Trump Official ENDS Smug Journalist's Career Who Tried to Spread Fake News at Press Brief
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00:00Does anybody have questions for Stephen or for Mr. Hassett?
00:03Nobody wants to talk about the economy?
00:05Sure.
00:07IRS?
00:07OK.
00:08Go ahead.
00:08This would be for either one of you.
00:10So we have reported, several other outlets
00:13have reported that about 3,500 people
00:16are due to lose their jobs at the IRS by the end of the week.
00:21If the goal of these spending cuts
00:23across the federal government has been to reduce the debt,
00:26why impose some of the deepest cuts
00:28we've seen so far at the agency responsible for raising
00:31revenue for the federal government?
00:33Well, I think our objective is to make sure
00:34that the employees that we pay are
00:37being productive and effective.
00:38And there are many, many, more than 100,000 people
00:42working to collect taxes, and not all of them
00:45are fully occupied.
00:45And the Treasury Secretary is studying the matter
00:48and feels like 3,500 is a small number.
00:51And probably it can get bigger, especially
00:53as we improve the IT at the IRS.
00:57So I think that it's absolutely something
00:58that is on the table for good reasons.
01:00And the point is that, don't just talk about the IRS,
01:03talk about all of government.
01:05That there are so many places, I live in DC,
01:07you maybe live in DC, where nobody's
01:09going to the buildings.
01:11People aren't commuting because nobody's doing their job.
01:13We look back and we see that there
01:14are all these people doing two jobs
01:16while they're getting a government payroll,
01:17on the payroll.
01:18So the point is, we're fixing that.
01:19And the IRS is a small part of that picture.
01:22So you're saying that everybody who's being let go
01:24was doing a bad job?
01:26I'm saying that we're studying every agency
01:29and deciding who to let go and why.
01:31And we're doing so very rationally,
01:33with a lot of support from analysis.
01:35Because we're being told by a lot of people
01:37who have been let go at other agencies,
01:39that they were told they were being dismissed because
01:42of poor performance.
01:43When in some cases, they haven't even
01:45had a performance review yet, because they've only
01:47been on the job a couple of months.
01:48Yeah, I've never seen a person who
01:50was laid off for poor performance
01:52say that they were performing poorly.
01:55OK.
01:57Good point.
01:57Sure, Caitlin.
01:58I have a question.
01:59I'll start with you, Kevin Hassett.
02:00Thank you for being here.
02:01And then I've got a question for Mr. Waltz.
02:03On these potential checks that you might send out from DOJ,
02:05is there a concern, as you're thinking through this,
02:07that they could be inflationary?
02:09Oh, absolutely not.
02:10Because imagine if we don't spend government money
02:13and we give it back to people, that if they spend it all,
02:17then you're even.
02:18But they're probably going to save a lot of it,
02:19in which case you're reducing inflation.
02:21And also, when the government spends a lot,
02:22that's what creates inflation.
02:23We learned that from Joe Biden.
02:25And so if we reduce government spending,
02:27then that reduces inflation.
02:28And if you give people money, then they're
02:30going to save a bunch of it.
02:31And when they save it, then that also reduces demand
02:34and reduces inflation.
02:35OK, so you're not worried about it.
02:36No, I'm not.
02:36And Mr. Waltz, to follow up on Peter's question,
02:38you wrote in an op-ed in the fall of 2023
02:40that, quote, Putin is to blame, certainly like Al-Qaeda
02:43was to blame for 9-11.
02:45Do you still feel that way now, or do you
02:46share the president's assessment as he
02:49says Ukraine is to blame for the start of this war?
02:51It shouldn't surprise you that I share the president's
02:54assessment on all kinds of issues.
02:56What I wrote as a former member of Congress,
03:00look, what I share the president's assessment on
03:03is that the war has to end.
03:05And what comes with that?
03:07What comes with that should be, at some point, elections.
03:11What comes with that should be peace.
03:13What comes with that is prosperity
03:14that we've just offered in this natural resources
03:17and economic partnership arrangement.
03:20An end to the killing and European security
03:24and security for the world.
03:26The president's not only determined to do that in Europe,
03:29he's determined to do it in the Middle East.
03:32And just a few months ago, we had an administration
03:34that had tried for 15 months, week after week,
03:38sitting with you here, and couldn't get us to a ceasefire,
03:41couldn't get our hostages out.
03:43Now we're at that point.
03:44We're back to the maximum pressure on Iran.
03:47And we have just begun,
03:49and we will drive towards a ceasefire
03:52and all of those other steps.
03:53I'm not going to pre-negotiate
03:54or get ahead of the sequencing of all of that.
03:58It's a very delicate situation.
04:00But this is a president of peace,
04:02and who here would argue against peace?
04:04Okay, so you do share that assessment.
04:05And can I follow up?
04:06In 2017, then President Trump.
04:08Go ahead, Jordan.
04:09You just had two questions, Kaitlan.
04:11Jordan, go ahead.
04:13Jordan, go ahead.
04:14So, Mr. Hassett,
04:17you were speaking about tariff revenue,
04:18and you also addressed a question about the IRS.
04:21President Trump has spoken about replacing income tax
04:24with tariff revenue, especially with all this waste,
04:27fraud, and abuse that we're seeing cut.
04:28Is that a possibility?
04:30Absolutely, and in fact,
04:32if you think about the China tariff revenue
04:34that we're estimating is coming in from the 10%
04:37that we just added, plus the de minimis thing,
04:41that it's between 500 billion and a trillion dollars
04:44over 10 years is our estimate.
04:46And that's something that is outside of the reductions
04:48that markets are seeing through the negotiations
04:51up on the Hill.
04:52And so we expect that the tariff revenue
04:54is actually gonna make it much easier
04:55for Republicans to pass a bill,
04:57and that was the president's plan all along.
04:59I have a question for Stephen Miller about DOJ.
05:03So, you spoke about DOJ.
05:05You said roughly $50 billion is set to be cut in a year
05:10of waste, fraud, and abuse by unelected bureaucrats.
05:14We're hearing this ironic narrative
05:15from the president's critics and the left-wing media
05:17that Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat
05:20and he's doing all this terrible stuff.
05:22Isn't one of DOJ's objectives
05:24to get rid of the federal bureaucracy, the deep state?
05:28And also, who was running the White House
05:31when Joe Biden was in office?
05:32Because I don't know a single person
05:34who believes it was Joe Biden.
05:35You're tempting me to say some very harsh things
05:40about some of our media friends.
05:42Yes, it is true that many of the people in this room
05:45for four years failed to cover the fact
05:47that Joe Biden was mentally incompetent
05:51and was not running the country.
05:53It is also true that many people in this room
05:56who have used this talking point that Elon is not elected
05:59fail to understand how government works.
06:02So I'm glad for the opportunity for a brief civics lesson.
06:05A president is elected by the whole American people.
06:08He's the only official in the entire government
06:11that is elected by the entire nation, right?
06:14Judges are appointed, members of Congress are elected
06:16at the district or state level, just one man.
06:18And the Constitution, Article Two,
06:20has a clause known as the Vesting Clause.
06:22And it says the executive power
06:23shall be vested in a president, singular.
06:27The whole will of democracy
06:29is imbued into the elected president.
06:32That president then appoints staff
06:34to then impose that democratic will onto the government.
06:39The threat to democracy,
06:40indeed the existential threat to democracy,
06:42is the unelected bureaucracy
06:45of lifetime tenured civil servants
06:47who believe they answer to no one,
06:49who believe they can do whatever they want
06:51without consequence,
06:52who believe they can set their own agenda
06:54no matter what Americans vote for.
06:56So Americans vote for radical FBI reform
06:59and FBI agents say they don't wanna change.
07:01Or Americans vote for radical reform under energy policies
07:04but EPA bureaucrats say they don't wanna change.
07:07Or Americans vote to end DEI, racist DEI policies.
07:11And lawyers in the Department of Justice
07:13say they don't want to change.
07:15What President Trump is doing
07:17is he is removing federal bureaucrats
07:20who are defying democracy
07:22by failing to implement his lawful orders,
07:25which are the will of the whole American people.
07:31Well, thank you, Caroline.
07:33Thank you, Steven.
07:35One of the things that President Trump
07:36cares most about is job creation.
07:38And it was about seven years ago
07:40I had the honor of joining you in this room
07:42for the first time.
07:43And it looks like we've created a lot more jobs
07:45in the last month.
07:46Look at how many people are here.
07:47My estimate is about 180, but I didn't count.
07:50So thank you.
07:51It's really an honor to be back here.
07:53I think that I just wanna go over a few things
07:56and then hand it off to Mike.
07:58The first thing is that the president
07:59has told us to prioritize fighting inflation.
08:02And he had to do that because as you know,
08:04President Biden let inflation get completely out of control
08:07and he did it with policies that made no sense.
08:11They made no sense.
08:12A lot of times you people say to us,
08:14our friends, the journalists,
08:15you know, why are you doing that?
08:17But, you know, I like to think, why did they do that?
08:20Why did they spend so much money?
08:22And then why did the Fed print so much money
08:24so that we had inflation as high as we've ever seen
08:26since Jimmy Carter?
08:27So why did they do that?
08:28So we're addressing inflation.
08:30We didn't have to address it in the first term
08:32because it was always in the ones, almost always.
08:34But we're gonna get it back there.
08:35And how are we doing it?
08:36Well, we're doing it with a plan
08:38that President Trump and I and others
08:40have talked about in the Oval
08:41that involves like every level of fighting inflation.
08:45First, the macroeconomic level, we're cutting spending.
08:47We're cutting spending in negotiations
08:49with people on the Hill.
08:50We're cutting spending with the advice
08:52of our IT consultant, Elon Musk.
08:55And then we're also looking into supply side things
08:59like restoring Trump's tax cuts,
09:02maybe even expensing new factories
09:04so that there is an explosion of supply.
09:06If you have an explosion of supply
09:07and a reduction in government demand,
09:10then inflation goes way down.
09:12And then one of the things that you will wanna say is,
09:14well, when are you gonna see it?
09:15Well, the first thing that you'll see
09:17when the markets believe
09:19that we're gonna get inflation under control
09:21is that the 10-year Treasury rate goes down
09:23because that's how they think
09:25about future expected inflation.
09:26And so we're still gonna see some memory
09:28of Biden's inflation.
09:29It's not gonna go away in a month,
09:31but the 10-year Treasury
09:32before the last Consumer Price Index
09:34had dropped about 40 basis points,
09:3640 basis points because markets were optimistic
09:38about our ability to fight inflation.
09:4140 basis points is kind of not a fun thing to say.
09:43I'm an economist, talk that way, I apologize.
09:45But the way to think about it is for a typical mortgage,
09:48if that affects the mortgage rate,
09:49then it's gonna save a typical family buying a house
09:51about a thousand bucks a year.
09:53And that's just in our first month, okay?
09:56The second thing we've done
09:57is we've had a lot of trade talks.
09:58In fact, I was just meeting a minister from Mexico
10:02with Howard Letnik just a couple of hours ago.
10:04And we're talking about reciprocal trade,
10:07and we're also talking about the fentanyl crisis.
10:09And so reciprocal trade is about our government
10:12treating other governments the way they treat us.
10:15We want trade to be fair.
10:17It turns out that Americans have been disadvantaged
10:19by foreign governments over and over,
10:21and President Trump wants it to stop.
10:23And the fact that struck me as most noticeable
10:26when I started to look at what President Trump
10:28was asking us to do
10:30is that last year, last year we have data,
10:34US companies paid $370 billion in taxes
10:37to foreign governments, 370 billion.
10:39Last year, foreign multinationals
10:42paid us $57 billion in taxes.
10:45We have one quarter of world GDP.
10:47They have three quarters of world GDP,
10:49and we're paying 370, they're paying 57.
10:52This is not reciprocal.
10:53We're gonna try, or we're going to fix it.
10:56The other thing that we've done
10:57is we've had an all-of-the-above energy approach
11:01that's led by Doug Burgum and Chris
11:03and a really large team, EPA.
11:06And we've already made so many actions
11:09that are gonna affect the price of energy
11:12and lower inflation.
11:13We've opened up 625 million acres to energy exploration.
11:17We've cut 50 years of red tape
11:20that makes it so you can't have permits.
11:22And we've even made it so that when you go home,
11:25if you get a new one, then you can take a shower
11:28or flush a toilet or read under a light bulb.
11:32We're doing that too.
11:33So finally, let's just think about the facts
11:37that we can see right now that we think are awesome.
11:41So guess what?
11:42Small business optimism has gone up by the most ever
11:48since President Trump came in.
11:50ISM, which is the measure
11:51of what's going on in manufacturing,
11:53it's expanding again for the first time in years.
11:57CEO confidence is the highest it's been in years.
12:02And the reason people are thinking this
12:05is that our policies give people cause for optimism.
12:09And then I wanna reiterate what Stephen Miller said,
12:12because it's so important,
12:13and it's so important for financial markets
12:14to start to digest this,
12:16that if, say, the Treasury Secretary
12:19or any cabinet secretary with Elon Musk
12:22is able to find some savings, say $100 billion,
12:26well, in CBO land, that's actually like about 10 times that
12:31or maybe 12 times that over a 10-year window.
12:34And so when you're thinking about the negotiations right now
12:37over reconciliation and thinking about,
12:38well, $4 trillion, $5 trillion,
12:40well, those numbers in terms of the savings
12:42are gonna end up being small
12:44because of all the waste that we're finding.
12:46And so we're incredibly optimistic
12:47about the future of inflation and the future of our economy,
12:51and we're optimistic
12:52because we're making so much progress so far,
12:54and we already see it in market prices.