00:00I'm not going to ask questions about specific issues about which I'm very concerned.
00:05I subscribe, frankly, to the remarks that Mr. Deloro, our ranking member, made, however, Mr. Secretary,
00:11with reference to my concerns about what is happening.
00:14First of all, let me ask you this.
00:17You submit a budget. It goes to OMB. The president will submit it to us.
00:22And Congress passes a budget, sends it to the president, presumably the president signs it.
00:28Once that happens, do you consider that budget that Congress passes to be a suggestion or a directive?
00:37Well, as far as I'm concerned, it's the president's budget, and my duty is to defend it.
00:43It's Congress's choice about whether or not they're going to fund, you know, the Congress appropriates the funding.
00:50Listen, no, there is, Congressman, there's no agency ahead that I know of that wants to see
00:58his agency gutted or his budget lowered.
01:04There's tremendous waste in my agency.
01:06You know, it grew by 38 percent during the Biden administration, and public health went down.
01:11Okay, I got five minutes.
01:13Right, but I just say this.
01:15President Trump has a broader vision than me,
01:18which is that the $2 trillion we're spending a year that we don't have is landing on our children.
01:24That is a health crisis for them.
01:25Mr. Secretary, my question to you respectfully was, do you believe it is a suggestion or a mandate?
01:33This is a very important issue, which we differ greatly with the administration and with Mr. Musk,
01:41that willy-nilly, without Congress's approval, they can remove things, take things away, defund things, fire people.
01:47Well, that is not my proposition.
01:50I want to know whether it is your proposition.
01:52You've answered in the sense that once the budget is adopted, you need to carry it out.
01:57Now, whether that was President Trump that signed that budget or President Biden that signed that budget,
02:02I presume your premise is the same.
02:06Is that correct?
02:07I mean, I don't know whether you're asking me a rhetorical question because I think it's self-evident.
02:12It's not a rhetorical question, it's whether or not you think once the Congress says we're going to spend X number of dollars on X objective, Y objective, that you will follow that.
02:22Yes.
02:22Okay, that's the answer I wanted.
02:27Incidentally, that happens throughout history.
02:30You know, the Republican-
02:32Well, throughout history, Mr. Secretary, with all due respect, you and I know this.
02:36Mr. Nixon said that was not the law, that he could take whatever we, and he took it as a suggestion, and he wanted to impound, and he did impound in the early 70s.
02:50And we passed an act that said you can't do that.
02:52Then the Supreme Court heard that case, and very frankly, one of the most conservative judges, Justice Scalia, said,
03:00President Nixon, the Mahatma Gandhi of all impounders, asserted at a press conference in 1973 that his constitutional right to impound appropriated funds was absolutely clear.
03:14Scalia went on to say,
03:16Our decision two years later in train versus city of New York proved him wrong.
03:22That opinion has been reiterated by the Supreme Court subsequent to that decision.
03:28This is a critically important issue, because there are conflicting opinions.
03:35We will try to come to consensus on that.
03:38The president has to sign the budget unless we override his veto of the budget.
03:42That becomes the law.
03:44We think, and a lot of courts over the last two months have decided, that that law is not being followed.
03:51So that was my point.
03:52Now, let me ask you something.
03:53You've reduced the department by 20,000 people, as I understand it.
04:00You've been quoted as saying some of those firings were mistakes.
04:04In fact, of course, Musk fired 70% of the people when he bought Twitter and then brought a large number of them back because he found out,
04:12as you would point out, not that with respect to that, but respect to these 20,000 people, there were mistakes.
04:19My question to you is, have you had an analysis prior to making those decisions or Mr. Musk making those decisions?
04:29And I ask you first, who made those decisions, you or Musk?
04:32They were made, I mean, ultimately, we executed the decisions.
04:37I know you executed them, but my question is.
04:39Elon Musk gave us help in figuring out where there was ways, fraud and abuse in the department.
04:46But it was up to, it was up to me to make the decision.
04:51And there are many instances where I pushed back and said, we don't want to, you know, that would hurt us to eliminate that group.
04:58Let me ask you a question based upon that response.
05:00Was there an analysis of the consequences of these cuts and the reduction in force and elimination of programs?
05:11Was there an analysis that you can provide the committee that indicated those, as you concluded in your statement,
05:18would not harm people, would not undermine, frankly, the people who are being served, the health care not delivered,
05:27people not served, children not educated, research not accomplished, frankly, lives not saved.
05:34Is there an analysis that you can provide to this committee prior to us determining the budget
05:39that will show that, in fact, those cuts will not be harmful to those objectives?
05:44Yeah, I mean, yeah, there were analysis.
05:46The simplest analysis was at the outset, the analysis that we're spending $2 trillion a year that we don't have.
05:53Mr. Musk said he was going to cut $2 trillion.
05:55At some point, when you're spending $2 trillion more than you have, you have to make cuts.
05:58The other analysis that was more detailed is that...
06:02Did you cut the children or the Indians that you're so concerned about?
06:05We didn't cut the Indians.
06:07We didn't cut the Indian services.
06:08I'm asking you.
06:10You said you have to cut...
06:10I made sure that those services were not cut.
06:13I made sure that Head Start was not cut.
06:17And I...
06:19But the cuts that were done were cuts that were to duplication, to redundancy, to streamlining.
06:29We increased our workforce 70% in four years, so we were going back to the 2019 levels.
06:34Mr. Reagan said he was going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
06:40He increased the budget deficit by 189%, the highest of any president in history.
06:45No analysis.
06:47I am.
06:48You know, we're allotted five minutes, and I am trying to be lenient, you know, instead of cutting somebody off in mid-sentence.
06:54But if y'all could be respectful to me so that we can sort of wrap up when I start tapping.
