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May 8, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
25:49
DId Congress Kill DOGE?

: After the fanfare over the DOGE cuts had died down, the ball was in Congress' court. Would the cuts identified by DOGE be codified in legislation so that they would actually take place...or would House and Senate leadership quietly continue to fund government at the full level. Yesterday Rep. Thomas Massie gave us the answer...

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Identifying Incredible Amounts 00:03:54
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is not in today, so we will have a little briefing together.
Today, I want to talk about something that is extremely important in my view, and that is the cuts that were identified by the people working for Elon Musk and Elon himself in the very early days of the Trump administration.
Now, if you're anything like me and Dr. Paul, I'm presuming feels the same, that was probably the most exciting part of the early Trump 2.0 presidency.
You had this team of young whippersnappers going through the institutions, identifying incredible amounts of waste, incredible amounts of things being done that we had no idea they were doing, and we didn't want them done.
You know, you look at particularly places like USAID, which it turns out was funding an absolute spider web throughout the entire world of things being done that we don't want done, funding newspapers, independent media everywhere, right?
90% of Ukraine's independent media was actually funded by the United States government, which of course, you get what you pay for.
So, it revealed this kind of secret world that the U.S. government had to control opinion and also to control spending because the foreign media certainly informs our intelligence services and it informs the domestic media here at home.
So, you had the mighty Wurlitzer, as was once called the secret apparatus of the government that was turned on and tuned up to crank out what they wanted.
So, identifying that was massive and was extremely important.
But it wasn't just the foreign aid.
That's the kind of the low-hanging fruit.
It was the waste throughout the different agencies, government agencies, the Department of Education, what have you.
You know, it was hundreds and hundreds of people who just didn't go to work.
I had two or three jobs.
They collected a very, very nice salary, government salary.
Didn't show up.
Sat around in their pajamas all day for years.
So identifying that was important, especially as we all know, it's getting very, very difficult to make ends meet.
Inflation is terrible.
If you don't believe me, go to the store.
You'll see prices going up.
I watch them very closely because it's a barometer of the level of happiness and contentment of Americans.
So it was indeed popular at first.
You were talking, if we think about February and March, I was just looking over some polls and it was extremely popular.
Now, of course, the people who are opposed to any kind of cuts in government, and they're on the left and the right.
You know, you had the lefties who were, they didn't want any cuts.
They were afraid that the cuts were only going to benefit the rich.
Whereas in reality, certainly in my opinion, if you can identify abuse, for example, in Social Security, and this is co-social security system, if you can identify abuse and you can shore up that agency, well, then you can preserve it for the future.
Nevertheless, you have that side, those constituencies who are not happy with it.
But you, of course, had the hawks and the deep state, because they use things like USAID.
They use our massive military budget to control the world or attempt to control the world overseas.
So they didn't want it happening.
And what do they do best, particularly the left, I have to say, with the media in tow, is to demonize.
They didn't want to go and have a debate about Musk.
They didn't want to have a debate about whether we should be funding people that are 400 years old getting Social Security.
No, it was Musk.
It was all about the person.
Backlash Over Rescissions 00:13:47
He's a weirdo.
We don't like him.
Let's demonize him.
And so you did see the numbers going down after they started demonizing Elon Musk, which is a real shame and it wasn't deserved.
But nevertheless, those cuts were identified, serious cuts were identified at first.
But the problem is, we've discussed it on the show, as you know very well, when Congress appropriates money to be spent by the executive branch, that money is just sitting there in a bubble, you know, just sitting there.
It has to be spent.
You can't just go back.
And the president can't refuse to spend it.
It's more complicated than that, but essentially, he can't just refuse to spend it.
So what do you do?
What do you do with this money?
What do you do with, you signed off on closing down the Department of Education?
What about all the money that's been appropriated?
Well, as we've also mentioned on the show, you have to do a rescuit bill.
You have to do proactively in Congress.
You have to cut that money after it's been appropriated and send it back to the Treasury or to the Ether or wherever it goes.
And that's what's so important.
That's why you saw Thomas Massey, Senator Rand Paul, and many others saying, look, these cuts are great, but they've got to be put in legislation.
Otherwise, they're just, it's a shimmer.
It's just blowing through the breeze, blowing through the air.
And the last thing that the deep state or whatever you want to call it, the last thing they want is for this to be codified into law because they can just kind of blow smoke around and confuse everyone and keep doing what they're doing.
So that brings us to this week.
I think it was, I think this is the week that Speaker Johnson announced a four-day break.
He's going to cut votes early this week and everyone's going to go home back to their constituencies and whatever they do when they're at home.
Thomas Massey, you know, last night fired off something that was kind of flew in under the radar.
Massey, in my opinion, in my experience, is not a person who, you know, who flies off the handle without having information to back up what he says.
But he said something very interesting last night.
Now, put up that first clip and I'll show you what he did.
This he went to X and he said, this wasn't widely covered in the news, so I will tell you.
Congress was scheduled to vote on rescissions this week to cut the waste that Doge found.
But the votes were quietly canceled.
USAID and other programs like PBS and NPR were to be targeted.
So apparently they had identified some of these things and they were going to actually cut.
And according to Thomas Massey, they decided to not do that.
Now, he took to Grok, the AI component of X, and he asked Grok a question about this.
And Grok did churned out a few bits of info.
I'll go to the next one.
This is interesting, and it's also revealing, even though it's Grok, which seems pretty accurate.
And it does cite the sources there.
You see that little P on the bottom.
That's Politico.
So Grok says, in early 2025, House Republican leaders tentatively planned to vote on a rescissions package proposed by President Donald Trump during the week of May 5th, 2025.
That is this week.
The package expected to be sent to Congress in April 25 aimed to cancel $9.3 billion in previously approved funding.
So that's the point, previously approved, previously appropriated funding.
It was to cut that, primarily targeting foreign aid programs, the State Department, and the public broadcasting entities like PBS and NPR.
And certainly those first two are pretty popular.
I mean, Americans don't like foreign aid.
They just don't.
PBS and NPR is a little bit more divisive.
I think the left tends to like it.
The right tends to hate it.
Nevertheless, keep that up, if you will, please.
The rescissions process governed by the Impound Control Act of 74, that was a whole Nixon thing, allows the president to propose canceling appropriated funds, which Congress must approve within 45 days of continuous session via a simple majority vote in both chambers.
This fast-track procedure was seen as a way to formalize spending cuts, particularly those pushed by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, led by Musk.
So, the initiative, I don't want to get too far in the weeds, but it's important here, I think.
So, the initiative comes from the president and it goes to Congress, and they have this time to make these cuts to vote on these cuts.
Now, go to the next one after this.
So, Grock continues on why didn't it happen?
What happened?
And this is their analysis, and they cite their sources there on the bottom.
Now, you're right, you'll be this won't you'll recognize some of this stuff here: political opposition and lack of consensus.
Now, here we go.
Once the smoke is cleared, once they have basked, members have basked in the glory of, I don't know, hugging Musk and being popular along with Musk because on their own, guess what?
They're not very popular.
Once that clears, now it gets back to the business of making the sausage, and that means don't upset the apple cart.
Okay, so here's what Grok says: the resistance package faced significant resistance from both Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Democrats argued that the executive branch was overstepping its authority by attempting to rescind funds appropriated by Congress.
We've already talked about how they can fix that, viewing it as an infringement of the legislative branch power of the purse.
Now, I highlighted this part: moderate Republicans and defense hawks expressed concerns about cuts to foreign aid, particularly after the controversial shuttering of USAID, which had already strained international relations.
I know, Grok, where are you getting this?
But whatever.
Additionally, some GOP senators were wary of publicly associating themselves with unpopular cuts.
There you have it, especially after the 2018 recessions that narrowly failed.
They didn't want to be blamed if they failed.
They didn't want to be associated with them if they became unpopular, which is certainly very possible given the media's coverage of it.
And definitely, the military hawks, the people who are maintaining the global empire, did not want any of these cuts to foreign aid or USAID.
Now, the problem is when you've retained that funding for USAID and it continues to function as an entity within the State Department, they can continue to do things.
Now, Marco Rubio, everyone watching this show knows, is no angel.
He may be behaving himself a little bit right now when he's working for Trump, but in his heart, he's a neocon and he's always supported the global American empire.
And so he's got that money just banging around, you know, and he's got people around him thinking about what to do with it.
You know, it's like putting a big old cookie jar in front of your toddler.
They're going to eat it.
That's just how it works.
So until you cut that money and say, nope, it's got to go back, it's vulnerable right there.
And that's what's going to happen.
It's going to be hidden and nobody's going to know.
It actually may turn out to be worse than before because under USAID, there was some accountability because they did, at least for a while.
I think they stopped doing it recently, but they did have to announce the different grants that they gave.
So at least you know where the money was going.
Now you won't have that.
So go to the next one here on this rescission.
The other problem is White House hesitation and strategic shifts.
Again, this is what happens when the momentum slows.
The momentum was there in March and April to get this done, but it slows.
They wake up.
They wake up with the hangover, right?
They were drunk on the excitement of cutting government because that's what Americans wanted and voted for.
Well, they woke up with the hangover and they said, God, we don't want to do this.
This is no fun.
So here's what Grok says.
Despite initial Republican enthusiasm for a rescissions package to legitimize Doge's spending cuts, the White House appeared unhurried to send their proposal to Congress.
Now, that's because they lost interest in it.
And that is exactly why people like Senator Paul and Thomas Massey and a few others.
I think Marjorie Taylor Green should be in that group and probably a few others were saying, Don't stop.
You got to get this through.
Don't waver.
And that's exactly what happened.
And while they were wavering, guess what happened?
The next part.
Now go to the next one.
This is when the backlash comes.
They didn't strike when they should have.
They didn't strike when the fire was hot.
Public and legal backlash.
The Doge initiative, led by Musk, faced significant public and legal challenges, including lawsuits questioning the legality of freezing or cutting appropriated funds without congressional approval.
The rescissions package could have provided legal cover.
That's what we're talking about.
But the scale of the proposed cuts sparked unease among lawmakers.
What a surprise, particularly given the public's mixed reaction to Doge's aggressive approach to slashing federal programs and jobs.
Yes, there was a mixed reaction after the media gave it 100% negative coverage, as we've seen, and demonized Musk for trying to do this.
Yeah, people were worried because they were told to be worried.
They were told that this evil billionaire was going to take your money away.
And that wasn't the case at all, but it was able to turn the tide against the enthusiasm for these cuts.
You know, and so basically just wait it out.
Everyone who's there in Washington, everyone who's in the Beltway, just wait it out.
It'll be all right, man.
You got your, oh, you got your job cut noticed.
Don't worry.
We'll get you back in.
It's not going to happen.
And that's exactly where we are right now.
Now, go to the next one.
Now, this is a summary of the Grok again, as I was mentioning, the Grok that Thomas Massey put up last night on his ex-account.
In summary, while a rescissions vote was scheduled for early May 2025, it did not happen due to a combination of political opposition, historical caution from the failed 18 attempt, White House reluctance, legal and public backlash against Doge's cuts, and competing legislative priorities, i.e., the big, beautiful spending bill.
100%, everything, everyone gets a pony in the big, beautiful bill.
Post on X also noted significant Republican discontent with the proposed cuts, suggesting the package ran into a buzzsaw of opposition from both House and Senate Republicans, further undermining his chances.
That's it, because that's the currency of DC: is money.
Money is being stolen from us.
That's what keeps them alive.
That's what flows through their veins.
And when they lose money, they lose power.
If you cut these agencies, they lose power.
They lose patronage, right?
So that's what happens.
So, anyway, that's what Massey claimed yesterday.
I tend to believe him.
He's never led me astray before.
I think he's right.
He may have gotten some small details wrong, but I think he's right.
And so the Gateway Pundit, which is a right-wing, I believe, website, now they ran with this last night.
And here's what they put up.
And they got some pushback.
Thomas Massey accuses Speaker Johnson of canceling rescissions vote that would have slashed $9.3 billion in wasteful spending.
Johnson's office denies the allegations.
Who do you believe in those two pictures?
And now go to the next one.
And this is the Gateway Pundit pointing out that he took to social media, that is Thomas Massey, to drop a bombshell allegation.
Now, that's how I felt when I saw it last night.
I saw it like late in the afternoon and I saw Massey's post and I thought, that's a bombshell.
That's a bombshell.
A bombshell allegation that House Speaker Mike Johnson quietly canceled a key vote this week on a rescissions package backed by President Trump, 2/9.3 billion, which, at least to the rest of us, to you guys, myself, that seems like a lot of money.
Punch Bowl News reported back in April that House GOP leaders had tentatively planned to vote on the recessions package on May 25.
Here's what was going to be in it: 8.3, if you got the next one, 8.3 billion in foreign aid, USAID money and elsewhere, and NPR and PBS.
And Massey pointed out that it was not covered, so he wanted to spill the beans on what was going on.
Now, here's a pushback.
Speaker Johnson said, no way, Jose.
That's not what happened at all.
Through his spokesperson, put this next one on, Alicia, what's her last name?
Put it on there.
Oh, I can't even read it.
Adelina Lawson.
There she is.
Now, here's what she said.
She's Johnson's person.
No votes on recessions were canceled this week.
The speaker has repeatedly expressed his commitment to save taxpayer funds via the rescissions process.
Under law, this process requires a special message before Congress, to Congress, detailing the proposed rescissions before Congress can act.
So she's saying in a technicality, they didn't have that message.
I don't know.
Who knows?
Who knows what happened?
But something was supposed to happen this week, and it didn't.
And I think the main point is that every day, every week this doesn't happen is a week that it becomes less likely to happen.
Russia's War Demands 00:07:22
They're going to wait this out, guys.
They're going to wait it out because people will lose interest.
They will look at the next shiny object that the media waves in front of them.
And before you know it, business as usual, big, beautiful bill, fully funding everything.
Now, I've got one other post here on next.
Now, this is from Senator Paul, who back in April was sounding the alarm bells on this.
Senator Paul said on April 10th, I wholeheartedly support the cuts President Trump, Elon Musk Doge have put forward.
And this is prophetic, but if the cuts are real, why does the bill, this is the one we're talking about, the big, beautiful bill, why does a bill expand our debt by $5 trillion?
Congress math, once again, does not add up.
GOP holdouts block action.
So, you know how it is.
It's Lucy and Charlie Brown.
They teed up the idea that we're going to really have cuts this time.
And people were enthused about it.
They were happy about it.
They did their work.
They did their prep work.
They demonstrated that the things that were going to be cut were things that we didn't really want anyway.
And they waited.
And the momentum slipped.
And sadly enough, let's be honest, President Trump became distracted because he wanted to make a deal.
He wanted, he's like the dog chasing cars, you know, trying to bite the tire.
He got obsessed with making a deal on Russia, which I've got a little thing here to finish up on before we go.
Obsessed with that.
A lot of energy, a lot of mental energy, a lot of the energy of his staff was taken up with this deal.
The problem is they went in there with the wrong briefing papers, right?
They let General Kellogg tell them what was going on, and Kellogg had his head somewhere it shouldn't be.
Let's just put it that way, and gave him a bunch of false info.
You can't fix a car if you don't know where the parts go.
And that's exactly what happened.
So you had that.
You had this whole Middle East distraction with President Trump.
He's obsessed with that.
Now he had the Iran distraction with President Trump.
Then you had Liberation Day.
And then you had, oh my God, let's get rid of Liberation Day a few days later.
So all the while these things are happening, the thing that we really want, the only thing that matters, the only thing that matters is making these cuts and reducing the size of government.
It's the only thing.
Everything else will follow.
That's going by the wayside.
That is the one thing that will not happen.
So disappointing.
I guess we can continue pushing for it.
Not be distracted by shiny objects that they're going to throw in front of us.
Not be tempted to allow them to demonize people like Elon Musk for whatever faults he may have.
He put in a lot of his own time into this and done a great service.
So anyway, I'm going to finish up by doing a couple of things on a political piece.
JD Vance, who I think has pretty good instincts when it comes to foreign policy, and I also think he wasn't buying General Kellogg's BS on the Russia-Ukraine war, he nevertheless was speaking at the Munich Security Conference yesterday, I think it was.
And he's kind of serving up a kind of a dog's breakfast on this whole Ukraine-Russia thing.
They've been expressing frustration that Russia is not biting on the deals they keep offering.
They keep offering the same deal.
Here's the Kellogg plan.
You want it?
No.
Here, have it again.
You want it?
No.
Here, there's the Kellogg plan.
Do you want it?
No.
This is what's happening.
And if you put on that next clip, oh, here's Vance.
Here's political reporting.
Vance says Russia is asking for too much to end the war with Ukraine.
Now, the presumption in this headline, if you just leave it up, the presumption in this is that Russia is desperate to end the war.
But as even JD Vance, as even the New York Times, as even the mainstream media report, Russia is winning the war.
It's pretty basic, basic logic that when you're winning the war, you're not necessarily desperate to end it or certainly to freeze the conflict.
That's Kellogg's big thing: freezing the conflict.
Why would you freeze the conflict if you're winning the conflict?
It makes no sense.
So this whole sort of JD Vance being sucked into this is a real disappointment.
I don't know what he's being told.
He's got to know better than this.
Now, go to the next one.
Here's what he's saying.
This is what he said in Munich at the conference.
Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that Russia is, quote, asking for too much to end its war with Ukraine, underscoring new frustrations in the Trump White House over efforts to court Moscow on peace talks.
Speaking to the Munich leaders meeting in Washington, he said, oh, maybe it was in Washington, whatever.
He said that the U.S. is focusing on a long-term settlement since Russia rejected the U.S. call for a 30-day ceasefire.
Duh.
I mean, are you surprised?
So Moscow said that sort of temporary pause.
It's not on a strategic interest because it would allow Ukraine to regroup.
I would add to that, been there, done that.
We had Minsk one and Minsk two.
Every time there was a pause, the U.S. and its allies ran to give them more weapons and start the war.
Why would they want to do that?
Shoot themselves in the foot.
Now go to the next one, which is the last one, and we'll get out of here.
Is Vance stressed that Russia is likely to have to make concessions?
Oh, really?
You're going to tell them that?
Go ahead.
The latest sign that the Trump administration is willing to get more aggressive with Russian President Putin.
The Russians are asking for a certain set of requirements, a certain set of concessions in order to end the conflict.
We think they're asking for too much.
Well, send them a letter and tell them that and see how that works.
The point is that the conflict, from the very beginning when this conflict started, Russia was very specific with what its goals were.
And that was the demilitarization, the denautification of Ukraine, and an end to the security threat posed to Russia by NATO on its doorstep, meaning no NATO ever for Ukraine.
This has been their position consistently.
They've now fought for over three years to take back the territory that people who live there voted to rejoin Russia because they're mostly Russians.
They've been fighting for this, they've been fighting for these objectives from the very beginning, and they haven't wavered.
So basically, the U.S. is talking to itself.
It's pretending that it knows what's happening in Russia, and it's not.
And it just doesn't work that way.
And the other thing that's important, and we've said it before, I think, I've certainly written about it, is this whole notion that the U.S. is acting as if it's a mediator in a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, when in fact it's one of the co-belligerents.
It is a proxy war.
The United States is firing its missiles.
It's providing targeting.
It's providing intelligence.
It's providing weapons.
It's training Ukraine.
It's the United States that's at war with Russia, using Ukraine as its proxy.
So you can't pretend that you're a mediator.
You can't pretend that you are a referee in boxing when, in fact, you've got gloves on yourself and you're punching the other guy too.
It doesn't work that way.
And it's very shocking to me that nobody in Washington, or certainly in this administration, seems to understand that point.
And until they do, they're going to keep delivering these things to Putin until he just says, stop coming.
Frustrated Mediation Failures 00:00:43
You know, Woodkoff, hey, I enjoy spending time with you.
You're a smart guy, but you keep bringing me this same bowl of dogs breakfast.
I don't want to have it anymore.
Don't come back.
You know, come back with something different.
It's got to keep going until they understand this problem.
So until they do, we're not going to resolve it.
The best thing that would happen, in my opinion, and I've written about it, is for the U.S. to become frustrated.
Stay out of it.
Leave.
Stop supplying weapons.
Get out of it.
And it will be over sooner than you think.
So, anyway, a couple of thoughts for today.
I appreciate everyone who tuned in today.
Without Dr. Paul, his words of wisdom, he got stuck with me.
But I really appreciate you tuning in.
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