All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 19, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:03
DOGE Versus DoD: Pop Some Popcorn!

The DOGE government-cutting train has finally made its way to the Pentagon, promising to slash the bloated staff of America's "defense" HQ. Will they be successful? Also today...the US flew B-52s and fighter jets across the Middle East as a show of force to Iran. How much did that cost? Finally today...a good news story.

|

Time Text
Pentagon's Hidden Agenda? 00:12:24
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Good.
Looking for good news.
We found something we think could be good news, but you really have to wait to be sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, we talk a little bit about foreign policy in this program.
That's why we have you as the expert on foreign policy and been experienced, even worked in Europe and the government.
Oh, my God.
Of course, I work for the government too.
But anyway, I think that the good news is that, you know, that Doge has been firing people.
People question, is he allowed to?
Well, you know, Biden, he was allowed to do almost anything.
He added things without anybody's permission.
And the dumb, no, I shouldn't say that.
The Congress just went along with it.
They never say, you know, all the time, we have a law that says that all regulations can be reviewed, you know, by the Congress and vacated, that they don't have to go.
No, if they, and I think after 15 years, it was done one time.
The Congress didn't care about it.
And then all the mess continued.
But anyway, they have had some success in the various departments, and the numbers are significant.
The one that got the most attention was, of course, USAID.
And that was a lot.
And that was even a pleasant surprise on how much they found and it was revealed because even though there were a lot of small things, that's what gets people's attention.
If they're wasting $20,000 on this or even a million, that maybe someday it will add up to real money or being into the trillion.
Anyway, they have now said the DOD is not exempt.
And the DOD is generally exempt from all monitoring.
The Pentagon doesn't get audited.
They're almost as secret or more secret than the Fed.
So now said they're going to look at it and they're given the numbers now, but the numbers have to be studied, just who they were.
Are they temporary workers?
And are they going to stay off?
There's a big reaction to all this.
I mean, the left is going wild because if they fire 10,000 people and there are two of them that lost a job and their children got into financial problems, they'll talk about the one incident.
They won't talk about what the DOD has done to us.
It's defense, Defense Department.
This Miss De Nomo, Mr. De Nomo.
I think people that realize it were not in the defense business.
They should be recognized as offense and we have an empire to defend, you know, but yes, we're at it anyway.
But this is good news, though, that it looks like they're calling attention to it because even 20 years ago, we heard they were spending hundreds of dollars for a hammer.
Yeah, yeah.
But it was that passed over quickly.
And I'm sure they're doing it big.
Now it's Boeing.
Boeing has sold the government a few things that never became useful.
Maybe it was.
It was most useful.
They didn't work.
We didn't have to start a war to test all those weapons.
But anyway, I think it's good that they're mentioning this.
But I was surprised at how many choices, hundreds of thousands of people with 950,000 civilian employees and all in the Pentagon.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Boy.
So we will see.
I think it's going to be tough, but I'll tell you what, the people who are involved in being attacked by Musk, they're scared.
They know it's serious and it may well be, but it'll be a PR fight is what I think will happen.
You know, who gets the most sympathy?
But it's still good news that this is the most confrontational and, you know, available to people to see what's happening and seeing, why haven't they done this years ago?
So this encourages them to continue.
Yeah, I mean, once upon a time, not that long ago, we would have had the left with us on this.
They would be cheering.
Oh, they're cutting at the Pentagon.
We never thought that would happen.
That's a good thing.
Now, there still are a lot of good progressives, people like our good friend Dennis Kucinich, who's on our board, a lot of good people like that who are cheering this.
But by and large, sadly enough, the Democratic Party is not cheering it because they've become the war party.
We'll put that first clip on.
This is from Hedgegen today.
This is what we noticed.
Incoming Doge poised to strike Defense Department with mass layoffs.
And we've seen, here's the Grim Reaper.
He was at Energy.
He was at Interior and now he's knocking on DOD's door.
It is very, very heartwarming in a way.
And the thing is, as you sort of suggested in your intro, Dr. Paul, yes, firing a few people may not be the big money, the big thing that we need.
But as you suggested with USAID, yes, they save money by stopping the spending, but they also revealed to the world the things that were being done with the money that were actually very harmful.
Now, they revealed a worldwide matrix of fake newspapers, fake media.
They were all supposed to be independent voices.
They were all subsidized by the U.S. government, and they were saying just what their masters wanted them to say.
So I think the same thing could happen at the Pentagon, even if they don't do the kinds of cuts that we want, and they may do those.
We may start finding out the kinds of things that were done with that money simply by looking at what things they can't do anymore and realize.
And Americans may realize, well, hang on, that wasn't defending America.
That was doing all sorts of other things.
So I think that's the real benefit of this.
It just may be true that some people said that it was happening in the lead up to our participation in Ukraine.
It's stirring up problems.
And look at what Ukraine looks like right now.
But it costs the American people a lot of money.
And I know that's important.
That's getting the people's attention.
The intervention, though, it has to be the big issue because that's why they spend the money.
But there's always somebody going to make a buck over this.
And it is a shame that once allies from the true liberal side of the political scheme, that there's not very many with us.
And as a matter of fact, it's sort of it's bewildering that the warmongering Republicans that we thought would never cave, even some of them, you know, are in the new department, but they're not talking their old self.
They're talking, you know, they're trying to fit into what Trump is saying.
But the truth is in the pudding, and that means what's it going to be like in six months or a year from now.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now go to that next clip, and this is from the article.
This gives you a little bit of sense.
Now, there's where we might disagree in some respects, you know, and we'll offer a critique here.
On Tuesday, Doge staffers were reportedly at the Pentagon and being given lists of probationary employees in compliance with an end of business day deadline.
The term generally applies to any federal employee who's in the first one or two years of their current position, regardless of whether they've held other roles before taking the current one.
During the probationary period, employees generally can be fired without any privilege of appeal.
And you point out, Dr. Paul, that the Pentagon has about 950,000 civilian employees in all, which is a lot of people.
Now, I think you could say they're doing this because this is the low-hanging fruit.
They can go in and they can knock these guys and gals out without having to deal with a long appeals process.
So on one hand, I think it's a positive development.
Get rid of them, clear it out.
But on the other hand, you may actually find out that the deadest of the dead would is the people who've been there for decades, you know, who are doing things we don't need to have done, the old cold warriors, the neocons, whoever they are in there that need to be kicked out.
So it's not a perfect situation.
However, just tackling the Pentagon and cost-cutting cutting measures, I think is a sea change from how we used to do business.
Of course, we will keep looking for a significant change in foreign policy and the policy that we have.
And there is some mention and we look for it in the new administration.
But when you hear Trump say that he doesn't want to start a war and he wants to stop wars in certain places.
Certain places.
In certain places, it's being increased rather than decreased.
But nevertheless, we should emphasize, you know, the positive statement that are being made because that's moving things in the right direction.
Yeah.
Well, Secretary, Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth, we had some reservations about, but on some of these things, he's proven very good.
I'm going to put that next one up.
Now, here's what he said.
He's embracing that.
He is not fighting this, which is a good sign.
He says there are waste redundancies and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed.
He said last week.
There's just no doubt.
That's the end quote.
And then it says, given the sheer scale of DOD and the enormous variety of roles, DOGE may take a little extra time to parse the layoff of candidates.
Last week, those probationary employee acts accidentally hit.
Okay, et cetera, they made some mistakes, what have you.
So here's the thing, Dr. Paul.
I mean, I think we're of two minds on this, if I may speak for you a little bit.
On the one hand, yes, as I said, this is great.
On the other hand, it would be nice that these jobs, if these jobs were made redundant because we changed our policies and therefore these people are no longer needed because we don't do these things anymore.
We bring all the troops home.
We close all the bases overseas.
We stop funding 60 or 70 percent of NATO and get out of NATO.
Stop doing all of these regime changes using our military.
Stop training the militaries of other countries so that we can rely on them if we need a coup.
Stop doing all these things and then take a look at the Pentagon and say, well, we're not doing all this dumb stuff that we used to do.
So let's get rid of people.
But we also have to live in the real world.
And we know that there's a narrow window of opportunity to really strike radically.
And we're in it right now because it will end and they won't be able to do it later.
You know, in the 60s, it was dealing with the Vietnam War.
And there were spokesmen for Martin Luther King and others and presidents and senators that spoke out against it.
And there was a shift, but there were still a powerful group of people in the media and in the country and the political system that resented it.
And it led to a very violent 60s program with assassinations and whatnot.
Haven't noticed it approaching that, but it could be.
You know, that's why.
That's why uh, you have to have somebody that's very, very strong and deliberate and say, you guys aren't doing it, you're not doing anything, national offense and we don't need you.
Uh, and a lot of people are going to object to that.
But uh, i'd like to see them use uh, use the uh argument of the constitution a little bit more that, if it's not directly authorized on article one, section a, and they're supposed to follow the 10th amendment, what are you doing in there?
How'd they go in there?
Oh it's, those Democrats did it.
No, those politicians did it, and both parties have been involved for a long time of getting involved where we don't need to be involved absolutely now.
Show of Force Against Iran 00:08:40
Here's another encouraging thing though, because this goes even further than what's being said now.
This goes more toward not doing things we shouldn't be doing.
If you go to the next clip now, this is uh.
Last week and you wrote about this this week, Dr Paul last week, president Trump said he'd like to pursue a summit with Chinese president Xi and vice Russian president Vladimir Putin, with the goal of agreeing to slash each country's military budget in half.
Here's what Trump said.
This is a great quote.
He said we're spending the money against each other and we could be spending that money for a better purpose.
If we get along and i'll tell you, I think something like that will happen that's a good logic against each other.
You know, if we sort of had a hands-off program, that's probably what would happen in a natural course of events, that there'd be extra money and there'd be uh economic exchanges that would be permitted and there'd be less emphasis on probably less emphasis and other things.
Yeah yeah, and sanctions true, but uh, I I think it sounds, sounds like they're making the right step in the right direction.
I did want to play one uh video clip now.
This was embedded in the um ZERO Hedge article, but this is Kevin O'leary, who's well-known, well-known investor, well-known on a tv show, the Shark Tank, that he was on a CNN panel and he had some interesting advice.
And I would uh advise our readers, our listeners who are watching this, our viewers, look at the faces of the CNN people as O'ley says this.
Let's cue this up and listen to this a little over a minute long.
I think the issue is they're not whacking enough.
There's this concept in private equity, when you get a bankrupt company and you go in there.
You cut 20 more than your initial read and then you find like a pool of mercury, the organization gels back together again.
Always cut deeper harder, when there's fat and waste.
The faa it's not the people, the code is cobalt.
It's from the 60s.
It needs capex put into it for the technology.
We upgrade it to make it safer.
Fat like a chicken.
All of these agencies are like big fat chickens dripping over barbecues of fat.
This is the best barbecue i've ever seen.
But I don't think it's happening fast enough.
They're not cutting enough.
Keep slashing, keep hacking.
While you have a 24-month mandate before the midterms, cut more, more cutting.
Believe me, it's going to work out just great.
Everybody nuclear codes cut.
You know the?
The important thing there is, he's believable.
Yeah, a lot of people say that politicians, like campaign trails, say oh yeah, it's all bloated, i'm in there, i'm a fiscal conservative, all that.
And one time somebody was talking to me about this issue.
I said what this other politician just said, it.
He says yeah, but we didn't believe him.
Yeah, I think this guy's believable.
He's been there, he's done That, he's had a real life experience being in business, very well, very successful.
Yeah, you know, it's funny he's talking about them using cobalt as a code, 60s code.
I remember a long time ago, many moons ago, I spent the summer working in State Department Intelligence, and I came in and they were using Wang computers from the 70s.
And I couldn't believe it.
I had a new Mac at home.
Mac had just come onto the scene.
It was a new computer.
I got there, and it was like I had stepped back to it's like I was trying to land a man on the moon.
You know, he's got these prompts.
Couldn't believe they were using Wang's of all things.
Crazy.
Yeah, but they'll replace them someday at the next thing, 20 years too late for the next match.
Exactly.
Keep the activity going.
Well, here's kind of the here's kind of the hangover from our joy over what happened.
Now they're trying to cut.
They're cutting.
That's great.
I hope they keep doing it.
I think it's a very good thing to do.
But at the same time, it's all about the mission.
That's the problem.
The philosophy is the problem.
Now, go to the next one.
This is from anti-war.com.
And this is kind of a sober you up a little bit.
USB-52 bombers fly over nine countries in the Middle East.
The flyover is meant as a show of force against Iran.
Boy, yeah, that's where it goes off the track, I think, because there's so much effort to pick one target, gang up on them, and never go and really look at the history, how we've contributed to that perpetual hatred, and totally ignore any effort on the part of the Iranians to seriously want to participate.
But, you know, somebody said, what you ought to do is look at it and find out was it the last time the Iranians tried to expand their borders?
Yeah.
And it was a time, but that's been a long time ago.
So it's something that we should pay more attention to instead of saying, how can we build up the hatred?
And it seems like we have to have an enemy, you know, besides, they wouldn't have all these incentives to build more planes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, go to the next one.
And here's from the article.
The Air Force's B-52 Stratosportress bombers, which led the mission, are based in the UK.
Also involved were American F-15s and other fighters flown by unnamed partner nations.
Now, I tried to do a little league.
I didn't have as much time as I'd like to have, but I would have loved to have found out how much this little operation costs.
Now, obviously, you have to train when you have a military.
That's understandable.
But this was meant as a show of force against Iran.
How much did this little show of force cost?
My guess is that the energy costs here, the building of the airplanes and the maintenance and the personnel cost a lot more than we're going to save from getting rid of the low-hanging fruit, you know, and the employees, the ones that, you know, that aren't permanent.
The permanent people got a waiver almost like that.
So I think, so an overall policy that we would like to see used would mean that you'd change this and you wouldn't at one time say we're cutting down here and it's going to be miscellaneous.
It's everything and we're going to cut out so many jobs.
You have to say, why are we doing this show of force?
Doesn't everybody in this country know that we are the most powerful?
And besides, airplanes are ancient weapons.
You know, you have satellites going on.
Even during the Cold War, I argued, and I always did it.
I thought, well, this will be funny.
But I don't, now that I think back, it probably wasn't that funny.
I said we could defend our country with six submarines.
We had the best submarines and they were quiet and they can launch missiles.
And you say, well, you have to have a defense there.
Well, if anybody attacked us, it'd be hard to get our nukes, nuclear submarines.
But it is something that it's always instead of the emphasis, cut, cut, cut, cut, the hilarious talk about it.
Spend, spend, spend, spend because we are in this business and there's stocks that have to be protected.
And believe me, they probably spend half their time looking at the stock payments and dividends.
Absolutely lobbying.
Yeah, the point is that Iran is not going to attack the United States, full stop.
So if we're going to do an America first, America foreign policy, we don't care about Iran.
It's not going to attack us.
They couldn't care less about us.
But here's Aaron Space Forces, a magazine write-up of it.
Excuse me, if you can put this up.
So Iran's not going to attack us.
We know that.
They write it up.
B-52s fly across the Middle East, dropping live munitions.
I'm sure they enjoyed that.
So here's the next one.
And here's what it's really about.
Unfortunately, go to the next clip.
This is from the same magazine.
Since Amos's October 17, 2023 attack on Israel, the U.S. has maintained an increased force presence in the Middle East, primarily to deter Iran and its proxies.
So in fact, it doesn't have anything to do with the United States.
And if you go to the next one, here's the absurdity of the entire thing revealed.
In a separate action, February 15th, the U.S. conducted a precision airstrike in northwest Syria, targeting a senior official in Huras al-Din, an al-Qaeda affiliate, CENTCOM said.
They never pointed out that Syria is now being run by an al-Qaeda affiliate.
They want you to know that part.
So that's we were involved in that.
That's the insanity of the whole thing.
Yeah.
Young Minds and Liberty 00:06:04
So someday they will wake up.
We've never had a perfect attitude toward non-intervention, but we should make the argument from through the moral position, through the Constitution, and then looking at the total failure of our system.
That's usually what ends war is people get exhausted.
They run out of money and they run out of, you know, young kids to go off and get killed.
And this is a sad situation and they will not listen.
I can remember so clearly the reception I got when I said, don't do it.
You're going to war.
Are you going to declare war?
When's it going to start?
When's it going to end?
And they were rather indignant.
They didn't like that.
And yet, that's where you have to really get people starting.
But, you know, being right 20 years later loses the effect.
It's not as fun.
Well, let's end on a happy and promising note.
And if you go to that next clip, here is a good news story, Dr. Paul.
TJ Roberts was in our first class of Ron Paul Scholars.
I think it was back in 2019.
He's been a friend of ours.
In fact, he was a lecturer at the Ron Paul seminar this past year.
He's come back as a lecturer.
In the meantime, he went through law school and got himself elected to the Kentucky House.
So he's a legislator in Kentucky.
He put in a bill, HB2.
And this is, I think, the first bill he introduced.
I could be wrong on this.
I think this is the first bill he introduced.
It's a measure that would give Kentucky taxpayers who were improperly charged sales and use taxes on bullion transactions such as gold and silver an avenue to seek refunds and additional compensation for legal and undue burden.
Go to that next clip.
Here is a great picture of TJ.
By the way, that last one, he's wearing a Mises pin.
He told me that last night when he texted me, which is pretty neat.
So it passed the committee in the Kentucky House and it's on its way to pass on the floor.
And the short way of saying this is that Kentucky passed a law, and you know it better than I do, where you can't tax these transactions in precious metal in bullion, and they taxed him anyway.
So TJ said, well, I'm going to fix that and it wrote a good bill.
He's going to force them to give that tax money back with punishment.
You know, the neat part about this, he could have picked another subject and made the point because they're always abusing the principles.
But this fit into the money issue.
That is what I really liked about that.
And he's on such solid grounds.
And there's been a significant movement among the states where, you know, because the Constitution, they assumed the states were going to be rather independent, but we were going to work as a group, but you shouldn't be coming up with a lot of counterfeit money.
So that's what they were saying.
The state, just to have a decent economy, the states can't use their own legal tender.
They can't make it up because they had tried that even before the Constitution.
And one of the reasons they emphasize hard money is that the states had various paper currency.
So he's making that point.
And there's been several states now that we have tried to encourage that very much to make the point.
If it's legal tender, you could even use Silver Eagles.
They sound like legal tender, you know.
And they said that, oh, well, legal tender.
And they would be forced to use that.
And that would solve the problems a long way.
And I'm so happy that so many states are doing this now.
It's a shame you have to get a law passed to say, this is what the Constitution says.
But anyway.
It's a good news.
Yeah.
One point I wanted to make because young groups like that, and I don't remember TJ.
He probably didn't need any advice.
But the lung groups, young groups would come up and after they spent some time with us, either there or on a campaign trail, that we'd come up and in the question period, they would say, okay, this sounds good.
We like this.
We like freedom.
We like Sound.
What should I do?
What should I do?
And they wanted ABC, which is to simplify things.
And I probably was pretending to be a little bit of a smart alley.
I said, do whatever you want to do.
But I was saying that seriously.
Now, TJ did what he wanted to do.
And I couldn't have said, oh, I think you should run for state rep or something like that.
The person has to make the choice.
And I said, if I had to do over again, if I was a good singer, I'd become a singer and sing patriarch song.
That'd be great.
But that didn't work out.
So my songs come out a different way.
I know the feeling.
We really need to congratulate TJ, I'll tell you.
So it's just wonderful to hear that.
So once again, it's not numbers.
Our groups each year, how many years have we been doing that now?
This will be our seventh year.
Seventh year.
And there's small groups.
It's not like we get a thousand people out for these lectures.
No, no.
And so I think that's wonderful.
We should congratulate him.
And I hope a lot more people decide that, oh, I don't know what to do, but that's a good suggestion.
I like the issue.
And the good thing is that there are people who step up and invest in the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar.
And they'll put these young students through our program.
It's not a long program, but it's a very good program.
And they're investing in the future.
That's what you always say, invest in the future of liberty.
Investing in the Future 00:02:44
And that's what it is.
And we're seeing, and TJ would see as an example because he did something great yesterday.
But so many of the other ones are doing great things that you don't hear about.
It spreads out.
So congratulations to TJ, but also a huge thank you to the people who are funding this program.
And I'd love to see it expanded this year beyond that.
So we'll be telling you about that later.
But go to that last one.
And here's in the short term, here's what we're going to deal with, which is our conference in March the 22nd, America in the Age of Trump 2.0.
Get your discounted tickets.
There is a link in the description.
Come join us.
It's going to be exciting.
It's going to be fun.
And we'll be happy to see all of you.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I, too, am looking forward to March 22nd because I'm there as a monitor because I've given strict instructions about what everybody has to make an effort to do.
And that is have some fun because I think that, you know, it's serious business and it's a thing where you can't say, snap your fingers and everything is going to be fixed.
It's ongoing.
The issue of good versus evil has been here just a long, just certainly a long period of time.
And it should be done in a tone where you can talk to people.
So it's rather sickening to me when it deteriorates into what we had during the campaign.
And even the former friends, we already mentioned that the progressives are now not progressive.
I always lamented the fact that the enemy of liberties destroyed the word liberal.
Oh, no, not liberals.
One time I used that earlier in my campaign.
And some local person, a Republican, say, don't ever use the word liberal.
So I think I heard that from Mises or somebody.
They didn't want to be called conservative.
So liberals and then even libertarian, they want to badmouth us on that.
And progressive.
Why can't you be progressive?
I think of what we do as very progressive because we're moving in a direction that we think is very good.
And that direction is more liberty and less government intervention.
That's why we applaud those people who are looking, even though it may be nibbling at the corners and trying to make the point.
Government's too big.
We have to eliminate it and start cutting spending.
And that hopefully will be the step toward our ideas about what we should do to promote peace and prosperity for everybody.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Export Selection