‘The Bureaucrats Have No Accountability’: DeSantis Praises DOGE For Reexamining Government Spending

4 days ago

During an event with Gov. Brad Little (R-ID) in the Idaho State Capitol in Boise, Idaho on Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) spoke about Elon Musk’s vision with DOGE and potentially codifying spending cuts into law.

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Transcript

00:00I'm not sure about that, but I think the questions were excellent.

00:03I mean, these are clearly legislators that are thinking very deeply, not just about the

00:08issues confronting Idaho, but the future of the country.

00:11And you know, I think we're in similar boats, just like our states have had success.

00:16That's great.

00:17But we're also we're all Americans here, and we want the country to succeed.

00:22And I've got four, six, I have a four, six and an eight year old at home.

00:27I know most of the legislators have kids and grandkids.

00:29You start thinking about what does that future look like 20 years from what are we going

00:33to be 75 trillion in debt?

00:35How do you how do you square this circle?

00:38And so I just think people are really concerned about the future of the country.

00:41I think they asked all the right questions.

00:43I think they're thinking very, very deeply about it.

00:46And I do think the fact like if you just had the balanced budget vote separately, seems

00:51like there would be probably more support than than the package that wasn't able to

00:55get the votes the other day.

00:56Yes.

00:57What's the promise of Doge?

01:00And then, for example, if you try to give a billion dollars, a billion dollars back

01:05to the federal government, and couldn't even figure out how to do it.

01:10Now you've met with Elon Musk, it's going to happen.

01:13Talk about the promise of Doge and just that example of how messed up things are going

01:17to be.

01:18So just for what he's referring to, during the Biden administration, we rejected federal

01:23funds on a variety of things because they had strings attached.

01:27So some of the road funding, we had to do all the DEI and woke policies, which are totally

01:32contrary to our state's policy.

01:34We had kind of led the fight against that stuff.

01:36Now it's more fashionable to be against it when we were doing it.

01:39We were kind of having an uphill battle.

01:41So so we did it.

01:42And we told the Department of Transportation and the Biden administration, here's 350 million

01:47or however much it is.

01:48We're not using it.

01:49And they're like, we don't know we don't know how to take it back.

01:52They literally did not know how to take back the money.

01:54Same thing on refugee money to send back, I believe, to HHS, they didn't do.

01:59So I'm like sitting on almost $900 million.

02:02We're not going to accept it because we're not going to change our behavior.

02:06So let's send it back and be part of the Doge efforts.

02:09So we went up and met with Elon on Friday in Washington.

02:12And he had one of his lieutenants there.

02:15And they were just like, you want to give back money like, yeah, we'll accept it.

02:19They got on the phone to Treasury.

02:21And like, within like 30 minutes, we had a plan to do it.

02:24And so we have initiated that.

02:27And so what's the promise of Doge generally, I think there's a lot of promise.

02:32I think when you see some of the spending that's happened, nobody justifies some of

02:38the grants that have been going out on some of these things.

02:41It was clearly taking taxpayer money and using it to push an ideological agenda was not about

02:47serving the interests of the country or what's in the public's interest.

02:51It was an ideological niche interest.

02:53And basically, these agencies had been taken captive by this viewpoint and used your money

03:00for that.

03:01So I think it's been great to expose.

03:02Here I think is the challenge, though.

03:05We're here talking about a balanced budget amendment because Congress won't change its

03:08behavior.

03:09Elon, and they're using a lot of savvy tech and all this stuff, are showing how the government

03:15mismanages money, but also just substantively, should government spend it on this?

03:21Because people have voted to do this in Congress for many years.

03:24Why are they doing it?

03:25How do you justify it?

03:27So you're running into kind of the momentum that Elon has with Doge with the fact that

03:32Congress has not been willing to change its behavior, right?

03:36So the most recent continuing resolution that the Republicans passed in the House funds

03:42everything that Elon had pointed out.

03:44It didn't change any spending from the Biden.

03:47In fact, that's a continuation of Biden's last year as president, basically, to do this

03:51continuing resolution.

03:52Now, what Elon will say is, well, they're not going to let these grants go out.

03:55And I think that's true.

03:57But ultimately, if Congress is appropriating the money, at some point, it's going to come

04:02to a head.

04:03Maybe you don't have to do a certain grant, but can you just impound everything?

04:07That's going to end up in court.

04:08There's a law on that.

04:10The solution is, if Elon's doing this, Congress should codify the Doge cuts in the law.

04:19There's no question Congress can do that.

04:22They have the power of the purse.

04:24But when you do continuing resolutions, that's just government on autopilot.

04:27So some people say, how could someone have said to do this?

04:31You know, Fauci, I was very upset at some of the things Fauci was doing over the years,

04:38including these cruel experiments on these beagle puppies.

04:41Like how did that end up happening?

04:43You know, a lot of, I'm a dog owner, a lot of dog owners are looking like, are you kidding

04:47me?

04:48But it's because the bureaucrats have no accountability.

04:50It's an omnibus bill.

04:52It's a continuing resolution year after year, which is basically government on autopilot.

04:57If you don't have the prospect of having Congress rein you in by defunding your program because

05:03you behave badly, you're going to induce bad behavior.

05:07That's just the nature of it.

05:08So I think it's really a battle between Doge and Elon and then this institutional swamp.

05:14And so far, I think that Elon's success has been limited to the executive branch.

05:19I have not seen Congress willing to step up and actually make these reforms permanent,

05:25which you're absolutely going to have to do.

05:27And we were talking earlier about Congress could balance the budget tomorrow, hypothetically,

05:32let's say.

05:33But it doesn't mean the next Congress is going to abide by that.

05:36They'll say, oh, we just came up with a 10-year deal to balance the budget.

05:40No, you didn't.

05:41Because each Congress that gets elected, they don't have to abide by that deal.

05:44They can legislate with a clean slate.

05:46They can choose to increase spending.

05:48A constitutional balanced budget amendment, you can't legislate around that.

05:53That's the rules of the road.

05:55And Congress will be restrained from plundering us further into debt.

‘The Bureaucrats Have No Accountability’: DeSantis Praises DOGE For Reexamining Government Spending

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