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Feb. 20, 2025 - Epoch Times
18:20
Chairman Comer on DOGE, Poultry Crisis, and New Declassification Task Force
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Chairman James Comer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
My pleasure.
So a few days ago at a Doge hearing, you said that since 2003, the government has lost $2.7 trillion.
Now, I have trouble fathoming what that means, but just tell me, $2.7 trillion?
Explain this to me.
Well, a big part of the loss is through what we call improper payments.
One reason the government is so susceptible to improper payments is because our software system is obsolete.
That's one of the things that Elon Musk knows a little bit about.
And one of the things that he's doing is creating these algorithms to work with AI to detect suspicious behavior.
And through this suspicious behavior, he's finding patterns where Social Security paid people that were over 150 years old or where people were drawing unemployment benefits in communities that didn't have hardly any unemployment and so forth.
So the government has been mailing out money.
In the form of unemployment insurance to people that didn't exist, foreign nationals, small business loans.
You've got Social Security payments, Medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud.
Just about every government agency grants through the Department of Energy, grants through the EPA. And this adds up to trillions with a T, trillions of dollars.
And what we're trying to do and what Elon Musk is trying to do at Doge is identify this and stop it.
The Democrats have absolutely lost their mind.
You know, they're obsessed with Elon Musk.
They're going crazy over the thought of Donald Trump firing bureaucrats who were supposed to be identifying waste, fraud, abuse from within their agencies.
And, you know, so this is going to be a battle.
But the fact that the media is finally reporting on...
All these improper payments, and I give Musk and Trump all the credit for that, I think we've got a real opportunity to finally get the backs of the American taxpayer.
So, you know, in terms of the Social Security numbers, right, we're talking about these, you know, incredible ages between 100 and 369 years old, 23 million citizens in that range, or, like, that payments are being made to.
Where's that money actually going?
Well, we're trying to find that out.
These are the numbers that Musk has tweeted out.
We've got to follow through with that, and that's what I've been telling the administration.
One thing Congress has done over the past three or four years is we've identified certain areas of waste, but nothing ever gets done about it.
And we can't just...
Point a finger and say, oh, we've got to actually do something about it.
And that's where we're trying to work with.
The Democrats are battling.
They don't want Congress or Musk or anyone to have access to people's Social Security numbers.
But when he creates a software program that identifies thousands of people who are over 120 years old who are receiving Social Security checks, then we have to be able to physically knock on those doors and figure out, What's going on here?
You know, and hold these people accountable.
So identifying it's the first step, but we've got a long way to go to hold these people accountable and claw that money back to where, you know, maybe we can give the American people money back like Trump talked about.
I want to do that.
But we've got...
We've got to have assistance.
The government has checks and balances.
They have inspector general.
They have auditors.
But at the end of the day, the Pentagon continues to fail audit.
The IGs or the inspector general, they've not been detecting waste, fraud, and abuse.
So we've got to terminate all these people, and that's what Trump's doing.
This is a big project.
It's going to take month and month and month to do, but Donald Trump's working at laser speed right now.
So, bottom line, Mr. Chairman, is you're actually going to be sending people to knock on these doors and find out, like, physically where some of this money has gone.
Somebody's going to have to do that.
If it falls on the oversight committee, we'll do what we can with the limited staff we have.
But at the end of the day, just detecting this behavior is not going to stop it.
And detecting the behavior is not going to get that money back.
These government agencies have people in place.
They have fraud investigators.
They have what's called the inspector general that's supposed to do this, but they haven't been doing it.
There are 79 inspectors general in the federal government.
Trump fired 13 and the media and Democrats lost their minds.
So, you know, we've just got a terrible...
There's a set of bureaucracy and bureaucrats that have not been doing their job in detecting this waste.
Musk and Doge are doing a great job of detecting it and amplifying the message to the American people.
And it's very difficult because the Democrats are filing lawsuits.
As we speak, there are members of Congress standing in front of government agencies not wanting Musk to go in and detect this fraud.
So there's still a lot of obstruction.
That's where we've got to figure out a way to go in and catch these people.
Because when you're talking about tens of thousands of people that are abusing Social Security, somebody's going to have to knock on the door and do something about it.
We've got to empower the U.S. attorneys and district attorneys and attorneys general in these states to do something about it.
So that's going to be the Trump's...
Trump's responsibility.
So hopefully we can do that.
But, you know, it's going to be weeks and weeks and weeks of identifying this waste and hopefully months and months and months of going after people that were caught abusing taxpayers' dollars.
So let's expand beyond Doge here a little bit, right?
I mean, we're actually 30 days in.
It's a pretty significant milestone.
Yep.
From an oversight perspective, how are things looking?
Great.
I mean, it's just a breath of fresh air.
When we request information, we actually get it now from the White House.
We have cabinet secretaries who I'm communicating with often.
My staff's communicating with their staff.
So this is a breath of fresh air.
We've got a president who has common sense.
He's put cabinet secretaries in who are disruptors, and that's what we have to have.
We can't...
What the Democrats are wanting to do is say, okay, if you've identified this waste in this government agency, we'll let the bureaucrats investigate it.
No.
They're the ones that were in charge of allowing the abuse to happen, allowing the fraud to happen.
We want the bureaucrats gone.
Not only do we want to end the bureaucracy, we want to fire the deep state bureaucrats who have...
They have failed the American people.
They have failed the taxpayers.
And Trump's doing that.
In 30 days, he's done a lot.
But I can't tell you, we've just scratched the surface.
There is a lot more to do.
So, just from your vantage point, aside from Doge, of course, where a lot of the focus has been in this realm, where do you think the biggest shifts have been from the different people you've been speaking with?
Well, you've got people like Kash Patel, who will hopefully be confirmed.
He understands the obstacles and the barriers and the problems that his agency has created over the years.
He understands that there's a lack of confidence in the FBI, not just among members of Congress, not just among conservative media, but among jurors, among people in America who, when an FBI agent testifies in a trial against a drug dealer, Jurors thinking, you know what?
I don't believe the FBI. What other evidence do you have?
I mean, that's a problem.
It's a problem that the American people think there's a two-tier system of justice that the IRS and that the Department of Justice have gone after conservatives.
We've got to change that.
And I think the people that, you know, that Trump's footing in office, whether it's Billy Long at the IRS, whether it's Kash Patel at the FBI. Whether it's Pete Hedgespeth at the Department of Defense, they understand that the American taxpayers expect the government to do better.
And they're all rolling up their sleeves and working hard.
We didn't have that in the Biden administration.
It was the exact opposite.
So one area where there's been significant shift, of course, is in the border.
I was just looking at a graph.
The number of encounters has gone way down over the last 30 days and so forth.
The question is, for example, there's another announcement that was made recently that payments to illegal aliens are going to be clawed back.
But that itself will create its own new set of problems, in a sense, because they're here.
Have you thought about this?
Yeah.
Well, I don't think there's anything that's been more successful than...
In Trump's first 30 days in his effort to secure the border, we've gone from 11,000 apprehensions a week to 229. And what we're trying to find on the oversight committee is who is paying to transport these prisoners?
Who is paying to house these, I call it prisoners, but lawbreakers, these illegals that have gone in?
And hopefully we'll be able to find that out.
But with just securing the border...
And I think you're seeing the American people support this.
The polling shows that they support this.
Now you're seeing more Democrat mayors like Mayor Adams in York City that are coming forward and saying, yeah, this is a bad deal.
We can't afford all these people.
They've increased the crime rates, and they're a burden on our public school system.
They're a burden on our hospitals and our health care system.
So we've got to go in now and follow up with everything, President.
We've got to codify into law his executive orders.
But, you know, securing the border, I can say with confidence today, as we sit here 30 days into the Trump administration, our southern border is secure.
So one of the monikers used has been radical transparency, and that's been announced in all sorts of areas, whether in HHS or in, you know, so you would say that that's what you're seeing?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, look, we've got...
For the first time, a transparent administration.
The first time in at least four years.
So I think that, you know, transparent, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
We've got a lot of disinfecting to do, and it starts with being transparent.
And I think that, you know, what I want to be with this interview and with people today at CPAC is we're...
Finding this.
Doge is finding this out.
But we've got to have cooperation, like what we're seeing Tom Hammond do with ICE and local law enforcement.
We've got to have with our local prosecutors and our attorney general and our U.S. attorneys.
That's why it's great that Trump fired all the U.S. attorneys.
Put U.S. attorneys in that are going to go after people who are abusing Social Security, who are abusing Medicare, who are abusing Medicaid.
We've got to get spending under control.
And right now, Because of the Biden years and the Obama years, we haven't had any coordination between the federal government, the House Oversight Committee where we detect fraud, and someone actually on the local level and the state levels going in and apprehending these people and setting an example out of people that abuse their power and that misspend tax dollars.
You know, one of the things that we've heard is Kind of this need to tighten, a few prominent people have said this, that maybe Americans need to tighten their belts a little bit.
You know, how do you view that?
Well, you know, it's tough.
Inflation's been hard on everyone.
You know, the media makes a lot about I'm a farmer in the private sector.
I was commissioner of agriculture in Kentucky.
The biggest reason eggs are so expensive is we have a West Nile virus that's going through all the poultry houses in America.
There are a lot of these large poultry houses that they're having to go in and destroy.
Or terminate, whatever you want to call it, all of the chickens in there to contain this virus.
So there's a pretty bad disease outbreak in the poultry industry and that's that.
But at the end of the day, we've seen massive inflation because the government spent too much money.
And I would argue if the government will tighten its belt...
Then the American people won't have to tighten their belt as much.
But hopefully if we can get the bureaucracies out of the way, get the government off the backs of the private sector, the entrepreneurial spirit in America will flourish.
And that will transfer into wealth creation for every worker in America, every business owner in America.
And I think we can see a new golden age, like what President Trump talks about.
But the bureaucracy and the Democrats in Congress are an obstacle to that.
So hopefully...
We can battle this inflation by getting spending under control and lowering interest rates and unleashing our energy potential.
Another reason we have inflation is because of the Democrats' fascination with the Green New Deal.
That jacked energy prices up, and it makes people have to pay more to heat their house during the winter.
So I think a lot of stuff Trump's implementing, I think in a few months people are going to see the difference.
Mr. Chairman, I'm very...
Happy you mentioned the poultry situation.
I was reading something to the tune of 55 million heads were called because of H5N1 and so forth.
Now, I've also been talking with some very credible scientists who say that this approach of when one is caught with disease through PCR tests, you call 10,000.
I think that's the general approach right now.
There may be other approaches that might actually work and the calling might not be necessary.
Would you support kind of exploring alternate methods of dealing with the problem?
Absolutely.
We have a diagnostic lab in my district in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, affiliated with Murray State University.
They're doing research.
A lot of people don't realize this.
In Kentucky, we have horses, we have tobacco, we have lots of corn and soybeans, but the biggest agriculture crop is the poultry industry.
The media is really locked in on the price of eggs, but what the media hasn't focused on is that there's a real problem, and it started during the Biden administration, so it didn't just happen when Trump became president, but there's a pretty bad disease outbreak out there within the poultry industry.
So, you know, as we finish up, you know, in this vein of radical transparency, Congresswoman Anna Polina Luna announced this Federal Secrets Declassification Task Force.
Are you aware of the status of that, how things are coming along?
She and I sat down and we came up with it.
Task Force of House Oversight Committee.
This is something that Congresswoman Luna is really passionate about.
Tim Burchett is also passionate about it.
It started because we had a couple of subcommittee hearings on UFOs.
And clearly the government's not disclosed everything with respect to UFOs.
I don't know if there are UFOs or not, but I'm curious.
And I think a lot of Americans are curious.
Who's on the Epstein list?
What did the government know about the assassination of John F. There are a lot of questions the American people have.
Our government has a lot of answers to those questions, but for whatever reason, they're not turning it over to the American people.
Donald Trump said he wanted to turn that information over to the American people, so we've created a task force that's going to work with the administration.
One thing that happened to President Trump in his first term.
Is he would order, or his EPA administrator would order their agency to do something, but then the bureaucrats in the agency wouldn't do it.
And I think you see a lot of people, Trump's ordered to turn over all the files of the JFK assassination.
They said, okay, we turned them over, and then we find out, you know, a few weeks later, no, there's thousands of more pages they didn't turn over.
So this task force is going to work to try to ensure that when President Trump orders...
Something to be declassified?
That it's actually declassified and these bureaucrats aren't sitting on a bunch of information.
I think that...
If you polled the American people and asked, do you want to know who's on that Epstein list?
And do you want to know if the CIA was working with Epstein like a lot of people said?
I think an overwhelming majority of Americans would say, yeah, we want to know.
We're curious.
And the American people should know.
So that's what this task force is going to do.
I think it's going to be an interesting task force.
I think a lot of people are going to be tuned in to what's going on with the task force because we all have questions.
And, you know, this arrogant bureaucracy in the United States government.
They don't have the right to keep that from the American people.
So any hint as to what's going to come first?
I think first it's going to be some more stuff with respect to the JFK assassination.
I don't know the answer.
We may not ever know.
But there's more information the government has.
And as President Trump...
Turns that over.
We want to have hearings with that task force to kind of talk about this is something new that was found.
This contradicts the old narrative that we were taught in school.
And I think it'll be interesting.
It's not going to...
It's going to be different than the rest of our mission with the Oversight Committee, which is focused on waste, fraud, abuse, and the government.
But it's going to be something I think the American people...
Well, Chairman Comer, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
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