision on their own.
		So we're not, I have a perspective.
		I'm not hiding my perspective.
		But I think we have to give people access to data and information so they can make that decision.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		You said that it remains to be seen Elon Musk's impact.
		You're quoted as saying this, quote, Doge and Elon Musk have done the country an incredible service by identifying savings targets.
		What would you say were those savings targets?
unidentified		Well, a good example is Elon and Doge did a masterful job of going in and looking at computer systems that needed to be upgraded.
		So there's a mountain called Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania where they do retirement by hand, pen and paper.
		And we blew the whistle on that 15 years ago with Coburn's office.
		But this is where you have the advantage of someone with celebrity to draw attention to a problem that needed to get fixed 25 years ago.
		So I give Elon and Doge a lot of credit for identifying those areas, those antiquated systems that need to be upgraded.
		And that's one thing they've done that I think is going to be very, very effective.
		And Doge is going to continue that now that Elon has moved on to his other ventures.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's take a look at a very brief portion of Elon Musk promising to cut $2 trillion from the debt.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		This is before the election.
unidentified		Right.
		What a great group of people.
		All right, I've only got one question for you, and then I'm getting out of here because this is your stage.
		But we set up Doge.
		Yes.
		How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget?
		Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah!
unidentified		Yes!
unidentified		$2 trillion!
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		What do you think of that?
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Was that hubris from somebody outside the government having, because it essentially, he claims that it's $175 billion, which is a big difference from $2 trillion.
unidentified		Well, and it's not even $100.
		We'll get to whether it's really $175 billion.
		But maybe that number of $2 trillion, that really comes from President Reagan's Grace Commission.
		So 40 years ago, President Reagan put together a deficit commission.
		There was the Grace Commission in the 80s.
		There was the Simpson Bulls that I worked on, and now we have Doge.
		Those are the three big moments.
		The Grace Commission found that one out of every three tax dollars is wasted.
		That was their conclusion.
		If you extrapolate that to today's numbers, you get to more than $2 trillion.
		And I would argue that if you go back to the pre-COVID spending levels, it was about $4.5 trillion.
		It is not extreme at all to suggest that we ought to scale back the size and scope of government.
		So I wish Doge would go back to that $2 trillion plus number, which I think there's a basis for in previous studies of governments.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's possible?
unidentified		I absolutely think it's possible.
		Yeah, and not just that it's possible, is that if we want to continue as a country, we have to get rid of our debt and deficits that are strangling future growth and opportunity.
		So a nation that spends more on interest payments on the national debt than we do on defense, a nation that does that does not stay great for very long.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		I want to talk about defense spending, but I'll just let people know that if you'd like to join our conversation with John Hart of Open the Books, you can do so.
		Our lines are Republicans 202748-8001, Democrats 202748, 8000, and Independents 202748-8002.
		We also have a line set aside for federal workers.
		So if you're currently working for the federal government or you have been recently laid off or took the package, you can call us on 202-748-8003.
		That's the same line for texting us as well.
		Let's talk about defense spending.
		Steve Moore was on our program recently.
		He was a former Trump Economic Advisor.
		And this is what he said about defense spending in Doge.
unidentified		There is, you know, the biggest agency of our budget is, of course, the Pentagon, our national security and our national defense.
		And you have to spend whatever you need to to keep your country safe.
		But my gosh, we're spending a trillion dollars a year on our military.
		And everyone knows that there's massive fraud and waste in the Pentagon.
stephen moore ▲ ● ▼		I wish that if I have one complaint about what Elon Musk did when he was running Doge, and I think he did a great job of exposing all the incredible waste in our budget.
unidentified		But they should have started at the Pentagon.
		I mean, the Republicans want to spend another $150 billion a year on the Pentagon.
		Why not take that out of the waste in front of you?
		You have agency, you have people in the Pentagon.
		Nobody even knows what they do anymore.
		It's the biggest bureaucracy in the world.
		So I would like to see Republicans be very fair-minded about this.
		Let's get rid of the waste in every single government agency so that people aren't being ripped off.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		What do you think of that?
unidentified		I agree with Steve wholeheartedly.
		I've known Steve for a long time, and I think he's absolutely right.
		And one of the problems in the Pentagon, too, is we have this crazy rule called use it or lose it, where agencies throw money out the door at the end of the year.
		And the Pentagon spent billions of dollars at the end of last year on things like ribeye steaks and lobster tail, new furniture within the Pentagon because they didn't want to create the perception that they weren't spending all the money they got.
		So Steve is absolutely right.
		I think there's a lot of areas where we could have started.
		The Pentagon is one because you have such a massive amount of spending.
		And when I worked for Coburn, we did a lot of oversight on the Pentagon as well.
		We called it the Department of Everything, where the department is doing things that have nothing to do with the core mission of defending the American people.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Now, here is the Doge website saying an estimated savings of $175 billion.
		And then they divide that out per taxpayer as savings of a little bit over $1,000 per taxpayer.
		What do you think of that number?
		And how do we know that that is actually being saved in the government?
unidentified		The way I sort of measure what a quote real cut is, is is it durable?
		It's not so much, is it true or false?
		It's is the cut durable.
		And durable means if you get it passed by the Congress, if you get it signed by the president and the president is likely to not veto it, and if the courts will uphold it, then you could call it a durable cut.
		You know, back to the cuts I mentioned before, Coburn helped cut a trillion dollars.
		A big portion of that, I would describe as durable cuts.
		They went through all three branches of government.
		Now, of that number that Doge has put out, we did our own search.
		We tried to kind of retrace their steps and found that about 42% of the contract savings seemed to be verifiable, 27% of the grants.
		So I think a generous take on Doge's cuts would be maybe $20 or $30 billion because most of it has not gone through the Congress or been approved by the legislature.
		So again, I think I hope I want to see them succeed.
		I want to see them go way beyond what they've described.
		And I think there's more than enough change to find within the federal government.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Let's talk about the cuts to the federal workforce.
		CNN estimates at about 121,000 federal workers laid off or targeted for layoffs in the first three months of the Trump term.
		And that doesn't account for the people that took buyouts and things like that.
		Do you think that those cuts were made sensibly?
unidentified		Well, here's what I would have done is you have to look at the real problem.
		You have to fix the real problem.
		So we went through and looked at all federal agency spending over the past 25 years.
		We have 441 agencies.
		I would prefer we reduce that number by 98 to 99 percent.
		So we have four or five that are described in the Constitution: defense, treasury, state, justice, maybe interstate commerce.
		So I'm in favor of dramatically downsizing.
		But if you look at what the numbers actually tell us, is that personnel has been relatively flat over the past 25 years, but spending has gone like this.
		There's been a 300% increase overall.
		And in agencies like the Department of Education, we've had a 750% increase in spending.
		So they should have focused on the spending side and less on the personnel.
		And the way to be successful over the long term, to really downsize government, you have to pick your targets very wisely.
		You have to pick the right quote poster child, as we put it.
		That's why 20 years on, we're still talking about the bridge to nowhere.
		And that helped galvanize the movement that was successful 15, 20 years ago.
		We focused on things like Social Security disability fraud, where there was someone who role-played as an adult baby who was an able-bodied adult getting Social Security disability benefits.
		We chose those targets because we wanted to illustrate the broader point.
		So when you fire federal employees, even though I'm in favor of downsizing, you create a political problem that can derail future efforts to cut spending.
		So I think some of it was targeted well, a lot of it was not.
		You want to pull the weeds and not mow the flowerbed.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Has there been any transparency into the cost of Doge?
		In other words, when they lay off the wrong people and they have to bring them back, or when people take the package and they're being paid until September.
		Those kind of costs, is there any transparency into that?
unidentified		Yeah, there will be.
		I wish there was more.
		And this is the kind of question that I think we exist to help answer.
		So yeah, I think it's hard to get at a lot of what they've done because Doge has gained, one of the great achievements of Doge is they've gained access to what's called the Treasury Payment System.
		That is the administrative state's holy of holies, where only the high priest of government can go and enter and see the exchange of funds.
		USA spending that we helped create with Obama, there's a delay.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		And that's a website.
unidentified		That's a website.
		USAspending.gov was created through the legislation that enabled open the books and just a whole ecosystem of groups.
		That was the vision.
		We would crowdsource oversight.
		That succeeded.
		Does the capacity to work with Congress to create a much more real-time system of transparency?
		And I call that America's Checkbook.
		That just as you and I have the right to go on and look at our personal account, we should have the right to see what the government is doing because it's our money.
		It's not the government's money.
		And the technology exists to do that today.
		And there are ways to solve the problems of protecting national security data, personal data.
		So Congress and the administration, it's in their interest, especially anyone that believes in downsizing government.
		And frankly, it's shocking to me that Democrats have not picked up on this idea.
		They did.
		Obviously, Coburn and Obama did it together.
		But today's Democrats are so blinded by animosity towards Musk, they're not working with Republicans on obvious ways to improve transparency.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's talk to callers, and we'll start with Dale in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Republican, good morning.
unidentified		Hello, thank you for taking my call.
		I have a question for your guest there, John Hart.
		How do you determine what is fraud in the federal government?
		And I'm speaking about, especially with the military.
		You know, our military isn't just for defense nowadays.
		We use them for emergent, for weather emergencies, any kind of emergency that comes up.
		We use the military.
		Is that factored into this?
		What is fraud?
		Do they consider that fraud, or do they even consider that part of national defense?
		I'd just like to know what you consider fraud, especially after the last Doge meeting with that Social Security is being paid out to people that are over 140 years old.
		I think that's an outright lie.
		And millions of people, I think Social Security is doing the best job they can.
		And I agree with you.
		Cutting staff is not the answer to eliminating fraud.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		All right, Dale.
		Let's get a response.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Well, I think I would go back to what I said earlier: I'm more interested in giving him giving the caller the information he needs to decide what he thinks is fraud.
		And that's why transparency is so vital.
		So I would just, you know, I think fraud is where there is no public benefit or the public benefit does not justify the expense and the loss of freedom that comes from giving tax money to that.
		So there's mission creep in the military.
		Obviously, that's a question of who's going to deal with disasters, whether it's FEMA, whether it's the National Guard, whether it's the military.
		But when you have the Pentagon spending millions of dollars on ribeye steaks and lobster tail, I think that's clear fraud.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		For who?
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		For their own staff?
unidentified		For parties, yeah, just for end-of-the-year parties to spend money that's in their budget.
unidentified		Yeah.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Here's Tim, Rockville, Maryland, Democrat.
		Hi, Tim.
unidentified		Hey, good morning, and thank you for what you do, Mr. Hart.
		I worked for Senator Benson and was around a lot of the Texas Democrats in the old days, and they were conservatives.
		I think you would have a lot more credibility if you came out strong on defense cuts, come out with the top 20, you know, top 20 list of cuts you would make and why.
		So I'll leave it with that.
		Okay, well, thank you.
		I'll take you up on the challenge.
		We'll do a report on that.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Here's Samantha, who is in New York on the line for independence.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
mimi geerges ▲ ● ▼		So I have a complicated question.
unidentified		So we're talking about Ford and Abu.
		You can watch the rest of this on the free C-SPAN Now video app as we take you over to the U.S. Capitol where the House is gabbling in.
		Live coverage here on C-SPAN.
		The House will be in order.
		The chair lays before the House a communication from the Speaker.

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