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March 6, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
20:36
The Deep State Strikes Back!

The 100 MPH DOGE train is finding some obstacles thrown in its path, as judges are reinstating fired workers and even the Supreme Court is reversing spending freezes at USAID. How to continue the revolution in government reduction?

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Time Text
Troubling Trump Administration Pushback 00:10:27
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into 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?
Looking for peace and prosperity.
Let's do it.
And, you know, every once in a while, I make a prediction, and sometimes I get a lot more credit than I deserve.
You know, it was sort of accident because I probably quoted somebody else.
But anyway, there's something I've said over the years, which is not brilliant at all.
It's just a little common sense.
I've always said that if our side and it's not, it's not totally explainable.
It's a mixture of things, and that is the people who oppose the monsters on the other side, the authoritarians, the people who want to tell us what to do from cradle to grave.
And certainly superficially, the administration now at least talks common sense on this issue.
But I've always argued, and this is my point, is that when the time comes where it looks like we've gained some steam on, you know, competing with the people who are absolutely obedient to the deep state and always expanding government, have no knowledge about the difference between authoritarianism and liberty, that it'll get nasty.
And they'll say, boy, you know, and I think the speech that Trump gave the other day, the fact that some of the most decent things that he was bringing out, and you have to realize that some of that stuff is politically motivated,
but I tell you what, compared to what the Democrats did, it sort of sort of explains things because I've argued that our problems are, you know, we have a financial bankruptcy, but that comes from a moral bankruptcy.
And I think they were expressing, and they see that.
And when they get very defensive, in a way, Trump, if anything, has drifted more toward defending a moral position where Democrats, the worse they get, the more immoral they seem to get.
And so heartless.
So that is it.
And now, right now, they're fighting back because there's been a lot of activity.
I think they're just in their organization's in shambles.
What do we do now?
It used to be easy.
Just call Biden and he always fixed it.
So here's a headline from Politico.
Trump administration ordered to reinstate thousands of fired USDA workers.
Huh.
I didn't know he could do that.
And I guess the Democrats didn't like that.
But the thing of it is, they're talking about this, the pros and cons, and are the courts allowed to do this?
And what's the president allowed to do?
But the one thing that seems to be absent for me in this particular issue is it's not dealt in the area of constitutionality.
Why were these people hired anyway?
And so when you lead off with programs that are unconstitutional and accepted, then you get into a muddy water that you can't describe.
And I would say you avoid this stuff by not creating it because I like the idea of the Congress having a say in all this when there's a difficulty.
But if the Congress and the people go along with all these things that do not fit into Article 1, Section 8, you end up with a mess.
And how do you protect the rights and pretend that you're protecting the Constitution?
Instead, we end up with a mess.
Daniel, I think we have a mess here.
But I think the momentum is in the direction to support Trump on this, this kind of thing, because the other part has just fallen apart.
The interventionism has totally failed.
And the opposition who promotes all this, they're not willing to admit it.
Yeah, exactly, Dr. Paul.
There's been in these couple of months of the Trump administration, an unbelievable pace of events, an unbelievable pace of change now that's happening.
Not all of it, we agree with.
Not all of it is good.
There are some glaring problems.
Nevertheless, some amazing things have been happening.
One of them is this radical attack on bloated government.
And we saw it with USAID, whether you get rid of 90% of your employees and nobody knows the difference.
It's funny because that's what Trump did when he took over Twitter and turned it into X.
He fired most of everybody and nobody noticed.
So that's what they've been trying to do.
But people have said from the beginning that there's about a three-month window for him to be able to really do this before the other side starts to circle the wagons, starts to do some pushback.
And I think that's why we're talking about this today.
If we can put up this, now there's many indicators.
We just chose this one.
Trump administration in order to reinstate thousands of fired USDA workers.
As you mentioned, this is the pushback and it's the beginning of the pushback.
And I think the solution, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, is to push ahead as fast as you can, because I think the time is running out for them to really make some changes.
Yes, and it does excite them.
I'll tell you that.
And they're all holier to the now and taking care of the poor people and the evilness of Donald Trump.
They'll keep doing that.
Yeah, they'll give that.
But, you know, some of the things that they did to, you know, to defeat him or destroy him, you know, over his first term in office and certainly in between and certainly in the campaign and ever since.
But they never change.
It isn't that they come up with a program and say, you know, this program is failure.
We shouldn't have done this.
They don't have anything.
I mean, they never come out and say, well, we made a mistake in Ukraine and we're making a mistake here.
And maybe we should be better at balancing the budget.
And I like independence.
And I'm sort of interested in listening to Federman because he just blurts it out because he's not afraid to offend his colleagues and a few other sentimentalities.
That's true.
He did say something yesterday about that, about how they've got nothing.
Well, let's look a little bit into this political article.
This is what it's all about.
Put that next one on.
Thousands of fired workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture must get their jobs back for at least the next month and a half.
The chair of a federal civil service board ruled Wednesday, which is yesterday.
The ruling said the dismissals of more than 5,600 probationary employees may have violated federal laws and procedures for carrying out the layoffs.
And if you go to the next one, Kathy Harris, she's the chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Politico reports, this is a blow to Trump administration effort to drastically and quickly shrink the federal bureaucracy.
And this is a key part too.
Although it only applies to the USDA, it could lay the groundwork for further rulings, reinstating tens of thousands of other probationary workers whom the Trump administration has fired en masse across the government.
And now this is, we've talked about it before, Dr. Paul, this is the low-hanging fruit because the people, by definition, they're probationary employees.
That means they are not, they're subject to being fired.
They don't have that permanent guarantee of a job.
By definition, they can.
And so it's a little bit confusing that they're being fired as a problem because that's the definition of the status that they're in.
Nevertheless, this is a way to get things done quickly.
And now this pushback, this reinstatement. is going to be a problem for the administration.
Well, I'm disappointed.
Instead of having the debate I won, how did it get started?
Well, they started an unconstitutional program.
Now they're working out the details.
Oh, well, we have a way to settle that.
Well, there'll be somebody that will substitute for the Constitution.
We don't talk about that anymore.
You know, that's an old document.
But here, where they go to the chair of the Federal Civil Service Board, that must be an important position.
They take over the Congress and the president and everything else.
And Kathy Harris, the chair of the Merit System Protection Board.
You know, I like the idea of checking on merit, but merit should be checked by the people who are their supervisors in a free market economy and allowed to do the things to reward merit.
But here it is.
This authoritarian is going to be in charge of this and participate in the total ignoring of, you know, could this possibly be a constitutional issue?
They don't even hint to it, but I'd rather prevent things than to pretend, oh, we can handle this.
Yes, there could be some problems and there will be special needs.
We'll have to help some people here and take away some privileges over here.
And it's just management of something that they shouldn't be managing.
And yet we have a rule book and we have a guide.
And it never crosses their mind that how did these things happen?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there's an I think maybe it's just my sense of humor this morning, but there's a slight element of humor in this story as well, I think.
If you skip a clip and go to the one that's starting meanwhile, because Harris, this is a woman, Kathy Harris, she's saying you got to hire him back.
You can't get rid of him.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is separately trying to fire Harris herself.
She's fighting in court to keep her job because the federal law limits the president's ability to remove her from her position.
And go to the next one.
Now, this is how the whole thing came about.
Her ruling came in response to a petition filed by the special counsel Hampton Dellinger, who serves as a watchdog for the federal workforce.
Big Deficit Pushback 00:09:58
He argued to the board that the USDA's claims of performance issues appear dubious.
And here's another bit of humor.
Trump has also tried to fire Dellinger.
Like Harris, he's protected by federal law from being arbitrarily fired and is fighting in court to hold on to his job.
Now, this is another part that is the troubling thing of fire with the Trump people.
Dellinger, welcome to Stay Wednesday and telegraph that he is exploring the possibility of seeking similar short-term protection for thousands of other probationary workers beyond the USDA.
This is a big danger that he is going to expand this to the other places where they fired.
Maybe USDA, those 10,000, whatever people they fired, put them all back in.
This is a real problem.
The president doesn't seem to have the ability to shrink the government.
Talk about the definition of a deep state.
You're fired.
No, we're not.
It's pretty amazing.
You know, I think they are becoming, and they are, I think, desperate already.
But this is more or less the beginning of the pushback.
And I think it can get pretty darn vicious.
They might even lie about stuff, you know, and they've done that before.
You know, politicians have a habit of doing that when they get into a problem.
So, I believe this is going to be around.
They're going to think up other schemes to do it.
And this is hope that things like this happen in many societies.
Too often they end up with violence.
But when you mix this kind of stuff up with people getting poorer and unjustifiably suffering from an economy that both parties contributed to, because this, you know, is as bad as the Democratic Party has been, and the more they spend money.
The truth is, if you look at the last 30, 40, 50 years of our foreign policy, I tell you what, it's been bipartisan.
If you look at who has supported the Federal Reserve, it's bipartisan.
Who supported the deficit?
It's been bipartisan.
But it's not a very healthy thing politically to say that right now, because I always would say, you know, I would kid.
They said, do you think we ought to just have a third party?
And I used to kid and say, no, we should have a second party.
But right now, you know, I want to be more cautious because there is a little bit of difference now.
You can't deny that what Trump is advocating and trying to do versus these clowns who think that they can never change their way and it's just pursue all this activity and pretending they can solve these problems.
So this is, I think the lineup is getting more precise.
And I think there's going to be more anger.
And let's just hope people don't think they should use violence to settle these disputes.
No.
And well, the pushback, there's a solution to this pushback.
And you're never going to believe who's got a good solution.
This is going to shock you.
Put on that next clip.
This is from Eric Doherty.
New Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, calls on Congress to make all of Doge's cuts permanent.
To which Eric Doherty says, do it.
Go to the next one.
You'll never guess who Senator Paul had lunch with yesterday, Dr. Paul.
Our favorite Doge guy, Elon Musk.
This is from Axios.
Rand Paul pitches Elon Musk on a plan to slash spending.
This is a brilliant plan, in my view, because we've talked about this before, Dr. Paul.
The problem is the issue of rescission.
Congress has appropriated the money and they want to force the president to spend it.
There has to be a congressional solution to that.
It cannot be done at the executive branch, or maybe it can be, but we haven't seen that very evident yet.
So Senator Paul has come up with a plan to deal with the rescission issue.
Now, go to the next one.
Here are a couple of points on it.
Very important.
So no decisions have been made, but there is some early general support for the idea being pushed by Senator Rand Paul after the lunch.
I like this: an infamous deficit hawk.
He's an infamous deficit hawk.
That sounds like it's a bad thing.
An infamous deficit hawk.
Paul pitched Elon Musk on a massive rescission package during a lunch on Wednesday.
He told reporters.
Such a package would undo federal funding already approved by Congress.
The bill would only require 51 votes to pass the Senate, so no Democrats are needed.
Paul said specific numbers weren't discussed, but he'd like to see 500 billion.
Musk was elated at the idea.
Senator Josh Hawley told reporters, I didn't realize it could be done at 51.
So really exciting, great solution.
He sat down with Elon.
He didn't invite us, but that's okay.
We won't hold a grudge, but because he had came up with a good idea.
If my memory serves me correctly, years ago, it was put into the law that Congress had the authority, you know, to anytime there's a regulation, they could bring it up and have a vote and get rid of it.
They could stop it anytime they want.
And I think they say, oh, yeah, and I think after 20 years, they did it one time.
Exactly.
But this might get a little bit more attention.
The problems we have are much more severe.
Maybe more people will open their ears now and take a look at this.
But we shouldn't call them a radical.
I forget the word they use.
It's a great way.
I would get a t-shirt.
You may have to get a t-shirt that says that on it.
But that's a great solution.
And it's also encouraging to see Congress act.
You know, it's also encouraging to see them doing what they need to do.
And it's led by Senator Paul.
And I'm sure over in the House, Congressman Massey feels the same way.
So this is how you fix the problem.
So I'm going to close out now, Dr. Paul.
If you put that last one up, we are getting close.
We are in the ninth inning or the eighth inning, maybe the seventh inning.
America in the Age of Trump 2.0, our March 22nd conference down here in Lake Jackson.
We've got Tom Woods.
We've got David Stockwell.
We got Jeff Dice.
We got Representative John Duncan.
We got Ron Paul.
It's going to be a great event.
America in the Age of Trump 2.0.
Get those tickets.
Come on down.
You can go down and do some fishing at Freeport if you want.
Go down to Surfside Beach.
There's a lot to do down here anyway.
And listen to some great speakers.
I'll put a link there in the description for you to get those tickets while they last.
And over to you, Dr. Paul.
Yeah.
And Daniel, I think we have to be careful because things are moving quickly.
What if there is more success and a certain senator gets along with Musk and the president, and all of a sudden magic happened?
Could it be before our conference, all the problems are going to be solved?
Or do you think history is on our side of saying, no, you guys can stay busy?
We think there will be a problem.
Human nature is such, but hopefully they'll be greatly reduced, the problems that we deal with.
And I have over the years tried to explain to people who get the message and say, yeah, this is terrible, terrible.
How are you ever going to do it?
Isn't it too complicated to understand?
And the whole thing is, the truth of the matter is it's not that complicated.
You know, government interventionism is one big thing.
Authoritarianism is another.
And the Constitution is very clear on defending liberty, not being the policeman of the world.
And it's very understandable how we got into this mess.
Even the Constitution is pretty clear that only gold and silver should be used as legal tender.
And maybe we wouldn't be into the welfare warfare state and fighting these battles out.
But the one thing that's on our side, these battles aren't so quiet.
There is so much inflation that people accept it.
Just send me more money, print the money.
We can handle if we've handled it for this, for the first $36 trillion, we can do it for another $36 trillion.
Well, less and less people now are believing that.
And that is why the message of liberty and limited government is so important to explain that it is not complicated.
Yes, it could hurt some people.
They might lose their job because they are not doing anything.
But I tell you what, it is something that people say.
Well, and I even admit, you know, if tomorrow we had the key and we locked the door on the Federal Reserve, there's going to be big problems and there are different ways of doing these things.
But I tell you, hey, what?
If you let things go and you don't solve the problems on foreign policy.
Uh, so I, you know, I like what Trump is trying to do.
You know, in Ukraine, stop it, get out of there.
If, if that doesn't happen, and then we finally do have a big collision uh, economically and foreign policy uh, we're going to have a bigger mess than if you do it piecemeal or gradually or just say the rules are changing.
And that is, I think, a big deal, because in many ways, that's exactly what Trump has done.
He's changed the rules and for the most part, for the better.
So this is what we have to support, and it's not hard to figure out what is negatively portrayed by the authoritarians telling us how we have to live our lives and how to spend our money, versus the people who believe That the people are smart enough to know how they want to spend their own money.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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