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cover of episode Ep. 2127 - Trump Takes A WRECKING BALL To The Federal Government!

Ep. 2127 - Trump Takes A WRECKING BALL To The Federal Government!

2025/1/29
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Ben Shapiro: 我认为特朗普总统正在兑现他的承诺,他正在以历史性的、令人惊叹的方式迅速行动,打破现状。他通过管理和预算办公室提出了一项提案,暂时冻结3万亿美元的联邦政府支出。虽然这听起来令人难以置信,但这只是暂时的,目的是审查所有非强制性联邦支出,确保其符合总统和国会的意愿。左翼和媒体的批评是不合理的,因为他们此前扩张了行政部门权力,如今却无法接受权力被削减。暂停支出不包括直接发放给个人的援助,例如医疗保险和社会保障福利。媒体关于暂停支出将影响个人福利的说法是谎言。各政府机构需要对联邦财政援助计划进行全面分析,并暂停相关活动。政府对非政府组织的资助是美国公共生活中的一大浪费。暂停并非永久性措施,管理和预算办公室可以根据具体情况批准例外情况。暂停支出的目的是为了更严格地审查联邦支出,并阻止纳税人的钱被用于资助例如资助非法移民的团体。总统拥有扣留权,但其范围尚不明确。扣留权的历史可以追溯到杰斐逊政府时期,并且在历届政府中都有使用。尼克松政府也曾使用扣留权,但面临法院挑战。最高法院从未对扣留权的范围做出明确裁决。《扣留控制法案》规定了总统使用扣留权的程序和限制。特朗普可能利用《扣留控制法案》来取消支出。逐项否决权与扣留权类似,但此前曾被最高法院判定违宪。许多美国总统和公众人物都曾支持或使用过广泛的扣留权。国会对尼克松政府使用扣留权的反弹以及扣留权归属问题是导致当前局面的原因。水门事件后,国会对尼克松政府使用扣留权的反弹以及扣留权的归属问题导致了当前的局面。卡罗琳·勒维特是新的白宫新闻秘书,她是一位杰出的发言人。政府发现可以削减的资金,包括拨给加沙地带的5000万美元避孕套资金和拨给世界卫生组织的3700万美元资金。为加沙地带提供避孕套资金是纳税人的钱的荒谬浪费。哈马斯武装分子将避孕套用于制造燃烧弹等用途,这使得为加沙地带提供避孕套资金更显荒谬。数据经纪商收集并出售用户的互联网活动数据,这会影响用户的隐私和决策。使用ExpressVPN可以保护用户的在线隐私,防止数据经纪商收集用户数据。ExpressVPN可以保护用户的在线隐私,防止数据经纪商收集用户数据。ExpressVPN适用于所有设备,并提供额外四个月的免费使用时间。PureTalk提供价格实惠的手机服务,包括免费的iPhone 14或三星Galaxy手机。PureTalk提供价格实惠的手机服务,并使用美国最可靠的5G网络。特朗普政府的行政命令可能会遭遇恶意遵守,即反对者会以错误的方式执行命令来阻挠政府的议程。恶意遵守是深层政府成员试图通过制造负面新闻来破坏特朗普政府议程的一种方式。医疗补助登记网站的暂时关闭是恶意遵守的一个例子。白宫已经解决了医疗补助登记网站的暂时关闭问题。深层政府成员与媒体协调,制造负面新闻来攻击特朗普政府。媒体关于非营利组织将因联邦援助暂停而关闭的说法是不准确的。媒体报道的许多负面新闻都是恶意遵守的结果。医疗补助网站的关闭事件是深层政府成员试图羞辱特朗普政府的企图。扣留权的范围是一个悬而未决的法律问题,相关案件将最终上诉至最高法院。一位联邦法官暂停了特朗普政府的冻结联邦拨款和贷款的命令。低级别地区法官发布全国性禁令的做法在法律上存在问题。此案最终将上诉至最高法院,这将决定扣留权的范围。民主党人对拜登取消学生贷款债务的行为表示支持,但却批评特朗普暂停联邦支出。民主党人认为特朗普暂停支出是“抢劫”,但这与他们此前支持的政策相矛盾。民主党人对“抢劫”的定义是前后矛盾的。参议院多数党领袖约翰·图恩认为特朗普暂停支出是正常的行政程序。总统有权确保法律得到忠实执行,但其具体含义尚不明确。联邦官僚机构的扩张导致政府支出只会增加,除非总统拥有扣留权或逐项否决权。国会从未对联邦支出进行过实质性的削减。媒体对特朗普暂停支出的反应是夸大的。媒体认为特朗普制造混乱,但实际上,不浪费纳税人的钱才是正常的。普通民众和媒体精英对“正常”的定义不同。特朗普政府的拥护者非常有效地捍卫政府的议程。Helix Sleep床垫可以改善睡眠质量。Helix Sleep床垫正在进行促销活动。Good Ranchers提供高质量的美国肉类产品。Good Ranchers直接支持美国当地农场和牧场。Good Ranchers提供高质量、方便的肉类配送服务。特朗普政府的成员有效地捍卫了政府的议程。史蒂芬·米勒驳斥了关于暂停支出将影响公共福利项目的说法。史蒂芬·米勒指出,联邦政府的雇员大多是左倾的。史蒂芬·米勒解释说,特朗普政府需要控制政府以实施其议程。 supporting_evidences Carolyn Leavitt: 'the White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage...' Stephen Miller: 'There's 2 million employees in the federal government...' Chuck Schumer: 'The Trump administration is robbing Peter to pay the billionaires...' John Thune: 'I think this is a normal practice at the beginning of the administration...' Dana Bash: 'I frankly think this is what we predicted...' Sunny Hostin: 'I also want to make the point that an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal...' John Fetterman: 'Honestly, I haven't been surprised by anything now...' Jim Acosta: (No direct quote available in this context) Mary Margaret Ohan: 'Yes, so it was incredibly crowded...'

Deep Dive

Chapters
President Trump's administration announced a temporary pause on $3 trillion in federal spending to review its alignment with presidential priorities. This action sparked outrage from the left and media, who accused Trump of unconstitutional and dictatorial behavior. The chapter explores the history of presidential impoundment power, legal challenges, and the ongoing debate about the scope of executive authority in budget matters.
  • Trump administration temporarily paused $3 trillion in federal spending
  • The pause aims to align spending with presidential priorities
  • Controversy surrounds the constitutionality and potential impact of the pause
  • Historical context of presidential impoundment authority is discussed
  • The role of Congress and the Supreme Court in resolving the issue is highlighted

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
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Well, President Trump is keeping his promises. He's moving fast and he is breaking things in historic, amazing, amazing ways. So yesterday, the president of the United States, via his Office of Management and Budget, put forward a proposal that would temporarily pause $3 trillion in spending from the federal government. Now, that temporary pause is in fact unthinkable.

only temporary, much of that spending will go forward. But the idea here is to review all of the spending the federal government is doing in a non-mandatory basis. So there's a lot of mandatory spending in the federal budget. That includes Medicare, Social Security, many aspects of Medicaid, right? All of those things are going to continue to

So are various payments to law enforcement bodies, to defense. All that stuff is going to continue. What this is meant to do is allow a pause for the various branches of the federal government, which are under the control of President Trump, to actually look at the spending and ensure that they are spending in accordance with the president's wishes and with the wishes of Congress. So there's a big freakout that's happening today. We'll go through it. By the left, by the media, claiming that President Trump is doing something deeply unconstitutional, fascistic. Here's the thing.

You do not get to expand the centralized power of the executive branch for full on a century, controlling every aspect of Americans' lives, spending $7 trillion. And then when your political opponents take over and they use that power in order to cut back the amounts of power the executive branch will actually be exerting in Americans' lives, you don't actually get to then claim that he is a dictator. You don't get to do that. You break it. You bought it. You built this thing. And

when the person who takes over decides he's going to use the instruments that you created in order to actually downgrade the amount of impact that those instruments have on Americans' everyday lives. So, yesterday...

The Executive Office of the President, the Office of Management and Budget, led by Matthew Vaith, who's the acting director for the moment, put out a memo saying, quote, the American people elected Donald J. Trump to be president of the United States and gave him a mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar. In fiscal year 2024, of the nearly $10 trillion the federal government spent, more than $3 trillion was federal financial assistance, such as grants and loans. Career and political appointees in the executive branch have a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through presidential priorities. Finance.

Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending wokeness and weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and making America healthy again. The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. In other words,

We got elected, and now we're going to implement the priorities of the American people. This memorandum, according to the OMB, requires federal agencies to identify and review all federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the president's policies and requirements. By the way, this does not include assistance provided directly for individuals.

Nothing in this memo, in the memo itself, should be construed to impact Medicare or Social Security benefits. So all the lies you're now hearing from the media suggesting that individual benefits from these mandatory social spending programs are going to be impacted by the OMB order, that's false, it's a lie, and it's being promoted by people who are lying to you.

According to the OMB, to implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the president's executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under federal law, federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders included but not limited to financial assistance for foreign aid,

non-governmental organizations at DEI, woke gender ideology, and the Green New Deal. One of the great boondoggles in American public life is in fact non-governmental organizations that are being paid by the federal government. Grants that are going to left-wing social organizations on a non-profit basis, but are being funded by American taxpayer dollars.

No later than February 10th, 2025, according to this memo, agencies shall submit to OMB detailed information on any projects, programs, or activities subject to this pause. Each agency must pause issuance of new awards, disbursement of federal funds under all open awards, other relevant agency actions. OMB may grant exceptions, allowing federal agencies to issue new awards or take other actions on a case-by-case basis. So again, the lie that this is sort of a blanket nuking of all federal spending is

Would that it were so, it is in fact not so. The reality is it is a temporary pause that can be relieved by the OMB giving the ability to give the grants. So what is this? It is a way of taking a harder look at the federal spending that has been going on and that has grown wildly out of control and in which your taxpayer dollars are being used to subsidize groups that, for example, sponsor illegal immigrants.

or go toward social engineering of the left, transgenderism, right? That is the explicitly stated policy of the OMB. Now, does the president have this authority? Well, the president has always had something called impoundment authority. And the question is, what is the scope of that authority? So what exactly is impoundment? Impoundment includes any executive actions withhold or delay the spending of appropriated funds is according to the Cyclopedia of Congressional Budget Law and the Congressional Research Service.

Impoundment goes all the way back to the Jefferson administration, in which Thomas Jefferson decided that he didn't want to use a particular amount of money that was allocated to the executive branch to buy a certain type of gunboat. But it was also used under the LBJ administration. According to the Congressional Research Service, President Johnson made broader use of his power to impound by ordering the deferral of billions of dollars he was spending during the Vietnam War in an effort to restrain inflationary pressures in the economy.

Richard Nixon, when he was elected president, attempted to use impoundment authority to stop a wide variety of spending programs that were pushed forward by a Democratic at Congress. Eventually, the administration would announce major impoundment actions affecting a wide variety of domestic programs, including, for example, a moratorium on subsidized housing programs, community development activities, disaster assistance,

Court challenges reached the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did not actually rule on general impoundment authority. It suggests that one particular law had been ignored by President Nixon in using impoundment and that he couldn't do that for that one law. But the Supreme Court has actually never ruled in a broad fashion how far impoundment authority actually goes. Congress then passed something called the Impoundment Control Act over the veto of President Nixon.

The Impoundment Control Act effectively says that the president has to inform Congress of all proposed rescissions and deferrals and submit specified information regarding each. And then the comptroller general has to oversee executive compliance with the law and notify Congress if the president fails to report an impoundment or improperly classified item.

If there is a rescission of spending, the president says, I'm just not going to spend this money, then the Empowerment Control Act provides that funds must be made available for obligation unless both houses of Congress take action to approve the rescission request within 45 days of continuous session. So perhaps that is what President Trump is figuring right now, is that he will effectively rescind the spending. He's got a majority in both houses of Congress. And then Congress will just give him the go-ahead on the rescission of the spending. Now, the truth is,

That the question of a line item veto, which is effectively what impoundment acts as, it's the president being able to go through and redline a particular budget.

This has been a bipartisan consensus in favor of this sort of stuff since the 1990s. In fact, in 1996, the federal government with President Clinton and a Republican Congress passed a line item veto through Congress and the Supreme Court struck it down, suggesting that it was unconstitutional. But according to Daniel Henninger, writing back in 2011, here is a list of U.S. presidents and public figures who have used or supported broad impoundment power.

Abe Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton, the Bushes, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore, Pat Buchanan, Jeb Hensarling, Russ Feingold, Joe Lieberman, Judd Gregg, both Paul Ryan and Barack Obama. So why exactly did this happen? Well, number one,

After Watergate, again, Congress kicked back against Richard Nixon using impoundment authority. That's number one. And number two, it's unclear who exactly should be in control of this authority. Should it be Congress or should it be the president? Presumably, President Trump is going to push this, and then we will see how the Supreme Court rules on impoundment authority.

And the idea that, by the way, all of this spending is a good idea is obviously asinine. Yesterday, Carolyn Lovett, who as we will see, is an absolute star. She is the new White House press secretary. She, of course, was a representative for the Trump campaign as well. She's 27 years old and she is terrific. The upgrade from Karine Jean-Pierre to Carolyn Lovett is extraordinary. In any case, Carolyn Lovett, yesterday, she held her first press conference yesterday.

at the White House and she said, "Listen, turns out there's a lot of money that we can cut, including, for example, $50 million that was slated to go to the Gaza Strip to pay for condoms." - Doge and OMB have actually found that there was $37 million that was about to go out the door to the World Health Organization, which is an organization, as you all know, that President Trump, with the swipe of his pen and that executive order, no longer wants the United States to be a part of. So that wouldn't be in line with the president's agenda.

Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. Okay, now, people on the left are saying, ah, no, no, no, that was just for sexual health in Gaza. Okay, I just have a question. Why are we paying for sexual health in Gaza? I was made aware by the left that there is a supposed genocide in Gaza, but they're stopping people from producing people in Gaza. By the way, the population of Gaza has actually increased, not insubstantially, during the Gaza War.

What are those condoms actually used for in Gaza, by the way? Believe it or not, it turns out that the Hamasniks in Gaza have come up with extraordinary new uses for condoms, including blowing them up with helium, using them as balloons, and attaching actual flammatories to them to set fires in Israel. That is not even a joke. That's a thing that they've been doing. And if you just look at the cost on that, that'd buy something like 25 million condoms for use in Gaza. I don't know what they're doing over in Gaza, but I'm not sure why we would be paying for that.

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Now, one of the things that the Trump administration is running into, and this is clear, every time they make an action, executive order goes down, there is what we call malicious compliance. I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Malicious compliance is where you, opposing the president's agenda, pick a bad example of where the president's agenda should not apply and you apply it there.

So, for example, in the Department of Defense, if there is an executive action that goes out banning DEI in the Department of Defense, some low-level staffer will, quote-unquote, maliciously comply by saying that now nobody can teach about the Tuskegee Airmen. And it turns out that that's not what Trump meant at all. And Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth immediately rescinds that particular stupid application.

of the executive order. A malicious compliance has become a way for so-called deep staters, meaning career employees in the executive branch who don't like President Trump or his agenda, to try to thwart that agenda with bad headlines. And one example of that came yesterday when there was a temporary shutdown of the Medicaid enrollment website.

Now, do you think that President Trump wants the bad headline of shutting down the Medicaid enrollment website when he put forward this OMB executive action? Do you think that that's actually what he, of course not, of course not. And actually within hours, President Trump and the White House immediately addressed this. Carolyn Leavitt put out a tweet, quote, the White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage. We have confirmed no payments have been affected. They're still being processed and sent. We expect the portal will be back online shortly.

Now, again, one of the things that's happening here is you have members of the deep state who are coordinating with the media to do things like this and then claim that the end of the world is nigh. So you'll hear lots of headlines over the course of this week about how

various nonprofit programs will have to shut down in lieu of the federal aid. Because if they don't get that aid today, then well, they're going to have to shut. That's not the way the grants work. Typically grants are annual. And that means that people budget for longer than a week. You don't get a check from the government every month. If you're a nonprofit governmental organization, typically it comes in a lump sum at the beginning of the year. Okay. But people are going to play it as though everyone is going to die this week. If the temporary pause goes forward,

Earlier in the day, Politico reported that Trump's freeze on federal aid and grants is still reverberating as the gears of government churn out the real world impact of the administration's broad order. But again, what you are seeing mostly is just malicious compliance here from various people inside the so-called deep state attempts to sort of humiliate the Trump administration. The Medicaid portal story, which was the biggest story yesterday in the mainstream media, was just silly.

It was up and running again within hours. And clearly what happened is that there was somebody who's in the Medicaid system who decided that pretending that they were complying with Trump's order, they were going to shut down the website to create something humiliating for President Trump. Now, meanwhile, a lot of this is going to end up in the courts, as I suggested, and

The question of just how far impoundment control goes is an open legal question. A federal judge, according to CNBC, has paused until next week the Trump administration order that would have frozen the issuance of existing federal grants and loans until agencies vetted them. The judge, named Lauren Ali Khan, ruled during a hearing conducted on Zoom that they would have to prevent the shutdowns and the freezing orders

Ali Khan said her administrative stay would expire 5 p.m. Eastern time Monday unless she decides to grant a temporary restraining order, as requested by plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit earlier in the day challenging the Trump administration's actions. Now, again, one of the things that is very strange about the way that our judicial system has been working today

During Trump 1 and Trump 2 is you'll have a local district judge, like a low-level district judge, issue a nationwide injunction on a federal policy. I'm not sure exactly how that is supposed to work legally. The DOJ objects to Ali Khan's administrative stay against the OMB. Ali Khan's stay only affects the disbursement of government funds that have already been authorized, not money that was being sought.

In any case, this will end up at the Supreme Court level, and that will determine presumably exactly how far impoundments can go. Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, is out there shouting about how supposedly lawless this is, saying it's a constitutional crisis. Let's just get this straight. When it's Joe Biden unilaterally declaring that he can relieve billions of dollars in student loan debt, which, by the way, is not allocated by Congress.

then the Democratic Party is totally fine with it. When President Trump says, I'm not going to spend the money that you sent here until it actually complies with the will of the American people, apparently that's a constitutional threat to the order, says Chuck Schumer, this disastrous Senate minority leader. The Trump administration is robbing Peter to pay the billionaires. American families make no mistake about it. The money being taken from them will be spent, but not on them. Instead,

of going to support for your community, it's going to the ultra wealthy and the mega corporations. This is cruelty, this is lawlessness, this is a heist done on a national scale. No matter how much he may believe he does, the president does not have the authority to ignore the law and we're going to fight this in every way that we can.

By the way, I love the Democrats' definition of a heist. So according to Democrats, a heist is not when you steal American taxpayer dollars to pay the bills of the gender studies major at Wellesley. That's not a heist. What is a heist is when the president of the United States refuses to spend taxpayer dollars on nonsense. That is somehow stealing from you, the taxpayer. So spending your money on crap, that's not stealing from you. Not spending your money on crap, that's stealing from you, according to Chuck Schumer.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters, quote, I think this is a normal practice at the beginning of the administration until they have an opportunity to review how the money is being spent. We'll see what the extent of it is and what they intend to do in a more fulsome way. For now, I think it's just kind of a preliminary step I think most administrations take. Now, this is going to raise broader issues of what the powers of the presidency ought to be. So the power of the purse famously is held by Congress under the Constitution of the United States. How far does the executive have the ability to prevent the disbursement of those funds?

Well, according to the Constitution of the United States, the president has to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed. But what exactly does that mean, faithfully executed? He has independent constitutional authority, presumably, to say I'm not going to spend this money if I think that it violates the Constitution. And then it all gets hashed out by the Supreme Court. But this kind of lives in a gray area of the law that the Supreme Court has never really ruled on.

The reality is that thanks to the vast growth of the federal bureaucracy, there is a reason why the government ratchet only works in one direction when it comes to the size of spending. Until the president has something like impoundment power or a line item veto, government spending is just going to increase because the only way that actual government work gets done is by passing these giant omnibus packages to get enough people on board to actually pass them.

And it's always easier to spend than it is to cut. Congress has yet to actually issue, in my lifetime, a serious cut to federal spending. They've cut the trajectory of the growth of federal spending. They've yet to issue an actual, serious, real cut to federal spending. Again, there is a reason why there has been a bipartisan level of support for things like a line item veto, historically speaking. So...

You know, we will see how the Supreme Court rules on all this. The media, of course, are trying to play this up. It's going to be chaos. Everyone will die, just like everyone died of net neutrality during the first Trump term. Here's Dana Bash over at CNN. And she's panicked, obviously.

I frankly think this is what we predicted when those of us who campaigned saying President Trump would cause chaos would do so. And here we are. Yeah. And look, I think that he he would agree with you. Chaos is what he wants, which is why he's doing this. The question is what comes after that? Well, this idea that Trump wants chaos. I don't understand why it's why it's suddenly considered normal or non-chaos to spend trillions of dollars on absolute sheer trash.

And this is the gap that exists between normie America and non-normie America, the media elites on the coasts. For them, normal is spending trillions of dollars on absolute nonsense. For normies, it turns out that not spending the dollars on the nonsense, that would be more normal than spending the dollars on the nonsense. Stephen Miller, who is a very aggressive defender of the president's agenda. And let me just say at this point,

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As I said before, Carolyn Leavitt, the new White House press secretary, she's terrific at her job. She's great. Stephen Miller is a very aggressive defender and a very effective defender of the president's agenda. Tom Homan speaking on immigration. J.D. Vance obviously was like made in a laboratory to deal with legacy media. President Trump himself.

I'm old enough to remember the Bush administration when George W. Bush somehow seemed to think that it was beneath him and beneath the Republicans to actually defend their agenda aggressively, that it was somehow not Marcus of Queensberry rules. Trump administration people do not have these same hangups. They go with the media and then they refuse to accept the premise of the question and they fight back. Here was Stephen Miller, for example, with Jake Tapper on the spending freeze.

I just want to make sure I understand. So anybody out there that provides school lunches, anybody out there? Yeah, there's no, there's zero impact on public benefit programs, full stop, as OMB has made clear. And I just want to, but I want to really drill down on this, Jake, because it's so important. There's 2 million employees in the federal government.

Overwhelmingly, the career federal service in this country is far left, left wing. The American people... I don't know that to be a fact. Well, I'll give you a great example. We looked at USAID as an example. 98% of the workforce...

either donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate, just as an example. Okay, but now you're demonizing an entire workforce as having a place... Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you just say that saying someone voted for Kamala Harris is demonizing them? No, your suggestion is that there's a bias. No, but you used the word demonizing. You just said that I'm demonizing somebody by saying they voted for Kamala Harris. Let's get back on track. But I just...

i i'm i am on track okay let me stay on track what i'm saying to you is this there are two million employees in the federal government right they're overwhelmingly left of center the american people i gotta finish the sentence okay i gotta finish the sentence the american people voted for dramatic change implemented by donald trump so it is essential for him to get control of government to establish a whole of government process

for Donald Trump's political appointees to review discretionary grants of spending for pet projects that are not directed by Congress.

Okay, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Again, the level of defense this administration is putting forward for its agenda is unprecedented. It's unprecedented in my lifetime and maybe ever. It's an amazing, amazing thing to watch. That wasn't the only big thing that President Trump did yesterday. He also offered a buyout to millions of federal employees. Basically said, listen, if you don't wish to work for me, great. Here's the check. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

According to NBC News, President Trump's administration is offering federal workers the chance to take a deferred resignation, which would mean they agree to resign right now, but they get paid through September. A senior administration official told NBC News they expect 5 to 10 percent of the federal workforce to quit, which they estimate could lead to around $100 billion in savings. All full-time federal employees are eligible except for members of the military, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, positions related to immigration enforcement and national security, and other jobs excluded by the agencies.

White House Press Secretary Leavitt said in a statement, quote, American taxpayers pay for the salaries of federal government employees and therefore deserve employees working on their behalf who actually show up to work in our wonderful federal buildings also paid for by taxpayers. If they don't want to work in the office and contribute to making America great again, they're free to choose a different line of work. The Trump administration will provide a very generous payout of eight months. That is correct. And that is good. There's an email that was sent out to all federal employees, including a draft resignation letter for them to sign.

It said, quote,

So basically, show up to work or you can leave. You can also leave. Naturally, the left is fighting mad about this because they are afraid that a bunch of people will take the buyout. AFGE National President Everett Kelly ripped into the Trump email saying, quote, it should not be viewed as voluntary. Quote, the number of civil servants hasn't meaningfully changed since the 70s, but there are more Americans than ever who rely on government services. Purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants will have a vast unintended consequence that will cause chaos. Okay, I have a question. Why is that chaos?

Seriously, if you don't want it, get out. If you don't want to be involved in a performance culture, a return to the office, enhanced standards of conduct, that's what the Trump administration is calling for, then here is your payout and you can get out. That is the email that was put out by the Office of Personnel Management. And again, I'm making it real easy for people to resign. All you have to do is type the word resign into the subject line of the email and hit send. That's it.

They're basically saying, listen, we could fire you or you could leave. But if you're going to come into work, you come to work for the administration, which is, of course, the way to do this. President Trump is also moving to fire Democratic members of two independent federal commissions, which is good. The EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is a left wing dominated organization established in the 1960s and 70s.

Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burroughs, formerly the chair, have been dismissed. He also fired the head of the National Labor Relations Board, the worst government board in America. I know the NLRB. We comply, I have to say this, by law. We comply with all legal standards when it comes to labor. Also, the NLRB is trash and the National Labor Relations Act is garbage.

I know this because they literally tried to haul me up on charges for suggesting that I would fire employees who tried to dictate the editorial coverage of our company, which is not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. I was joking about it, by the way, and they still sent us an investigative letter. That's what the NLRB is.

So Trump has now fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox. I would hope that the NLRB is completely disestablished. Trump also removed the EEOC's general counsel, Carly Jill Bride, who oversaw civil actions against employers on a range of issues, including discrimination claims from LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign and pregnant workers. He also terminated Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB's general counsel. Good, good. These are career left-wing employees, right?

And it is worthwhile for them not to have jobs, period. End of story. Again, Trump is moving fast. He is moving fast. And the left is panicked because he's not using any authorities that were not available to Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Remember, guys, you built this. You don't like Trump using executive authorities in this way? Well, maybe Barack Obama shouldn't have dictated that he would use a pen and a phone if he couldn't get Congress to do his work. Maybe Joe Biden shouldn't have tried to use OSHA to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans, something we had to sue him at Daily Wire to stop.

Maybe Joe Biden shouldn't have tried to end around the Supreme Court by relieving student loan debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. You guys built this entire system. It used to be that the federal government was small and had significant checks and balances between Congress, the legislative branch,

and the presidency and the Supreme Court. You guys obliterated those. And now you're real sad because it turns out that President Trump is going to use the levers of power that you put in place in order to crank back the level of government spending, in order to crank back the level of government regulation and control. You break it. You bought it. Tough boogies, folks. I'm sorry this is happening to you. I'm sorry that you built the system that is now being used against you. But maybe you shouldn't have built it that way if you didn't want it.

By the way, I have to say, I'm loving this. I am. It is great because no matter how the Supreme Court rules on impoundment, we're going to find out what the actual story is on impoundment. No matter how the Supreme Court rules on these hirings and firings, we're going to find out what the actual powers of the presidency are. And I think that's a good thing. Clarity is a good thing.

For too long, we've lived in this gray area where the combination of media, Democratic Congress, the president of the United States, Democrats have been able to cram down vaster and vaster government spending programs in the name of the people without any checks and any balances. That day is now over. And I think it's excellent. Meanwhile, President Trump issued a historic executive order yesterday as well.

protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation. I'm going to declare victory here on behalf of The Daily Wire. Okay, The Daily Wire, there's no company in America. We don't toot our own horns on this as much as we should. There is no company in America that has fought harder and fought longer and fought more on the issue of the evils of transgender ideology and child mutilation than our company. We have dedicated our company to this issue for years, for literally years.

I mean, going back well before What is a Woman, the groundbreaking documentary made by our own Matt Walsh that totally shifted the debate on transgenderism and transgender ideology. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when I was assaulted on national television by a transgender identifying person for the great sin of suggesting that a biological male is in fact a biological male.

That was in 2015. That is going back 10 years. So I've been on this battle for a very, very long time. I believe that the very famous exchange that I had with a student at a university talking about why isn't she 60 when she claimed that boys could be girls. And I said, so why can't you be trans age? Why can't you be 60? I believe that was in 2014. I've been fighting this battle for as long as this battle has been going on. So has our company generally. There's no company in America that's done more on this.

We were happy to push people like Abigail Schreier when Abigail was pushing her book, Irreversible Damage, which really was a groundbreaking book. We helped to promote that book heavily. There's not an aspect of this fight in which we have not engaged as a company. And so thank you to President Trump for putting the capstone on that. Now we need a national ban on this sort of stuff from Congress. But according to the executive action from the White House,

It is now ordered across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our nation's history and it must end. Countless children soon regret they've been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy they'll never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover,

These vulnerable youth's medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and tragically, sterilization. Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States. It will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support these so-called transition of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures. Good for the White House. And by the way, thanks to our allies in this fight, ranging from Charlie Kirk at TPUSA,

He, of course, worked with us on the documentary Identity Crisis that was available on X and now is available at Daily Wire Plus. There are so many people who have been part of this fight. This is a giant victory for the right and a complete reversal of the trend of social leftism from where it was even five years ago. That is a long-going battle for this company.

We should take a victory lap on it for sure. All right. In just one second, we'll get to President Trump on illegal immigration and the left fighting him first. Let's be real. Mainstream media isn't just broken. It is corrupt. They do not report the news. They curate it to fit their agenda. And Americans, we're

We're done with it. That's why The Daily Wire exists. We're not here to follow the narrative. We're here to crush it. Our reporters go where the truth is, no matter how inconvenient it may be for the powerful, and we're not stopping there. We're creating the entertainment Hollywood won't. Bold movies, fearless documentaries, shows that fight back against the cultural rot. Here's the thing. None of this happens without you. The fight for truth and culture starts with your support. Join the movement today at dailywire.com slash subscribe zone. Sit on the sidelines.

be part of the revolution. Well, meanwhile, yesterday, a star was born over at the White House, the brand new White House press secretary. Carolyn Leavitt is 27 years old. She took to the podium yesterday and she announced a massive sea change in how the White House is actually going to be treating the media. First, she said that there would, in fact, be a brand new important focus on new media that would

Instead of legacy media being given all sorts of special attention, the new media would be given all sorts of attention. One of the members of the new media was there. That, of course, is our own Mary Margaret Ohan. She is our senior White House reporter. She was in the room. Mary Margaret, thanks for joining the show. Hey, Ben. It's great to be here. So let's talk about the mood in the room. Obviously, it was very, very packed. There are a lot of new media figures. It was different from the past. Talk about what it was like in there.

Yes, so it was incredibly crowded. I was not expecting that many members of the press to be there. At one point, I had someone pressed into my back and very close to me in the front as well. There were so many members of the press there and they were excited for this new transparency of the Trump administration, which we really did not see during the Biden administration. As Caroline talked about during the briefing, there were very few press briefings and very little access to more than, you know, the very top legacy members of the press.

So yesterday during the briefing, we saw Breitbart get called on. We saw the Daily Caller get called on. We even saw TPUSA's new White House correspondent get called on. And Caroline talked about how there's going to be an effort to include members of the new media in the briefings, including giving them a seat on the side. So there's going to be a rotating seat that we hope to have access to.

as a member of the new media and will be able to participate in the briefings in a much more legit way than new media has been able to in the past because as you know Ben this is typically given to members of the legacy press often the people in the front rows are the only ones that get questions that CNN, the Associated Press, Fox, these very established legacy media outlets so that's really exciting for us and Caroline made a very strong statement at the beginning of this briefing saying we are going to be transparent we're going to be allowing new media access

In fact, we do have a clip here of Caroline Leavitt. She was asked a question by the legacy media asking about standards of truth inside the White House. And here she was slamming the legacy media.

Since you brought up truth seek, I would like to point out, while I vow to provide the truth from this podium, we ask that all of you in this room hold yourselves to that same standard. We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not

accept that. We will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House. So, yes, I will hold myself to the truth and I expect everyone in this room to do the same. So, Mary Margaret, obviously, there's a sea change in how the media are being treated at the White House. Did you have any responses from the legacy media to the fact that they are now being treated equally and with equal status to new media like Daily Wire, for example?

Well, there was a lot of murmuring in the press room, but in general, it seems like people were open to the changes. They understood that this was going to happen. And look, you know, this was not completely out of the blue. Donald Trump Jr. came on Michael Moll's show earlier this year and talked about how the White House wanted to shake things up. We've heard that from members of the press team throughout the campaign, that this was an effort they really wanted to promote.

Of course, you know, there might be some grumblings going forward, but in general, just one seat on the side for new media, that's a great thing. And I think that's going to allow much better access. But also, you know, this effort to allow influencers and podcasters and people with big profiles into the briefing room to

help people understand what's going on. As Caroline talked about, there has been such a shift in trust in media. Young people are getting their media from very different sources and we saw that throughout the presidential election. We saw that in the way they consumed media from people like yourself, Ben, at the Daily Wire rather than Fox News shows or typical places that you might expect that people would get their media. So this is a change and it's fitting to the media landscape right now and I'm excited to see how it goes.

That's Mary Margaret Olihan, our senior White House reporter. Congratulations on actually now being an accepted member of the White House press corps. Really appreciate it, Mary Margaret. Thank you so much. All righty. Well, as we say, Caroline Leavitt was a star yesterday. She had a bunch of exchanges with members largely of the legacy media. That did not go particularly well for the members of the legacy media. Again, I've not seen a robust press response by a Republican administration this way, certainly in my lifetime.

You probably have to go back to the Reagan administration to see anything like it. And I'm not even sure how good that was, considering that back then you had three major TV networks and only a couple of major newspapers. And now you actually have alternative media available. Here was Caroline Lovett, who's questioned about whether the administration would be deporting only criminals or whether it would be deporting all illegal immigrants. Here was Caroline Lovett slapping around a member of the media.

Of the 3,500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back into office, can you just tell us the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally? All of them because they illegally broke our nation's laws and therefore they are criminals as far as this administration goes. I know the last administration didn't see it that way, so it's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that's exactly what they are.

Man, she is good at this. She's very, very good at this. Again, she is an aggressive defender of the president's agenda. She was also questioned by the legacy media about inflation. So the media finally decided that inflation matters, but only once Trump is president. So they asked her about the price of eggs and she went off.

Really glad you brought this up because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs. I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I'm not so sure, egg prices increased 65%.

Again,

This administration is not being run like prior Republican administrations. Speaking of which, the Trump administration has now ramped up deportations after a fairly slow start. One of the reasons that the deportation numbers have been lower for Trump is because the number of people arriving on the southern border has absolutely cratered under Donald Trump. People are not showing up

on the southern border, many of the supposed deportations that were undertaken by, for example, the Obama administration were actually what we call turnbacks at the border, people who would arrive and the administration would simply say, you can't get in. Nobody's even bothering to show up at the southern border knowing that Donald Trump is immediately going to turn everyone away, that CBP, that ICE are not going to allow people to use the border of the United States.

as a sort of porous Swiss cheese zone where he can move through at will. But according to the Wall Street Journal, ICE made nearly 1,200 arrests on Sunday and just under 1,000 on Saturday, marking an uptick after arrest numbers in President Trump's first few days were roughly in line with daily averages seen under the Biden administration.

The media are predictably upset about all of this. Stephen Miller, again, was on with Jake Tapper on CNN. And Jake Tapper was asking who exactly is going to pick the fruit and pick the vegetables. And Stephen Miller was like, Jake, the number of illegal immigrants who actually are in the fields picking fruits and veggies is pretty low.

So how do you how does President Trump make sure that the effort to deport people who are not in this country legally doesn't end up hurting Americans who want safe borders? Absolutely. But also don't want to see even more higher prices and groceries.

Well, I'm sure it's not your position, Jake. You're just asking the question that we should supply America's food with exploitative, illegal, alien labor. I obviously don't think that's what you're implying.

Only 1% of alien workers in the entire country work in agriculture. The top destination for illegal aliens are large cities like New York, like Los Angeles, and small industrial towns, of course, all across the heartland, as we've seen with the Biden floods. None of those illegal aliens are just...

are doing farm work. Those 30,000 legal aliens that Joe Biden dumped into Springfield. Yeah, I'm talking about the ones that are. No, no, no, but I'm explaining this. It's important to understand. No, you're kind of changing the subject. I mean, I'm talking about the ones. I will go. I will give me 30 minutes. I'll go as deep as you want. I don't have 30 minutes. I'm talking about the ones that could that work in the agriculture industry. You can come back and we can talk about the ones in the cities, I swear. I'll do that. I'll do the whole answer.

The illegal aliens that Joe Biden brought into our country are not full stop doing farm work. They are not. The illegal aliens he brought in from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Nicaragua, they are not doing farm work. They're in our cities collecting welfare.

Everybody knows that this is true. This is obviously true. And the agricultural conversation has been a misdirect for a very long time. As Stephen Miller points out, we do have temporary farm work that is available for people who cross into the United States legally. That is an actual program under President Trump. Do you have an idea for an invention or new product and don't know what to do next?

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But the reality is that for the left, they actually just want unlimited immigration. This is what Sunny Hostin, the idiotic id of the Democratic Party, has to say. She was on The View yesterday saying, actually, you know what? You're not a criminal for crossing the border illegally. I also want to make the point that an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal because he or she is undocumented. That is a civil offense. So to call people illegals is in and of itself, I think, xenophobic and racist. I do. I think that's-

Applause from the morons in the audience of The View. Actually, it is a criminal offense to cross the United States border illegally. That is a criminal offense, actually. But again, all this is part and parcel of what appears to be a really kind of lackluster pushback from the Democratic Party against Trump.

President Trump, one of the reasons that they're having such trouble is because they can't actually decide on what the narrative is. Trump wants chaos. Okay, well, we just had chaos for four years. It's not chaos to say that we shouldn't spend trillions of dollars on stupid nonsense. Oh my God, I can't believe Trump's saying that people have to come into work. Really, that's gonna be your line? Okay, so, you know, they go back to the well every so often. You have Anand Jiridharadas saying,

the worst commentator over at MSNBC, suggesting that the Trump agenda is to make America white again, which is weird since he has the most multiracial Republican coalition of my lifetime. As you're seeing in the reporting just now, what they actually do behind the scenes, they trust will not really get out. And it's part of a different agenda they have, which is really to make America white again, which is part of their attack on everything from birthright citizenship to abortion.

Any number of programs, aid, freezing various forms of aid that real people depend on. They have an agenda to make it harder for regular people to live in this country and for immigrants to have to live in worry about whether they have their papers. We are going to become a kind of check your papers society in the blink of an eye. And there's no mandate for that.

But that is what folks like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and others around the president actually want. They want to change the very fabric of this country, something for which there is not that same mandate. OK, that's kind of weird, since, again, there is no evidence whatsoever that Donald Trump is trying to cleanse the country of people who are not white. Like no evidence that that is the case.

And he won something insane. He won almost a majority of the Hispanic vote in the last election cycle. So yeah, good luck with that particular argument. The reality is that the only way for Democrats to take on President Trump is to do what John Fetterman is doing. The senator from Pennsylvania, who is in fact a solid Democrat, right? He is a socialist-leaning Democrat in terms of these economic programs.

But what he's doing is smart. He's saying, listen, Trump is doing what he campaigned on. I'm sure there are areas where we disagree. And when we disagree, I'll smack him. But I'm not just going to start screaming at the moon. Here's John Fetterman yesterday on The View. Do you anticipate that there's going to be changes that we should be

prepped for that we were not thinking about? Honestly, I haven't been surprised by anything now. I mean, he's been doing essentially what he actually campaigned on that. He announced he is going to pardon the J6 individuals. He is going to absolutely go after the border. So there's a lot of things that he's already ran on. I mean, criticized a lot of it. And I don't agree with everything either. But

It's undeniable he actually ran on that and been really upfront. He's like, I am your reputation. And he's kind of making those moves. Again, he is being rational about all of this. If Democrats could appear rational, that would certainly help. But it doesn't appear rational when the Senate Democrats decide to filibuster a bill that would have stopped American funding for the corrupt anti-Semitic International Criminal Court.

Fifty four people in the Senate voted in favor of basically putting sanctions on the ICC, which is a deeply corrupt, evil institution that would, in fact, target Americans and American soldiers. There's no reason why the United States should be either subsidizing or not punishing people associated with the ICC. Forty two Democrats had supported this in the House and a couple of Democrats supported it in the Senate. But Chuck Schumer.

The supposed show mayor of Jews, right? This is what he says. This is the guardian of Jews, Chuck Schumer, who's a disgusting, perverse individual in terms of his politics. The Senate minority leader, he said, quote, the bill before us is poorly drafted and deeply problematic. It will have many unintended consequences that undermine its primary goal. Okay, again, the reason that Democrats are voting in favor of the ICC is because they are just beholden to the radical left. Senate Majority Leader John Thune ripped them yesterday over all of this.

The other issue, as we all know, on the floor these days is nominations. And as you all know, the Democrats made a big deal and blocked the nomination of John Radcliffe to CIA last week. Ultimately, he ended up getting 74 votes on the floor. And that's going to be the case. I mean, they can block these votes, but these folks, we're going to continue to press on and get them confirmed. And they can do this the hard way or the easy way. They want to continue to obstruct and delay nomination.

We're going to continue to grind and grind and grind. And we'll do that through the weekend if necessary. By the way, Democrats are in a state of panic. Senator Gary Peters from Michigan.

who would be a very vulnerable seat for the Democrats has decided he is not going to run for reelection in the Senate in Michigan in 2026. So that 2026 Senate map is starting to look kind of not terrible for Republicans. It was supposed to be a bad year for Republicans, 2026. But it turns out that there are a bunch of seats that are up that are...

are really, really narrowly Democrat. That includes, for example, John Ossoff in Georgia. That seat is going to flip. That takes Republicans to 54. You could easily see a world in which Gary Peters' seat flips and suddenly Republicans have 55. In New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen, she is running. New Hampshire is moving toward battleground status. That would take Republicans to 56. Again, the map does not look particularly amazing for Democrats.

looking forward in the next election cycle. So Gary Peters stepping out is a bad sign for them. Meanwhile, in a moment, we're going to get to Jim Acosta. Have we seen the last of him? He apparently is leaving CNN. We shed a tear for Jim Acosta. If you're not a member, become a member. Use Coach Bureau. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.