July 16, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:15
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| We're here at the RSC Open House. | |
| Let's talk about rescissions. | |
| I just got word that the Senate removed PEPPAR from the rescissions bill. | |
| Do you expect there's a will in the Senate to pass the rescissions bill as is or close to as is? | |
| We have to be willing to cut spending in this country. | |
| At $37 trillion of debt, continuing down the same road is just simply not an answer. | |
| And this was only a $9 billion package anyway. | |
| So the idea that we can't spend $9 billion from our budget when we've got $37 trillion in debt and a $6 trillion budget every year, this doesn't make any sense to me. | |
| I understand they may be reducing some of the rescissions package. | |
| I wish that they would have just passed it as it was. | |
| I would like to see a rescission package brought to the floor every week. | |
| When you have a trifecta like this, Jan, House, Senate, White House, the window of opportunity closes quickly. | |
| And we cannot ever allow perfect to be the enemy of good. | |
| If we can move that football down the field, we've got to do so. | |
| We can't just vote no because it doesn't meet all of our demands. | |
| It's very frustrating, Jan, that they're doing this. | |
| I mean, what Elon Musk showed and put on front and center stage for the American people, he uncovered a cancer in this country that's got to stop. | |
| If you ran your house like that, you'd be on the street. | |
| If you ran your business like that, you would be out of business. | |
| But I do understand we're not always going to agree because not everybody thinks like me and not everybody thinks like you. | |
| So we're getting to where we need to get. | |
| There's no reason that they should not pass this bill. | |
| Most of the folks that I run into back home, they're asking, why is it only $9.4 billion? | |
| And I've been trying to answer to say, never fear, this is just the test case. | |
| This is the White House being willing to see if Congress is going to keep their end of the bargain. | |
| There's concerns about this sort of loss of soft power that USAID confirmed, especially vis-a-vis communist China. | |
| You know, soft power matters. | |
| It's important. | |
| It's part of a realist foreign policy framework, which the president is moving us towards. | |
| And I think that's something the American people want to see. | |
| But what does not fall in that category is promoting transgender surgeries in Guatemala or DEI scholarships in Burma. | |
| I think it's something we've got to really think critically about. | |
| There's nothing that promotes American interests whenever it comes to promoting far-left ideologies in foreign countries. | |
| Not worried about it. | |
| I think Donald Trump's got plenty of hard power to go around these days. | |
| USAID, I think its roots might have been for good, for a good cause in the beginning, but you've seen what it's grown into. | |
| It's become a slush fund for bureaucracies and others to doing things way outside of what a mission, I think the average Joe taxpayer would ever want to see happen. | |
| The absence of American presence in parts of the world, some strategic parts of the world, could be filled by people who are our adversaries or even our enemies. | |
| And so we do need to be aware, be mindful, have people on the ground in those countries, and then to prioritize to make sure that we are using tax dollars wisely. | |
| In the oversight committee, we've gone to folks and said, okay, it says here, you've got $7 billion, what do you have to show for it? | |
| And they have no receipts, and it's just unsustainable. | |
| And so we have to make some tough decisions. | |
| Oh, I'm sure there's probably going to be a need for some replacement to USAID. | |
| When we uncover the veil onto the fraud, waste, and abuse that was going on was just unacceptable. | |
| A soft power is very important, but I'll tell you, with the money that we were throwing out the window at USAID, I'm afraid I agree with the dismantling of that agency. | |
| President Trump has demonstrated, I think, in his first six months in his second term, of the epitome of peace through strength. | |
| Our allies know that we can be counted upon, just ask Israel. |
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