The GOP's Big Plans To Shrink Government
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I'm Harris Faulkner. I'm Stuart Vonney. I'm Kat Timpf. And this is the Fox News Rundown. Thursday, November 21st, 2024. I'm Jessica Rosenthal. This week, we hit a new record high, $36 trillion in debt. And while supporters of the incoming Republican administration are fired up about Doge, how much can the new efficiency panel really do to help tackle the debt problem?

$1.5 million to study the effect of yoga on goats. $1.7 billion to maintain empty federal buildings. Half a million to study transgender monkeys. It knows no end and it's got to stop.

I'm Chris Foster. President-elect Trump picked Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education, a department he said he'd get rid of. Easier said than done. The power of the Department of Education is not the department, but the programs it administers and it runs. And I'm Tommy Lahren. I've got the final word on the Fox News Rundown.

A lot of hopes are being projected onto the incoming Trump administration's new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, just as we cross over into $36 trillion in debt. The interest on that alone is rivaling our annual defense budget.

One of the co-chiefs of Doge with Elon Musk, businessman and 2024 presidential candidate himself, Vivek Ramaswamy, told Fox's Sunday Morning Futures. We've talked a big game for 40 years about cutting the federal government, about reducing the scope of the federal government. Politicians haven't been able to do it.

And so Elon and I, we're not politicians. We're businessmen. We're coming at it from the outside. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who's been focused on government spending for years, told Fox News of Doge. I think we've never had a president and a team like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that had this degree of momentum, incisiveness and boldness.

frankly, energy and drive to do it. Can they do it all through executive action? Maybe not, but pointing it out and ridiculing it and then doing what they can through executive action, I think we're going to draw a lot of attention to it and maybe some of my colleagues will wake up.

Some of those colleagues say they are awake. And even on the other side of the aisle, Delaware Senator Chris Coons is hopeful about Doge's prospects. They could save tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Depending on how it's structured and what they do, this could be a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced. But Coons also said in order to really impact the debt, it would require changes to programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The president-elect had said on the campaign trail he had no plans to touch those programs. But the power of the purse lies with Congress. And some members have now launched what they call the Doge Caucus. In this case, Doge will stand for delivering outstanding government efficiency. The American people are sick of it.

We're sick of it. We're done. And it's time to to launch a new direction. Florida Republican Congressman Aaron Bean is the founder of the Congressional Doge Caucus. So what we don't want, what we don't want is for Elon and Vivek to come up with great ideas of what needs to be done and then nothing happen. So for anything to be implemented, it literally takes an act of Congress.

And so with this new call, I just gave a little speech to some of my colleagues at a luncheon today. And I said, listen, the list is going to be long. There is something for every single member to do. We're going to divide up the list. We're going to divide and conquer. Let's go get it done. And the iron, they say it's best to strike when the iron is exceedingly warm. It is

glowing nuclear hot right now. So now's the time to act. That 100-day window of launching is also going to be exciting. So you can see I'm pretty fired up, Jessica. We're fired up here in Congress. Tell me, in your two years, what have you seen? Because the DogeX account, for example, also posted a few things about where our money's been spent, like

cocaine tests on Japanese quail, tequila and gin testing on sunfish aggression. I mean, people laugh at this and it's very comical in a way. But if this really is where, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars is being spent, what have you been seeing, I guess, maybe more on the absurd end to sort of that you think really highlights or paints the picture of just how out of control this has gotten?

$1.5 million to study the effect of yoga on goats, $1.7 billion to maintain empty federal buildings, half a million to study transgender monkeys. It knows no end, and it's got to stop. You know, Senator Rand Paul does his turkey list annually that it's pages and pages of books.

BS like we talked about. But listen, we don't have the money to give anymore. It's time to take care of Americans first. And so we always grow. We get fat and we never trim. We never trim. I just read a statistic where our spending is up over 50 percent since four years ago, since pre-pandemic, over 50 percent. And we've never adjusted.

COVID is over. It's time to readjust. And we wonder why inflation is so high, because the government just spends like it's going out of business. And so we are declaring war on out-of-control spending, and we're enlisting members of Congress. So if you're a member of Congress and you're listening right now, we want you. If you're listening, I want you to call your member of Congress and say, why aren't you part of those?

Get a part of Doge. Get a part of this revolution that has said we're not going to spend like it's just business as usual. It's time to get it done. And Doge is going to be the spear of putting the big stick in this pork belly up here in D.C.,

You're going to have a balancing act, though, on your hands, I would imagine, to some extent, because of some of the promises the president-elect has made, extending tax cuts on not just extending the tax cuts, right? But we're talking about new taxes, cutting taxes on tips, no more taxes on Social Security. Does that put you in a bind at all, some of the promises that were made to sort of even things out?

Yeah. Actually, Jessica, I just left an economist presentation over lunch. What that does, these tax cuts,

is adding rocket fuel to the United States economy. We believe that once we give liftoff, that we're going to do better. Our, our economy is going to grow. And just like the two seven 2017, uh, uh, tax cuts as then put together by then president Trump, it, uh, it, uh,

literally launched our economy in a new stratosphere. It was proven, it's already proven that we gained more tax revenue. If you want it, we gained more tax revenue than had we held these higher tax rates back in 2017. So that is clear, that is clear. So if we wanna grow the economy, put more money in the Americans' pockets,

then we need to reestablish these reductions in taxes. And then let's attack the waste. Don't be suckered. If you're listening right now to Jessica, don't be suckered that tax cuts don't pay for themselves or that we need to, it only benefits the rich. It benefits everyone.

You do have some Democratic support. I know Senator Coons said that some of these cuts could really matter if you guys are effective here. But he questioned, and I think it's a fair question, how much do you think, and I know you're just getting started, but how much do you really think Doge can do in terms of cutting? We're talking about $36 trillion now. We've passed the $36 trillion debt mark.

So how much can we really do if you're cutting here, you're nipping there, $100,000 here, $1.5 million here and there? Are we really going to do some damage or are you –

Are you actually going to say, hey, we're actually more limited in scope than all that? Like Coons is saying, if you want to really cut things, then you are going to have to touch some major programs. Is that not, I guess, under Doge's purview to touch major? You guys are looking for fraud and abuse. You're not necessarily going into deeper programs. That's a bigger congressional conversation when it comes to like budgeting. Well, we're also fraud and abuse. We're also looking for efficiency.

What's efficient? Is it efficient to spend 80 billion dollars on the Department of Education when the federal government has zero role in educating our kids? Should we continue to spend that? That's it. That's an efficiency. Should we continue to propose? Would you guys propose to Congress? Here's a bill. Our caucus is putting forth this bill. Please vote on it. It is a proposal to eliminate the Department of Education. Is that how that would work if it came to it?

Well, our caucus is a handful of folks from all different purview committees. It will not have legislative authority, but the members who make up this caucus will. And so we're going to coordinate. We're going to become efficient ourselves of coordinating some of these suggestions as well as coming up with some of our own suggestions of what needs to be cut, what is duplicate of spending, etc.

uh and listen to the public we're going to hopefully have a ways that we also can tune in on on what needs to be done and all of these ridiculous things that we're we're spending money on we know when when you're spending money on studying yoga on goats you've got too much money you've been you've been appropriated way too much money and so we're gonna we're gonna dial that back that's what we're gonna do and so jessica for anybody listening

that says, oh, what are they going to do? I think it's just in life. If you put limits on yourself and

if you put your limits on yourself where you say, I can't do something or I can only go this high or I'm only limited to what this is, then you put limits on your, you just, you're forever. But I think the logistics, but I think the logistics are the, are part of what's going to be fascinating because we're so used to covering different stories out of the beltway about, you know, the boring budgeting stories that end up not being so boring because you all are trying, some of you are trying to cut and some of you are trying to spend. But in this case, it,

The logistics will be fascinating because how do you go to Congress, go to your colleagues and say, okay, now vote? Is it, hey, DOD, give us your cuts. We're going to put it into a package and we'll all vote on it. Okay, now, Lee Zeldin, what are your EPA proposed cuts? Is each department going to come with proposals and you all are going to vote on this piecemeal and packages of legislation? Do we just simply not know yet how this is going to work?

Well, the beauty, the beauty of what President Trump has done, you know, the Doge, which his work group, which is the Department of Government Efficiency, is literally just a work group. It's a work group. It's going to be Elon and Vivek come.

Coming up with a structure. It's not set in law at all. They're going to have a powerful tool to spotlight all of the inefficiencies that are out there. Right. They're going to spotlight them. They're going to highlight them and say, good gravy, Congress. Look what you're look what you're doing. We're going to be so embarrassed.

Once we find out all these crazy things, then that's when Congress has to go to work. So Congress then is under its structure of budgeting and spending and appropriating is going to have to make some changes on how we do business. We know that.

doing traditional business as usual is only going to get us growing the debt a trillion dollars every hundred days. That's what we're doing right now, Jessica. Every hundred days, we add a trillion dollars to debt. So it's unsustainable what we're doing now. So once those suggestions are given to us, I think that's where the beauty of the Doge caucus is.

which is just made up of and I hope to have over 100 members, hopefully soon, where we can have a cross section of all major committees, including appropriations, that when they begin their work and continue their work of budgeting, appropriating and legislating, we now have targets of what we're going to eliminate,

going to restructure what we're going to do. And so when I say these suggestions take an act of Congress, that's exactly what it means. And but the good news is, Jessica, is that we can look at these voting results and say, we've got a mandate, we've got orders, we've got a direction from the American people to get it done. And I can tell you this.

I can tell you this, and I have said it to my colleagues, if we don't, if we don't run like there's no tomorrow, there will be no tomorrow for this Republican Party. There is a very fragile majority. And so if we don't get it done, the American people are going to say to us, you're fired. We've given you that opportunity. We've given you the trifecta, the holy grail of government, House, Senate and White House. And if we don't go out and sprint like it's no tomorrow, there, in fact, will be no tomorrow.

I think anybody who figures out how to handle $36 trillion in debt will probably be rehired. Florida Congressman Aaron Bean, thank you so much for joining us. Jessica, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation and let's go get them.

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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. I'm Emily Campagno, host of the Fox True Crime Podcast. This week, I'm joined by retired San Francisco Police Captain Yolanda Williams as she details her escape from the People's Temple cult. Available now on foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. This is Tomi Lahren with your Fox News commentary coming up.

Linda McMahon is President-elect Trump's pick for Education Secretary. She's the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE, was in charge of the Small Business Administration during the first Trump administration, served two years on the Connecticut State Board of Education, and ran unsuccessfully for Senate twice.

The president-elect said during the campaign the department shouldn't even exist. One other thing I'll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education worker needs

Back to the states. The Department of Education started operating in 1980 with congressional authorization and President-elect Trump can't eliminate it without Congress. But he can have McMahon there pushing for more school choice and parents' rights, he says, and giving more of its power back to the states. To actually make it toothless, you would probably really require an act of Congress.

And the power of the Department of Education is not the department, but the programs it administers and it runs. Matt Barnum covers education for The Wall Street Journal. And so to change things, you would really have to change the programs. And that requires Congress. Interesting. So you'd have to really go...

thing by thing by thing. Yeah. So for instance, there's a program called Title I, and that's money for poor school districts, schools that serve a lot of kids in poverty. That money goes for teachers and aides and tutoring of students. That's in federal law that existed before the Department of Education. Of course, you could repeal that law. You could say we're not going to fund Title I anymore. But that's

politically really tough. Title I's pretty popular with parents and teachers, and that's a question of whether President Trump would want to do that or want to take on that fight. There's talk about, hey, give it back to the states. States, school districts, schools make their own decisions. Here's the money. You do with it what you think you need to do with it.

Is there an opportunity for more block grants? Yeah, I mean, that's possible. So you could say, we're not going to take the money away from you, but we're just going to give you more flexibility on how to spend it. And actually, some schools and school leaders might say like, yeah, give us the money. Don't give us the strings. We would really like that.

that. President Trump actually proposed that in his first term, but it didn't go anywhere, in part because the block grant also included cuts, which were really controversial. And when you're taking like existing programs, there's always constituencies behind various programs that sort of push back when you try to take it away or block grant it.

You covered it. You covered the Trump administration. You covered the Biden administration. I don't remember education being as much as a priority as he's talked about now. Maybe I'm just misremembering. What did Betsy DeVos do or try to do then? It wasn't as much of a priority. And frankly, I think it's somewhat ambiguous how big of a priority it's going to be in his second term. In his first term, he appointed Betsy DeVos, whose signature issue was educational choice, funding for students who want to attend private schools.

They really didn't make much progress on it. And my sense is that President Trump didn't put a great deal of political capital behind it. Now he's sort of leaned more into what we might call the big bucket of culture war issues in education. And he sort of seems in his base seem more energized by that. And so it's more plausible that they would put more political capital behind that.

School choice, we're talking about, I assume, tax credits for private schools, tax credits in some cases for religious schools. Is that stuff on the local level, the state level, that's getting more successful, right? Yeah. I mean, there's been a surge of private school choice initiatives, which is essentially some sort of public funding or publicly backed support, including tax credit to support families who want to choose private or homeschool.

In a lot of red states, that has been enacted, a surge of enactment in recent years. But there is an interesting asterisk or caveat. In three states, some form of school choice was on the ballot a few weeks ago, and it lost in all three states, including in two very red states with voters. So we'll see how that plays out. I mean, I guess one of the arguments is, why is my tax money going toward your kids' presumably better education? I mean,

I mean, I guess people without kids could say, why is my tax money going to your kid's education at all? But you could say that about anything. I mean, you can't, you don't get tax credits if you want to set up, if you want to hire a road crew to fix a pothole. Right. I sometimes think about it as like a public library analogy. You know, you,

We set up a public library. You don't necessarily get funding to – a gift card on Amazon if you don't – if you're not a patron of the public library. But people could make that argument. Maybe we should support reading outside the public library and that's a version of that argument for private school vouchers. Generally, when there are campaigns on this issue, the real focus is whether it will hurt public schools.

And so critics of these programs say that it will end up draining money from the public schools, whereas supporters say it may end up helping public schools and they'll get better through competition. Right. You've written an awful lot about charter schools. Explain the difference in some cases between charter schools and public private schools and and the pros and the cons and the controversies of how they work. Sure. Yeah. So a private school is a private entity and that may or may not probably not get significant amounts of public funding.

funding. A charter school is actually sort of a hybrid between a public and a private school. It's set up by a private, usually a nonprofit board, but it's approved typically by a public agency. In state law, it's defined as public, and they're typically not allowed to have many, if any, admissions requirements and not allowed to be religious. Though, as a side note, there's some effort to change that and allow them to become more religious. So, but...

Some support – even Democrats have supported charter schools as sort of like a middle ground between private schools and public schools. Republicans have traditionally supported charter schools. But actually President Trump proposed eliminating the charter schools program as part of his block grant effort in his first term. We'll see what he does on charter schools this term. Same curriculum requirements, same protections for kids in charter schools. They fall under the same laws. It –

It actually varies depending on the type of law. So there are some administrative rules or laws that they don't have to comply with or that they're not bound by, including typically collective bargaining agreements through teachers' unions. But there are other laws that they are required to follow, including administering state standardized tests. Transgender issues have become large in politics. You talk to a lot of teachers. You talk to a lot of school administrators.

How much of a landmine is that really on the ground in schools? Is it as much of a thing as it's said to be?

Without downplaying the importance of the issue, I think on a day-to-day basis in schools, that's not something that's top of mind to most administrators or teachers or other educators that I talk to. We're talking about a small percentage of students, even in sports where there – many states have enacted bans or restrictions on transgender athletes. When their data has come out, they're often –

been like one, two, three trans students in a state across a number of years. So it really is not a hyper salient issue in school. That said, it does come up. You know, there are increasing number of students who identify as trans and say, you know, I want to use the bathroom based on my gender identity, not based on my birth certificate. I want to go by a different

name or a different pronoun and school administrators have to figure out how to deal with that and how to comply with sometimes competing in complex state and local laws on the issue. And their competing philosophies, not just with those issues, but others, um, parental choice is how it's framed. It's, it's, others may frame it as, um, student rights, children's rights, rights to, to be able to make their own decisions and, and, uh,

you know, and do what they want. Yeah. And actually, what's interesting is I think the parental rights argument is a little nuanced. You know, I've spoken to parents of trans students who feel that their rights are being violated by various state laws. And so and on the other hand, California has passed a law about not disclosing a student's gender identity or sexual orientation to a parent without the child's consent. And so that also raises parental rights issues on the other side.

What happens with Title IX? It was a women's rights law years ago. The Biden administration has broadened it to include gender identification, sexuality. Could Trump undo that? The short answer is yes, that Trump should be able to essentially –

undo this rule that the Biden administration has attempted to put in place that extends protections of Title IX to gender identity and sexual orientation to transgender people. Trump can undo that. He has said he would undo that. Courts have already stopped much of the Biden administration rule from being implemented anyway, but Trump will have the ability to say we're not going to enforce that rule.

I believe the timeline, it may take a little bit, but he will be able to do that. I think an interesting question is whether he even goes further and says, actually, Title IX doesn't just not include protections based on transgender identity, but prohibits trans students from accessing bathrooms or sports teams based on their gender identity. Yeah.

There's also a lot of fear about books in a few states. Is that just the kind of thing that goes up and down with different administrations in different times of hate change and politics change? I think that is mostly a state and local issue. And so it depends. There are more states and localities and districts who have put in place certain book restrictions or have removed books from shelves that they say are not appropriate for children and that critics say amount to book banning. And so I think that is really varying on a local level.

I believe that President Trump has made some comments about restricting – he certainly has made comments restricting what he describes as inappropriate material. I think I would be a little surprised if he really digs in on the book issue because that's pretty local. Another thing the federal government has – the National School Lunch Program is something that they administer. Yeah.

free subsidized lunches, but there are requirements for nutrition and things like that. Is there any criticism of that program or is it just pretty much chugging along? There had been an expansion of the program during the pandemic to include all students. So instead of saying, if your family makes it below a certain income, you get free or reduced price lunch, we're going to expand it to everyone. If

If you want a meal, we're not going to require your family to fill out a form. We're not going to require you to prove that your family doesn't make a certain amount of income. We're just going to give everyone free meals. That ended a few years ago. There was some talk about continuing the sort of universal free meals.

but it didn't go anywhere in Congress. And my understanding is Republicans were pretty skeptical of that. We have seen in a number of blue states, and actually this was something that vice presidential candidate Tim Walz championed as Minnesota governor to do the universal school meals. That has been mostly and perhaps exclusively in blue states. I don't think that's going to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress. Yeah, I guess the idea in part being stigma that some kids who may qualify for –

free lunch, don't do it because they don't want to be the free lunch kid. Right. And also just like paperwork hassle, like if their parent doesn't turn in the paperwork or just like, you know, maybe you were eligible or you weren't eligible, but then your family, your parent lost their job and now you do need it, but your last year's income, just like the sort of hassle of it. On the other hand, critics, it does

cost more to do it for everyone. So those are sort of the arguments on both sides. Right. Matt Barnum covers education, mostly K-12 stuff for The Wall Street Journal. Matt, thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me. Enjoyed it. We all have plans in life, maybe to take a cross-country road trip or simply get through this workout without any back pain. Whether our plans are big, small, spontaneous, or years in the making, good health helps us accomplish them.

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Kamala was a horrible candidate in 2020. She didn't even make it to 2020 before dropping out of the Democratic primary. She was an even worse candidate in 2024, and the exit polls second that notion. So why then would Democrats be foolish enough to run her in 2028? Well, according to a survey by Echelon Insights, Kamala Harris is the top choice of Democrat

voters in 2028, and she is way ahead of other party favorites like Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, and Pete Buttigieg. This survey asked Democrat-leaning subset of 1,010 voters which politician they would vote for if the party primary was held today, and a staggering 41% of respondents selected Kamala. Newsom was the closest second with only 8% of the vote. With the Democrat

Will the Democratic Party really be dumb enough to run this failed experiment a third time? Well, as a Republican, I admit I selfishly hope they do. I'm Tomi Lahren.

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