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Aug. 21, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:52
Tulsi Cleans House

Again breaking the "rules" in Washington, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard has announced plans to reduce the size of her ODNI staff by nearly half. If only the rest of Washhington would follow her lead! Also today: the Pentagon announced another $3.5 billion in weapons to Israel. How many more children will they kill with our money?

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Time Text
Tulsi Gabbard's Intelligence Budget Win 00:11:15
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 this morning?
We're doing well.
We're searching, and we found at least something that you have to cheer a little bit about.
Yeah, for sure.
But, you know, the answer is what will happen afterwards?
Will they really do what they're saying they're going to do?
But at least this is an item having to do with Tulsi, a friend of ours.
And she's living up to her reputation.
You know, I was thinking the other day that, you know, we get along with her real well.
But, you know, our initial association with her, she was just a Democrat.
Remember?
And then she was running for president.
Yeah.
We got to know her.
But anyway, she's now a very important person in the administration, part of the cabinet.
And she's in charge of the national intelligence.
And she's the director.
And it's a place where she's going to be vulnerable because who knows, Trump might criticize her now and then, but I think the people like her.
I think the Republicans have accepted her very well.
And they don't accuse her of being a Democrat.
But she must have been at that time.
I didn't know her that well, but she probably represented the Democratic faction that we would work to get along with an understanding of civil liberties and a good foreign policy.
And she certainly has expressed herself in that area.
But the headline on Politico is Gabbert to cut ODNI staff by 50%.
That's a significant cut, I would say.
And if that goes through, now she's cut some before.
It was a 30%.
Now it's going to go up to 40% staff cut.
So that looks like, what are they going to do?
Who has to override her to rehire these people?
What will they do?
And who knows what will happen?
But it's supposedly going to save like $700 million.
And that probably, you know, it will be.
But if there's a savings, do you think there's somebody else in the administration?
You know, they owe so much debt.
The people who do the manipulation are the ones that handle it.
But you have to give her credit.
And it's good news that she's doing that because I don't think that's been done quite as bluntly as she has done that.
And that's what should be done.
It should be done in everything in the government start cutting back.
But anyway, she deserves some congratulations.
Yeah, absolutely.
Put that first clip up.
This is from Politico.
This gives you a sense of what it's all about.
Gabbert, as you said, bought to cut ODNI staff by nearly 50%.
Viewers and listeners will remember that the Office of National Intelligence, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is one of those things created after 9-11, like the Department of Homeland Security.
And of course, in government, reform always means getting bigger.
So the story was that the intelligence agencies of the FBI, CIA, and otherwise, in the run-up to 9-11, weren't coordinating their efforts well enough.
So the idea was to create a superstructure over top of them to help them coordinate better.
Same as it was said about Homeland Security.
They put them all together.
Of course, it doesn't work in practice as well as it may sound good in principle.
What you've basically done is added another layer of government with thousands of jobs.
And so what Tulsi has done, Tulsi Gabbert has done, Director Gabbert has done, is something that's never done in Washington ever.
And that is making your own department smaller because size is power.
Bigger your department, the more powerful you are.
And so it's such a countercurrent in Washington for someone to have the courage to actually voluntarily give up power.
I think it says an enormous amount about how good her instincts are in that position and otherwise.
So go to the next one.
Now, this is what she's doing.
She's going to overhaul her office, cutting hundreds of staff and consolidating teams, calling it ODNI 2.0.
And go to the next one here.
She's already eliminated, you covered this, Dr. Paul, already eliminated 500 staff and reduced the size by 30%.
The new plan will boost the number to over 40% and save more than 700 million.
That is a big change.
As you say, it'll probably be spent on something else.
Nevertheless, it's a move in the right direction.
Yeah, I think about the efforts and the excitement with the cuts that have been proposed by Musk and others.
And then it just sort of faded into the wilderness and it never got turned into law.
But I think she's in a position where, you know, she theoretically, hopefully nobody comes in and overrides her, can do this.
And now they're going to have to, if somebody tries to override her, they have to go through the embarrassment and say, oh, no, we want it all with all the bureaucrats we can get.
So it is a good move, and she deserves a compliment on this.
And the other thing that's good about it, Dr. Paul, it's not just that she's trimming the size, which would be good in and of itself.
It's that she's identifying malicious parts of the staff of the directorate, and she's eliminating those for a specific reason.
Now go to the next one, and you'll see what I'm saying.
This is all from Politico, by the way.
As part of the changes, the agency will trim down the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which collects and analyzes data on foreign influence operations seeking to undermine U.S. democracy.
ODNI says that the National Intelligence Council and National Counterintelligence and Security Center already carry out this work and describes the FMIC as having been, quote, used by the previous administration to justify suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.
Now, what she's doing here, Dr. Paul, in my opinion, is that she is going toe-to-toe with the deep state because this is what we're talking about: this foreign malign influence center.
Those are the types of people who were calling up back then Twitter and Facebook and others.
Hey, censor this, take this down, block this guy.
That's the kind of thing they were doing.
And they were also this center and those like it, which she's shutting down, were very much behind the fake Russia Gate story, pushing the Russiagate story.
The Russians are coming.
And this represents her thinking that the First Amendment is worth protecting, you know, in all set of circumstances.
And why in Washington indirectly?
And, you know, what's happening with the administration, you know, by the universities punishing administration.
Give money to people then they're beholding to the administration who controls the money more so than they should and more money than they should have.
And they do this and say, well, if you don't do exactly as we say, we're going to remove your largesse.
We're going to take it away from you.
And it's amazing that in a system like this, it's good that one person can cut some of this down.
But the whole thing is, is it's so much power in the punishment.
You know, if they don't do what's right, and, you know, another executive order can just close it down.
So it's a system that's run amok.
But this serves the interests of the people who want to know the details of what can you do.
But it's going to take a lot of Tulsi to really get to, because it has to have the fault.
People have to understand that.
That's what I hope we can contribute to.
Yeah, I mean, a great development would be, and I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon.
And I'm almost certain it was Jeffrey Sachs at our conference who made this point toward the end of his speech.
The idea that you must separate the covert action aspects of our intelligence community and intelligence collection and analysis, the latter should stay and the former should go.
It would be nice if she'd move in that direction.
But what strikes me about this, Dr. Paul, is it's a particularly sensitive area of government.
There are other places where you could cut, and of course they would be screaming and squirming and nobody wants to cut.
But this is the intelligence budget.
It's sacred.
It's sacrosanct.
And it's a high political risk for her.
She's taking a huge political risk with really very little upside.
She can continue to preside over a growing department and more power and more authority.
That's the trend.
That's how Washington runs.
She's doing it the opposite, and she's doing it in the intelligence community.
So she's going to get a lot of people who will be yelling, who will be very unhappy about her doing this.
Why are you cutting our intelligence capabilities back?
You're going to get a lot of that, I think.
See, this is what they'll do.
They'll use the defense.
She's winking the defense.
We have to have that.
We have to know exactly what's happening.
So she's not patriotic enough to stand up for spending this money.
Her little debt is, you know, won't be a problem if we can get this information.
So that is, it could serve the interest, but we have to have an atmosphere that is endorsed by the people.
The people understand it and that it's contagious.
You know, it's great to have an example, but it's not necessarily always going to be contagious because the more I think about how infected these ideas are, way down, she's taken a step down, you know, where the people are totally ignored because there might be a proposal somewhere along the way.
Well, we'll cut a billion dollars out of this $10 billion proposal, you know, and claim that's a great victory.
Yeah.
Well, here's her explaining what she's doing.
And I think it's actually really encouraging.
If you go to that next clip, this is Gabbard herself saying, over the last 20 years, ODNI, Office of Director of National Intelligence, has become bloated and inefficient.
And the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence, Gabbard said, adding that she would ensure the IC and ODNI return to its, quote, core mission to, quote, find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the president and policymakers.
Now, if that's the direction she's moving in, Dr. Paul, she's doing a great service to this country and to the president, him or herself in the future.
You know, some of the objection to Tulsi has been, she's never worked in the administration.
Why More Money Means Less 00:04:56
She doesn't have any experience.
How does she know what to do?
And it's wonderful that she doesn't have that brainwashing in an administration like that.
And she's independent-minded.
And it doesn't, you know, it takes just somebody wanting to be honest about what's going on to come out and explain this to us and say what they're doing.
But I think it's a wonderful thing that this has happened.
And, you know, one time somebody said to me, I think it was in politics.
They say, oh, Ron Paul doesn't have a degree in economics.
Somebody else called it.
That's good.
It's good that she didn't have the economics of the bureaucracy.
It had to live with that.
So it's good news.
This is a rule breaker.
That's good.
Well, unfortunately, we can't go two for two when it comes to good news today because our second story is not a good news story.
If you go to that next clip, this is Dave DeCamp wrote this up at anti-war.com.
Report.
Pentagon to spend $3.5 billion with a B dollars replenishing munitions.
It used defending Israel.
Wait, hang on a minute.
Defending Israel?
We have to give them another $3.5 billion, Dr. Paul.
And here is what makes it even worse.
That bill doesn't even include the 12-day war that Israel started with Iran.
And to make matters worse, this is above and beyond what we already give Israel, a huge extra chunk of money and more on the way.
Isn't it amazing and really ugly that this appropriation was before the 12-day war?
So in a way, it's hidden until next year because they didn't have any more room.
And, you know, when we passed these budgets, when I was there and now, I always say, watch out, there'll be a supplemental.
There will be an emergency, something like this.
But this is the first time the cover-up was before they even passed the bill.
They just hid it until the bill was passed.
They say, oh, well, it wasn't in the last bill.
Well, it should have been.
You already spent it.
But, you know, it's just not even necessary anymore because all they think about is, do we have a Federal Reserve that will print the money for it?
And they all do it, regardless of the arguments you have on factions, on what the interest rate should be, which I think is the silliest debate ever, as if they know what they're talking about.
But I think this is just another system that they can have.
Maybe all of a sudden, well, the Pentagon, who knows what they do because they could spend money and keep it quiet forever, because we're not even allowed to audit them.
It's impossible.
Well, you know, there's a moral and an economic component to this additional money.
And there'll be a lot more where this $3.5 billion came from.
The moral component is, I mean, I think it's the most extreme of immorality to force Americans to pay for genocide, to force Americans to pay for children to starve in Gaza.
And that's exactly what this is going.
These weapons are going to kill innocent Palestinians.
And for our government to force us to subsidize that, I think is probably one of the worst tyrannies imaginable.
But the other component is economic, as you point out so accurately and effectively all the time.
We're bankrupt.
We don't have this money.
It doesn't exist.
And it's taking money from poor people in America who are working and dealing with inflation and trying to raise their kids and put them to school.
It's stealing money out of their pockets and giving it to a relatively rich country, a country that does, by the way, better for its citizens if you measure things by this than our own country does in terms of education and healthcare and all these other things.
They're all free for them.
And why?
Because we have to pay for it.
But when's the last time you've heard some good reporters press some of these bureaucrats and spenders about where is the money?
Is there money in the bank?
Don't you have to have money in the bank when you buy something?
And press them.
And they never ask the question, so they never have to have the answer.
But it's endless and it keeps getting worse.
Where does the money come?
How can they do this?
And it should all go back to the machinery of the inflation, the printing of money, because that would curtail the automatic expansion because they get around it.
These are examples how they get around to have an open government.
Thank goodness we do have some people like Tulsi and Thomas to try to point it out to us, but it's not enough.
The people have to know about this.
And that's why.
It's very, very important that we do our best job to get this information out.
Moral Responsibility Loops 00:05:39
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, put this that next one on.
It'll be the last clip that we have on this topic.
The single biggest request is for a billion dollars to replenish various models of the standard missile interceptor, which are primarily fired by U.S. Navy warships and are produced by Raytheon.
The request was for SM-3IB threat upgrade interceptors, whatever those are, used to shoot down missiles, and they cost Dr. Paul only $9 to $12 million per munition.
I think you have to shoot two for each missile fired.
Now, that last one, if you go to, it's not just these, it's also the FADS, $204 million to purchase more Thad interceptors.
They're only $13 million apiece, Dr. Paul, $13 million apiece.
And during that war, which Israel started with a sneak attack on Iran, during that war, the U.S., and we've talked about it on the show, they shot a quarter of their total stock of the FAD interceptors costing about $2 billion.
So that $3.5, just if you talk about Thads, is now $5.5.
You're going to see a lot more than that that are going to be sent over there in a war that Israel instigated and which directly harmed our diplomacy that we were trying to pursue with Iran.
If you remember, just a couple of days before we were to sit down at the table with Iran and try to figure out a way to start getting along better, well, Israel threw the table over with a sneak attack on the Iranians and then started begging us to help them out.
You know, I think a better move for Trump would be to say no more money, no more weapons, stop the war.
He does talk about how much he wants to stop the killing in Ukraine.
That's great.
But how about stop the killing in Gaza?
You know, one thing we don't talk about, it starts super strong, but there is a movement in Israel because there's a growing number of people in Israel who reset the idea that Israel is responsible for that tragedy with the Palestinians.
And I think that is a big issue.
If that ever gets loose and that Yahoo loses more political clout, there may be a change in attitude because they're the ones who are demanding it.
But I think I don't even know if anybody has a number on that, what percent, because it would be kept rather quiet if they knew that 37% of the people in Israel objects to starving the Palestinians.
We don't know exactly, but there has to be resistance there, as well as with our people here at home.
See, they don't think we have, and you mentioned the moral responsibility what we have.
It's our moral responsibility because we allow it to happen.
We allow them to print the money.
We allow them to tax us and tax us.
And then they go and they do these things.
And they couldn't do it.
Matter of fact, I think these things that we're complaining about could not be done without a Fed because they'd have to face up to the fact that it's debt and you would have to literally take it from the people.
And that would bring the revolution on real soon.
Because right now, you know, I wonder how much taxes would have to go up for everybody.
They might have to double or triple, and they still wouldn't have enough because they say, oh, the money's coming in.
And then they say, you know, we forgot the bill, you've $12 billion for this thing.
We'll add that on.
Maybe they won't recognize that we hit it.
Yeah.
Maybe imagine if the cost of the Ukraine war and the Israel war, all that was just taken out of people's paychecks, they'd probably start to wake up a bit.
Oh, that's for sure.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, by thanking everyone who's watched the show.
Just like I want to thank everyone who came out to our conferences.
We're having a great time, and we hope that we can do some more in the future.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
It's not that we haven't had enough things to complain about.
I'm going to close with one new item of a plan.
The plan is for the U.S. to spend $500 billion Boeing Casey tanker aircraft for Israel.
Oh, but they haven't spent it yet.
But believe me, it's in the making.
The order has been placed.
So it's endless.
And that's why I'm not optimistic that all of a sudden we're going to have more Thomas Masseys and Tulsis there that are going to be able to guide the country to a more sensible approach.
But it is going to end.
It will happen.
What we have to do is help people prepare for what the alternatives will be because people will say, how can we be safe?
How can we be safe if we don't have all these weapons?
How could we be policing the world?
That's our moral responsibility.
So all those questions will be asked.
But actually, as I've said so many times, the problems aren't difficult to understand, and even the answers aren't that difficult.
And I believe sincerely that what we do here at the Institute for Peace and Prosperity is the way to go to try to move our country in that direction.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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