00:01Mr. President, one of the most important innovations that President Trump has brought to the nation
00:07is the Department of Government Efficiency.
00:11And of course, this has been headed by Elon Musk during his term as a temporary government employee.
00:20But the good news is that the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as it's called around here, lives on.
00:27And that's reflected in the fact that the Office of Management and Budget has sent its first rescissions package to Capitol Hill.
00:37For those who don't follow the process and procedures here in Washington, D.C.,
00:43the rescissions package is important because it allows Congress to codify the important progress
00:50that the Department of Government Efficiency has made in identifying
00:54and starting to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government.
01:00And what DOGE found, under the leadership of Elon Musk, is a target-rich environment.
01:10During the last several months, DOGE has uncovered numerous examples of blatant government waste and abuse.
01:17These range from common-sense efficiency reforms to canceling programs
01:22that are outright nonsensical uses of taxpayers' hard-earned money.
01:28According to their website, the Department of Government Efficiency estimates
01:31that they've identified $175 billion in savings, or approximately $1,100 per taxpayer.
01:40Now, I know some in the media have said, well, that's peanuts.
01:46That doesn't count.
01:47Well, tell the taxpayers who have to pay $1,100 in additional taxes a year
01:53to fund an inefficient government that has waste and fraud within it.
02:01So the truth is we have more work to do, and this is just a start.
02:06That, to me, is the most important point to make.
02:10This is just a start.
02:12President Trump and Mr. Musk have changed the culture here in Washington, D.C.,
02:17and changed the conversation.
02:20We know that our national debt has now surpassed $36 trillion,
02:24and that is an amount of money that I know no human mind can fully comprehend.
02:30But here's how I begin to get at it when we start to think that we are spending more money on interest
02:39on the national debt than we are to defend the nation, our most important job.
02:46That, to me, is shocking, and it is a mandate to get our spending under better control.
02:55This isn't a matter of not taxing the American people enough.
03:00There isn't enough money to tax people for.
03:05It is a spending problem, and we need to get spending under control,
03:11and we have multiple opportunities, and one of those is with this rescissions package.
03:18Now, Doge started out with an ambitious goal of a 15 percent reduction in government spending
03:23of about a trillion dollars.
03:25Again, this is what the media has pooh-poohed and saying,
03:29well, they haven't come anywhere near their target.
03:31But again, the most important point I can make is this is just the beginning.
03:38I don't see the work of Doge being finished, but rather being a starting place.
03:45And again, I think perhaps the most important contribution is it's changed the conversation
03:51here in Washington, D.C.
03:53When people realize the egregious expenditures of their hard-earned tax dollar,
04:00then they say, well, what more is there?
04:03Is this just scraping the surface?
04:06And the fact of the matter, it is.
04:08When I look at some of the items included in this rescissions package from the Office of Management
04:18and Budget, I think this package will sell itself or should sell itself to people with
04:25any common sense.
04:26For example, it rescinds $67,000, a small amount, but small amounts add up.
04:33For testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar, whatever that is.
04:43Similarly, it rescinds more than a million dollars for LGBTQI plus programs in places like Uganda
04:51and the Western Balkans.
04:53Why are we spending tax dollars in Uganda and Balkans for programs and projects like that?
05:01Sure, it doesn't seem like a priority to me.
05:06And if that were not enough, the Doge recommendations now embraced within this rescissions package
05:13cuts millions of dollars for Green New Deal-style programs, not in America, but around the world.
05:21The bill rescinds $6 million appropriated for net zero cities in Mexico.
05:29A half a million dollars for electric buses in Rwanda.
05:38And $2.1 million for climate resilience in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and East Africa.
05:46Again, budgets are about priorities, and I can't imagine a world in which these would be the most urgent priorities
05:57for the nation as our debt exceeds $36 trillion.
06:02But just when you thought these programs couldn't be more absurd, they become more absurd as you look further.
06:13It rescinds $4 million for legume systems research, and $3 million for Iraqi Sesame Street.
06:25Well, I think if we were to ask my constituents back home in Texas if they want their hard-earned dollars spent for ridiculous projects like this,
06:38including creating cartoon shows in the Middle East, they would say, no, loudly, emphatically.
06:48In many respects, Doge has shown a bright light on for what has a long time been a black hole in Washington, D.C.
06:58Taxpayers know that they send a lot of their hard-earned money to Washington, D.C.,
07:03and I think most Americans, patriotic Americans, if they thought that money was necessary and put to good use,
07:11then they would say, okay, that's part of the price we pay for living in the most prosperous, safest, strongest country in the world.
07:20So, as I say, perhaps the most important contribution that President Trump and Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency has made
07:39is to shape the conversation, both on and off Capitol Hill, about government waste.
07:46Many of the incredibly impressive team members who were hired as part of the Doge initiatives have been hired on more permanently in various agencies.
07:57So, Doge is not going away, even though Elon Musk has returned back to do work on his companies
08:07and is no longer on the federal government payroll.
08:11I'm not sure he ever got paid, by the way.
08:14I think he volunteered his time.
08:16But if you think about this for a minute, it's quite the momentous of somewhat, but in some ways, a paradoxical achievement.
08:25The nature of bureaucracy and government is to grow and grow and grow.
08:33And over time, our federal government has simply become so large and unwieldy,
08:40we needed something like the Department of Government Efficiency
08:44to come in and begin to, number one, identify the problem,
08:49and to, number two, begin to help us chip away at some of the outlandish spending,
08:55some of which I have mentioned a moment ago.
08:58But the good thing about this change in the conversation and this change in the culture here in Washington, D.C.
09:05is that the efforts of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency,
09:11will continue even after the current occupants of those positions move on back to the private sector.
09:20What Doge has done is to hire a team of people of incredible accomplishment in the private sector
09:27to help eliminate waste, and these cost-cutting efforts have become a quintessential whole-of-government effort
09:36within the Trump administration.
09:38The efforts to get our spending under control, though, do not begin or end with Doge.
09:46We need to play our part in Congress to make sure this work does not go to waste,
09:51and the way we do that initially is by taking up and passing this rescissions package.
09:59Since Congress holds the power of the purse through the appropriations process,
10:03we have the power to rescind these funds when they're shown to be not appropriately expended or used.
10:14So this rescissions package from the Office of Management and Budget is a gift on a silver platter,
10:21and I look forward to taking up the bill and passing it soon.
10:25But when it comes to eliminating wasteful Washington spending and trying to chip away at this incredibly large debt
10:34and the interest payments we're having to make on the debt,
10:38which jeopardize everything else important in the government, including our national security,
10:44in addition to the rescissions package, we have the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House
10:51now being considered here in the Senate.
10:53This bill is important, as I had learned from small businesses in Texas last week as I traveled around the state,
11:06and I asked them, what was the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that we passed in 2017 during President Trump's first term?
11:16And they said the impact was pretty dramatic.
11:18It allowed them to hire new employees, to invest in new equipment, to grow their business,
11:25provide more job opportunities for hard-working Texans.
11:31And the truth is that unless we extend those expiring provisions soon,
11:37then all of that will go away, and they'll have to begin to cut employment.
11:44They will no longer be able to grow their business, and they'll be no longer able to provide additional benefits to their employees.
11:53So the tax cuts that we will implement in the big, beautiful bill will allow those small businesses and individuals to prosper
12:04and in turn grow our economy, which will benefit everybody.
12:08But we also have savings opportunities in the big, beautiful bill.
12:17Things like eliminating the Inflation Reduction Act, which was inappropriately named.
12:24I don't know what the agency or the corner of the Capitol behind a door that's unnamed,
12:37where these names come from, but the idea of an Inflation Reduction Act from the inception was laughable,
12:43because it did nothing to reduce inflation.
12:46In fact, it made it worse by pouring gasoline on the fire.
12:50The fact of the matter is, Bidenomics resulted in an incredible amount of additional spending,
12:58which created the 40-year high inflation.
13:01And now that's sort of baked into the cake in everything we do here in America.
13:06You go to the grocery store, small businesses, in terms of their inputs,
13:12things that they need in order to produce their product.
13:16And if you ask folks in the agriculture sector, everything they use for inputs to grow a crop,
13:27to produce livestock, has all gone up, thanks to the wasteful spending of the Biden era.
13:35So we need to begin to cut back on some of these wasteful spending projects,
13:40and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is an important place to start.
13:44But we also need to do smart things when it comes to some of the other expenditures of the federal government.
13:53For example, so-called means-tested programs.
13:57We sometimes refer to that generically as welfare.
14:01In other words, a safety net to help people who need a helping hand.
14:05And government does have a role to play,
14:08but these are means-tested programs,
14:10which means that only people below certain economic levels qualify.
14:17But over time, we know that able-bodied adults
14:20who should be working and contributing to the economy,
14:26contributing to their families and their communities in the nation,
14:30are receiving these benefits and not working at all.
14:35And that has to change.
14:37That has to change.
14:38So particularly in our means-tested programs,
14:41there has to be a work requirement for able-bodied adults.
14:46Plus, if you talk to employers around the country,
14:49and as I have in Texas,
14:50they say one of the biggest problems we have
14:53is a shortage of people willing and able to work.
14:57We need, we have good, well-paying jobs,
14:59but we can't find the workforce to fill these jobs.
15:06Well, the third means by which we are going to begin this process
15:11of controlling our out-of-control spending and our national debt
15:16is the appropriations process.
15:18And, of course, this is an annual process
15:20where we consider how to fund the federal government.
15:25And like everything else in the budget process,
15:28it's a matter of choosing our priorities.
15:32But this is only 28% of what the federal government spends.
15:37And historically, we've ignored the other 72%
15:40when it comes to spending,
15:42but we're going to deal with that in the big, beautiful bill.
15:46But in addition,
15:47Congress has traditionally passed,
15:49as part of that 28%,
15:5112 individual appropriations bills
15:54to fund the federal government.
15:56The number one, of course,
15:58on that list of priorities is national security.
16:03Of course, under Senate Democrats,
16:05we frequently punted this responsibility
16:07and passed something called a continuing resolution,
16:10which was on autopilot instead of full-year funding measures
16:15that were debated both in the Appropriations Committee
16:19with bipartisan support
16:22and then debated here on the floor
16:24and passed into law.
16:28Instead of that, we just passed continuing resolutions,
16:31which is an abdication of our responsibility
16:33as the holder of the purse strings under our government.
16:40But while we often think of the Appropriations process
16:42as strictly a spending process,
16:44it does not have to be that way.
16:47We can also use this Appropriations process
16:49to enact further spending reductions,
16:53and I think we should.
16:54So we have three bites at the apple,
16:58at the spending apple.
17:00Rescissions, reconciliation,
17:03the big, beautiful bill,
17:04and then appropriations.
17:06I hope the House and Senate
17:07will take full advantage
17:09of each of these three opportunities
17:11to begin the process
17:13of reducing our deficit and debt.
17:17Because as the former chairman
17:20of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen,
17:23said maybe about 10 years ago or so,
17:26he said the biggest threat
17:27to our national security is our national debt.
17:31And that prediction at the time has become true
17:34when we're spending more money on interest
17:37on the national debt than we are on defense.
17:40So there's no better time than the president
17:42to begin to remedy this situation,
17:45and it's up to Congress.
17:47We can't look over our shoulder
17:49or look around the room and say,
17:50who else will protect us and save us
17:53from this unsustainable trajectory.
17:57It's up to us.
17:59And while the formal Department
18:00of Government Efficiency Task Force
18:02may have concluded,
18:04the work of DOGE lives on.
18:06As a founding member of the DOGE Caucus,
18:08I'll keep doing my part,
18:11along with all of my colleagues,
18:12to bend the spending curve,
18:14and I urge all of my colleagues
18:16to join us in that effort,
18:18particularly by passing this rescissions package
