In this episode, Wade Miller, Executive Director of Citizens for Renewing America and Senior Advisor for Center for Renewing America, joins Jenny Beth to reveal the inside strategy behind making the DOGE spending cuts permanent. They break down key budget mechanisms like rescissions, reconciliation, and pocket rescissions—and how the Trump administration plans to use them to rein in out-of-control government spending. If you're concerned about the $36.9 trillion national debt and want to understand how fiscal conservatives can finally make progress in reining in the federal budget, this deep-dive is a must-listen.
In this episode, Wade Miller, Executive Director of Citizens for Renewing America and Senior Advisor for Center for Renewing America, joins Jenny Beth to reveal the inside strategy behind making the DOGE spending cuts permanent. They break down key budget mechanisms like rescissions, reconciliation, and pocket rescissions—and how the Trump administration plans to use them to rein in out-of-control government spending. If you're concerned about the $36.9 trillion national debt and want to understand how fiscal conservatives can finally make progress in reining in the federal budget, this deep-dive is a must-listen.
X/Twitter: @WadeMiller_USMC | @amrenewctr | @amrenewcitizen | @jennybethm
Website:
https://citizensrenewingamerica.com/
Wade Miller (00:00:00):
Keeping our Republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she is most proud of is Mom To Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Narrator (00:00:32):
Good afternoon. Today is Thursday, June 5th, 2025, and our national debt is currently $36.9 trillion. As we speak, Elon Musk has been in a role on X talking about the federal government's need for a balanced budget. I can't believe how cited I get when the wealthiest man in the world is talking about the need to balance the budget of the federal government of the United States. It's with the people in the Tea Party movement have been championing for the last 16 years. So I'm very thankful for what he's championing right now and for all the work he did while he was in the government with Doge and the work that is continuing through the Department of Government Efficiency. And Ilan, honestly, when I'm reading his post, it seems like he is as discouraged as many of us in the Tea Party movement have been, often about our government spending.
Narrator (00:01:29):
And one of the things that the Tea Party movement has learned and that we at Tea Pretty Patriots action has realized we have to learn how government spending works and all the different mechanisms within Congress that enable government spending to continue. And it honestly just drives us a little bit crazy because we run our own household budgets. Many of us are entrepreneurs. We run our businesses and we can look at our checkbooks, look at our balances in QuickBooks and go, oh, we need to slow down and not spend so much money. And we go and we make decisions and we cut spending, and we can do so very easily when it's our own business or our own households. But when it comes to the government, it seems like they never are able to do what we think just makes perfect common sense to do so.
Narrator (00:02:20):
Why don't they do this? Why are there so many obstacles that prevent spending cuts and enable more and more and more and more spending? And how can we ever make these Doge cuts permanent and will we get to a balanced budget ever? These are the things we're going to be talking about today. We're going to get into the ins and outs and really get into the weeds about the spending mechanisms in Congress and how we can by understanding these different spending mechanisms and the rules that constrain Congress, how we can work towards a balanced budget and work to help you along get those Doge cuts made permanent. We're joined today by Wade Miller. Wade is the executive director for Citizens for Renewing America, and Senior Advisor for Center for Renewing America, citizens for Renewing America was founded by Russ Vote, who is President Trump's director of the Office of Budget and Management, or Management and Budget or OMB in DC speak because in DC they talk in acronyms all the time.
Narrator (00:03:25):
We're going to dive into the complex and confusing issues like Rescissions Pocket, rescissions, impoundment, reconciliation terms that are essential to making America great again because if you want Doge spending cuts to become a reality, we have to use these different tools like Reconciliation and Rescissions and Pocket Rescissions to make it happen. So the way the discussion is going to work today is that I'm going to talk with Wade about the various aspects of spending and ask him questions to explain how government works when it comes to spending. Then we're going to open the discussion up to questions from you and the audience. Wade, thanks so much for joining me today and thank you you and both citizens for Renewing America and Center for Renewing America for participating in this webinar today.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:04:20):
Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.
Narrator (00:04:22):
So there's a lot to discuss and a lot of it is going to be kind of wonky discussion today really talking about terms that probably everyday Americans are not quite familiar with. But let's get started with some things that are pretty basic to understand about how spending works in the government. And to start it off, could you please address what is the difference between mandatory and discretionary spending and why is it important for us to understand the difference in these two kinds of spending?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:04:57):
Yeah, so mandatory spending is anything that in statute is mandatory. And so when you're talking about mandatory spending, you're talking about spending that is on autopilot and it's going to get funded no matter what, assuming that the government's open and all of that. But it's social security, it's Medicare, it's Medicaid. There's other things that are considered appropriated entitlement, other quasi mandatory quasi discretionary, and then discretionary, mostly defense spending. And then all of the various agencies, all of the functioning of the government, the Department of Defense, the IRS, office of Management and Budget, the Department of Agriculture, the department of Education, that's what they're talking about generally speaking, when they're talking about discretionary spending and the mandatory process is on autopilot, the discretionary process every year they have to bring it up in budgets and through appropriations
Narrator (00:06:02):
And we'll come back to what budget and appropriations means in a moment. Well, when it comes to then the budget and how spending happens, I guess that probably is important to discuss as well. What is a budget, what are appropriations? And from a very basic level, without delving into the details of the bill that's on deck right now, what is reconciliation?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:06:32):
Sure. So generally speaking, the way the spending process is supposed to happen is that it's somewhere between February and May. Usually it's supposed to be February to March, but in the first year of a term it usually comes a little bit later, the president puts forward a budget proposal, submits that to Congress, and then Congress is supposed to take that and they basically send out instructions to the various committees and they come up with a budget and this is a budget proposal and passes. And then once the house and Senate have passed their budgets, then you can get into what's called the appropriations process. However, once you've also passed a budget resolution, you can also, and this isn't done all the time, you can do what's called reconciliation process. And that's what we're hearing with the big beautiful bill. That's the reconciliation process. Every single time the Congress does a budget proposal, which usually happens sometime in the springtime, you can then give instructions to also do a reconciliation process.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:07:41):
And the reason reconciliation is an attractive option and the government right now is because the house, its majority passed, but in the Senate, usually they need 60 votes on a reconciliation bill, they just need 51. And that's kind of where we're at. So we can pass it in theory without having to rely on any Democrat vote. That's why reconciliation is really important. So you can do reconciliation or the budget resolution can then inform the committees on how to start doing the appropriations bills and appropriations usually come later in the summer and into the fall towards the end of the fiscal year. And that can be in many forms, it can be individual appropriations bills called regular order or it can be a whole bunch of bills put together called an omnibus spending bill, or they just may not decide to do any of that and just kind of ignore all the work that they may or may not have done and do what's called a continuing resolution, which is just to say, okay, the previous funding of the awardee, we're going to copy all of that exactly and continue to do that in the next fiscal year and sometimes have a few policy changes general.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:08:55):
And that's basically how the government gets funded. And we've had kind of a broken process, but in the past, and I think everyone on this call probably knows that, but that's how it looks throughout the year generally.
Narrator (00:09:06):
Okay. Now we're going to delve into reconciliation a lot because that's what people have been talking about with a big beautiful bill, and I think it makes most sense to do that. And then we will come back later in our discussion and talk more about appropriations, regular order omni buses and continuing resolutions. When it comes to doge spending cuts that have already been enacted by the administration, do those fall into mandatory or discretionary or both?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:09:42):
It can be both. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of the identified doge cut would be considered discretionary spending items. Unless it's some sort of an efficiency that has a significant impact on inlays and outlays in a mandatory program, then it's probably not mandatory. And the reason that's important for reconciliation is that you can't do discretionary cuts on a reconciliation bill. So a lot of people are saying, why don't we have more doge cuts? Why don't we have more doge cuts on the reconciliation bill? You just can't do it because the Senate has what's called the bird process, and they would consider a discretionary cut to be extraneous and they would strip it out through the bird process in the Senate. It's a longstanding, even my conservative friends who would love to find the gimmick there concede that most of these doge cuts would be stripped out and we wouldn't get 'em in the reconciliation bill.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:10:37):
So that's why you're not seeing the doge cuts on reconciliation. The cuts are mostly for mandatory almost entirely, if not all considered squarely in the mandatory camp. They're mostly a clawback of tax credits or clawback of Medicaid spending and reforms that would've a significant impact. So all of the cuts in the reconciliation bill are kind of the mandatory nature. And so one could say we should be cutting more there and I'm fully supportive if the Senate can get a bill forward here that cuts more on the mandatory side and we can get to enough votes to get this thing passed as my full support. But that's why you're not seeing do cuts on reconciliation as some people have asked for.
Narrator (00:11:23):
Okay. And so the Doge cuts are, there may be some that are mandatory, but most of them are discretionary. So we are going to talk about different ways that we can enact changes and make doge cuts permanent, but that's going to deal more with the discretionary side rather than the mandatory side. Correct,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:11:51):
Correct. After the reconciliation, you're already seeing the first precision bill coming forward, and we can talk about the best strategy on that side, but a lot of the doge cuts will come after the reconciliation process.
Narrator (00:12:04):
So if you've got questions about doge, put 'em in the queue, put any questions that you have in the queue and we're going to get to the questions, but I just want to make sure that we are very clear there's a difference between mandatory spending and discretionary spending and the way the government is funded, if it's autopilot for mandatory spending, unless there is a bill that comes in and cuts or reduces the rate of growth for that spending. So that happens automatically. The discretionary side does not. And it's very important to understand there are two different kinds of spending. It might make you want to go bang your head against the wall because there are two different kinds of spending and Congress is kind of messed up, but right now these are the rules and it's how we function as a country. So it's important to understand that that's how the rules are. Okay. So now we have, let me ask one quick question before we get into reconciliation or two. I guess. Do you know the percentage of the budget that is mandatory and the percentage of the budget that is discretionary?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:13:13):
Mandatory is roughly two thirds. Discretionary is roughly a third.
Narrator (00:13:17):
Okay. So it's kind of shocking, isn't it, that two thirds of the government is on basically autopilot and is going to be spent no matter what, unless significant pressure happens to change the trajectory of the spending?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:13:34):
Correct. However, and this shouldn't be overstated, we can do a lot on the one third. So in DC what you often hear is as an excuse to not get serious about cuts is discretionary irrelevant. It's only one third. We have to do stuff on mandatory, which is true in some degree, but the establishment always uses that as an excuse not to do the appropriations process seriously. And then after the appropriations are done, they say, well, we meant what we said, but we really can't do mandatory cuts because we'll lose elections. So we have really pushed back and said there's actually a lot you can do to get us to a balanced budget if you prioritize discretionary spending, you do still need to do mandatory cuts, but we can really do a lot to put ourselves on a path to balance in 10 years by heavily attacking the discretionary side too.
Narrator (00:14:28):
And before we get into reconciliation, you mentioned the freeze regular order. I think that might be important to discuss when we had a balanced budget previously. The last time we had a balanced budget was when President Clinton was president and after the Republican Revolution in 94 and Newt Gingrich was speaker, correct? I think
Jenny Beth Martin (00:14:51):
So. It's been a while.
Narrator (00:14:52):
Okay. So it's been quite a while because I think pretty shortly after George W. Bush came in when nine 11 happened, spending it exploded back then in the nineties. I think that what we saw, we had a Democrat president and we had a Republican controlled Congress and they still worked together and found ways to get past the filibuster in the Senate and get things passed. And the same thing happened when Reagan was president and Democrats controlled Congress. They still were able to work in a bipartisan manner. And right now it just seems that our country is sharply divided. Congress is divided and hardly any Democrat is going to give an inch at all on anything that President Trump supports. If he said the sky was blue and grass is green, they probably would vote against that even So it's very hard for regular order to happen when we have that kind of political environment, isn't it?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:15:56):
It's so regular order is where you take up each individual appropriation bill, all 12 of them separately, you have an amendment process, a markup, a committee, and then you bring each one separately to vote. That's how you're supposed to do things. Now to be clear though, regular order doesn't necessarily mean it's better if we have good leadership, if we have a conservative GOP, then regular order is the ideal process. If we have leadership that we don't necessarily trust, if we don't have an overwhelmingly conservative GOP caucus, then regular order or an omnibus can just be used to get to a worse outcome than what a CR would give you. So it's kind of a debate about positions versus interest. We'd like regular order, but if it's in our interest, in other words, if the outcome is better because of a cr, we have to take each individual scenario on its own and determine, well, if we do regular order, then we're going to have all of these cardinals who are the people, cardinals in DC are what they call the people who are the decision makers.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:06):
Then you're going to have decision makers that do all of these bills separately, but we're actually going to end up with more spending than if we just did a cr. That could be an instance where CR is ideal. And we've had it kind of baked in our heads that crs are always bad. They are often bad. I've spent a lot of years opposing a lot of crs. Sometimes the CR is the best that the conservative are going to get and it would actually be better than actually doing regular order. So we just have to be careful that there's the ideal, but we also have to recognize how these processes can be abused and a smart leadership would do regular order right now and just use it against us and say, well, you've been asking us for a regular order for years. We did regular order, but we increased spending by a trillion dollars on discretion. So it can be used against us. We just have to be careful strategically on what we do and don't support on that regard.
Narrator (00:17:53):
Okay, that makes sense. And then I think it's important to understand, I remember when Newt was speaker, he was my congressman and I was in my twenties and I had another job and I worked 60, 80 hours a week and volunteered and kept up with politics as well, but I don't remember, and I was not involved in all the ins and outs to get us to a balanced budget, but it wasn't a, I'm sure back then in the nineties it wasn't like one magic pill or one magic bill that took everything to a balanced budget. They were probably working through regular order and had 12 different bills to wind up getting to balance. And the reason that I'm highlighting this right now is because what we're going to be talking about during the rest of this discussion are different steps that Congress can take and that President Trump and the administration can take that will hopefully get us to balance. That would be my goal. And that is clearly Elon Musk goal and the goal of many Americans around the country, but it's not going to happen in just one magic bill.
Narrator (00:19:04):
And the reason for that at the very basic level is you've got discretionary and mandatory spending. So we just have to understand it's going to be a process and it takes more. There are many different lanes to get us there. Okay. Now with reconciliation, which is a big fancy word for the big beautiful bill, president Trump was right to call it the big beautiful bill. It's much easier for people to understand. It's a big beautiful bill that does a whole bunch of things. And what are the things in it that are good? And I understand we want more spending cuts, but let's focus on what is good about the bill right now.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:19:46):
So currently it's roughly 1.6 trillion in mandatory spending cuts mostly through Medicaid. And to put that in context, that twice as much as the Gingrich welfare reforms in real dollars in today's dollars, the Gingrich welfare reform was about 800 billion. This package is 1.6 billion. Initially, a lot of that was in the out years. HFC worked very hard to get more of that put in the earlier years. So this is actually scores a lot better in terms of cost savers on that point. There's about a hundred billion or so for border security. You can correct me on the exact amount. I forgot what all the manager amendment changes were. I would argue that's not really a hundred billion in expenditures. I think that over 10, 20 years you're going to save a lot more than that through deportations. There's some estimates that it's a hundred, 150, 200 billion a year we spend on illegal aliens.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:20:37):
I think we're going to save a lot more than that billion investment even though the will score billion against money in there. Now we could debate this. I go back and forth on this. One of the strategies of the reason they're putting defense money in this and I'm for being some restraint on defense spending, it's getting a little out of control, but the reason they're putting money in reconciliation and not doing it through appropriations later this year is because when we get into that debate, the left will always push for dollar for dollar funds. So every dollar we want to increase defense, they'll demand a dollar increase on their discretionary spending for all the agencies. So if we front load this in the reconciliation bill and pass it with 51, they don't have that negotiating leverage in the appropriations process. So we can set ideally the White House new baselines, which drastically reduces the discretionary spending levels significantly and then holds the military spending kind of static at that top line and over a 10 year window.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:21:44):
That's a tremendous amount of savings. Now there's other provisions in this. There's fallbacks of IRA credit could be more would be fine with that, but the tax extensions, the Trump tax extensions is how the argument that this is a cost increaser in net is because we're extending the tax cut. The CBO argued that's adding trillions of dollars to the debt. I just fundamentally disagree with that. Any conservative or libertarian tax policy person who's talked about tax policy over the last 40 years, we've all talked about the lap recur of the revenue maximizing rates. I think that the corporate rate and the Trump tax levels went down into the rough revenue maximizing range. And I think that you could even bring the individual income tax rates down a couple more percentage points left will claim that's the tax cuts for the rich. And so that's probably why the White House is doing a little bit less on that front.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:45):
They could probably go deeper, but again, if they did that, the CBO would say it's costing even more and it's adding even more to the deficit. And I just don't agree to that at all. I think that in 20 years the Trump tax levels will bring in more net revenue than if we allow the tax cuts to expire. You're going to get more revenue next year and next two or three years, but then it's going to start petering out over the span of that senior window over 15 or 20 years. The Trump tax rates will bring in a lot more revenue because we're maximizing revenue while also maximizing economic growth. And at the end of the day, revenues are a function of economic growth and we need growth to be able to bring in the revenue to pay for the things that we're doing. So I just don't agree that the Trump bill is going to increase the deficit in terms of cut and expenditure. I am for conservatives using their leverage to get more cuts, more cuts is great. We've got to have more cuts in one way, shape or form. Conservatives in the house have said that it can't get any worse than it is right now, and it's in and of itself good. The question is can we make it great? Can we make it a lot better? And I think that there's opportunities for the Senate to do more on the mandatory side, which would make this bill a lot more palatable.
Narrator (00:24:00):
Okay. And we'll talk about that in just a second or well, let me ask before we talk about that, there's something that I've said, and I'm going to do it again here when you were talking about the tax cuts, if I heard someone else give an even better analogy than this, but if the government took 50% of this lipstick holder, 50%, it's half of it. It's a large percentage, but it's not a very big diameter. But if they took 10% of this bottle, that is way more than 50% of this lipstick. When you cut tax rates, even though the percentage is smaller, it grows the entire economy and we wind up with a much bigger pie. So they're getting a smaller percentage of a much bigger pie and they wind up with more money. And I heard one driver who I had recently, like an Uber driver who said I would rather have 10% of a watermelon than a hundred percent of a grape on
Jenny Beth Martin (00:25:14):
The tax policy front. That's exactly right. We want a larger economy from which to tax less from which actually gives you more revenue. And that's what dynamic tax policy does. And the CBO just doesn't score that at all.
Narrator (00:25:25):
Yeah, it's a tragedy that they don't and it doesn't even pay attention to economic reality, but they don't Wade. Let's just take a step back, CBO one of those three letter acronyms. What is that and why? It doesn't matter.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:25:42):
Congressional budget office, it's a bunch of lefties, almost exclusively Democrat donors that crunch the numbers and they refuse to reform the entity. It's supposed to be kind of the governmental scorekeeper on how much a bill will cost or how much tax policy will cost. And they usually do these things on a 10 year window. And I would argue for tax policy, a 10 year window is asinine. You should really be doing a 20, 30 year window when it comes to tax policy. Spending policy is different 10 year window probably, but they just refuse to do that and they do static tax assessments, which is they don't really fundamentally fully assess the pro-growth aspects of having more capital in the economy. So all that to say is that I think that the scoring of this bill is wrong. That's not to say that the bill can't get better, but I would strongly that this bill of spending portions of the bill.
Narrator (00:26:47):
And then one more thing before we address what's in the bill and how we can make it stronger. The debt ceiling is in the bill as well. Correct. And why is it in there? Normally in years past, we've said that we would prefer to have a dead ceiling vote as a standalone vote. And I believe that's one of the arguments that Senator Rand Paul is making right now. What is a reasoning right now for it being in the bill?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:27:22):
Well, I can give you various perspectives I myself have not quite landed on, there's a lot of good points made for both sides here. And so one argument is, and I think you see Rand Paul making this argument, is that we should do a lower amount of debt ceiling increase. And upon first glance, I tend to lean towards that. The reason I'm not fully bought into that isn't because I disagree in principle. It's that what is the cost of that? So if we're doing one single debt ceiling increase, yes, that allows the government to spend more money and the deficit will then therefore increase. But if this is going to happen anyway, what are the scenarios that we're looking at where we get, because these will happen in chunks or all at once. And so what are we going to have to give up later to get the rest of these?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:28:18):
Not that I want them, I would love to force the government to just spend through the revenue that's coming in, but reality is on the hill. Republicans aren't going to block this. And so the question is what are Democrats going to extract out of Republicans in exchange for the 60 vote threshold and the Senate to give a debt ceiling increase versus doing it through the reconciliation bill where they don't have any leverage because it's a 51 vote? So I don't think that there's actually an answer to this. It's too much crystal ball. There's scenarios where if we don't do it all right now, we could actually lose a lot more and doing chunks of debt, ceiling increases throughout the rest of the presidency or it could be worse to do it all now and we could have used those as opportunities. I just don't know yet.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:29:04):
But I see a really solid argument on both sides and I think that the president thinks that the left isn't going to play by the rules they have in the last time and that they actually just want to shut down the Trump admin. They want to shut down border security enforcement, they want to shut down ice, they want to shut down all of these various things that they would argue aren't emergency or essential services. And so I could see both arguments there and I don't think that there's a clear winner here yet. So with that said, I just don't know if the strategy is we should do debt less debt on or if we stick to the current one. And at the end of the day, if it's going to kill the bill, I'd rather just do it as is because I don't want to lose the 1.6 trillion, especially in lieu of everything else that we've got coming later this summer in terms of cuts and reforms. I don't want to lose that because we don't have a vehicle to get all of that mandatory spending done unless we do another reconciliation bill, which would just put us right back in the same position.
Narrator (00:30:06):
And every time that I think of what you just described and whether it would kill the bell or not, it just makes me think of John McCain not repealing Obamacare. And it was with the same mechanism with reconciliation that we were trying to repeal Obamacare and he prevented that his one vote, which kind of brings us to the point of why the bill is so big. It's big because they're adding all these different pieces to it and trying to get every Republican in the house pretty much I know that we had two votes against and one abstention and then almost every single vote in this Republican vote in the Senate to agree on one thing. And it is very hard to do that. And it's frustrating to activists around the country, including myself. I'm like, why don't you want to do what's right for the country?
Narrator (00:31:07):
And I have to remember, we have a constitutional government. We have equal co-equal branches of government. So Congress, the House and the Senate are equal to the executive branch and to the judicial branch. But we don't have a king who can just come in and say, this is how it's going to be and everyone is going to do what I say. We have to go through this legislative process and each member, every member, Republican and Democrat, every member of Congress, and by that I mean the whole body, not just the house, they're all elected by citizens and they represent their own constituency. And we just have to remember that that frustrating part of the process is also part of why we love our country and love our constitutional government. It was designed to be slow and that slowness normally helps protect us against tyranny.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:32:07):
And remember, Trump really wants, he really wants his tax cut extensions and he really wants his border security money and this border security money is supposed to be for most of his presidency. Once those two things are knocked out, he has a lot more leverage because right now he needs congress, he has to have Congress for those things. Once that's done, he has a lot more leverage to lean hard in on everything because he doesn't need a major reform. I mean we'll always take reform, but he doesn't need it. He's not burning on for some specific congressional bill at that point. He then has more leverage on Congress to push back hard on the spending front and on woke and weaponize. So there are upsides, there's downsides, there's upsides. The bill could be better. But I do think that like he said, we have to look at this in terms of tranches. This reconciliation bill is just one. Once you get tax cuts and border money out of Donald Trump's mind, he isn't free to focus on woke and weaponize. And that's going to be heavily on the spending front because in order to neuter it, you have to take it, the funding away from it. And so we're going to see a lot more of that post reconciliation.
Narrator (00:33:18):
And that's good. It's really good. And I hope that people are hearing that we will see more, but first we've got to take care of the spending cut, I'm sorry, making the tax cuts permanent and making sure that we are fully funding borders security. And you're right, those are part of the reasons that the big promises that Trump was elected on, people did vote for him also because we won a balanced budget and we're working towards that. And this bill is one part of it when it comes to things that I would like to see be different in the bill at a minimum to help strengthen it, I really want all of the green New Deal gone. It blows my mind that any of it is still is still in there. And I think that's something we should all be putting more pressure on the Senate to see if we can get more of it removed then I am completely against the thousand dollars handout to newborn babies right now.
Narrator (00:34:26):
The way the bill is written, there's going to be a thousand dollars to every single new baby born in America. And that means that even non-citizens who have babies, because those babies right now in America are considered American citizens will also get a thousand dollars for an investment account for a baby who can't walk or eat or drink on their own. Yet it is supposed to be give them a nest egg and to let them see the magic of compounding interest and to appreciate capitalism. Well, I think the way you appreciate capitalism is that you stick to capitalist values and you don't compromise the capitalist system to save the capitalist system. You don't compromise free markets to save free markets or sacrifice free markets to save free markets like George W. Bush talked about. But if there are tax provisions with that portion, so you've got the handout part, which would be a new entitlement, but also in those new accounts, the ability for people to donate into it tax free to these accounts so babies can see their money grow. I'm fine with that. If you want to carve out a special portion of the tax code to make it tax deductible for donations and money to go into the accounts for the babies, I'm all for that because people are doing it out of their own free will. I just don't think the government should be coercing taxpayers to pay a thousand dollars to every new baby. That's just me.
Narrator (00:36:10):
So I want the Senate to change that.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:36:13):
Yes, the Senate can get more of the green provisions out and if the Senate conservatives can get things like fmap reform on Medicaid included and that increases the total cut significantly, makes it a lot more palatable for conservatives. So I'd love to if they can use their leverage to get that. I think at the end of the day though, they need to get it to a yes. There's too much that could cascading bad in our direction if we don't get this past. And then of course, once we get past reconciliation, that's where we get to the stuff that we've all been clamoring for and we actually have a pretty clear cut strategy of how to get almost all of the doge cuts done. So there is a bright spot in all of this
Narrator (00:37:01):
And let's come to that. But before we go into that, just explain what does fmap mean?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:37:08):
I am not an expert on Medicaid, but it has something to do with the formula on the population that you are and how much the match is in terms of the federal tax. So if you are a single mother, you get roughly, I think it comes out to average of like 60 cents or something along those lines match. But perversely incentivized in terms of if you're a single able-bodied male that's not working, you get like 90% max. And so it's really incentivized a lot of able-bodied single males who just don't want to work and want to play video games and maybe have black market income, sell drugs and just basically have mostly free healthcare. It should be, in my opinion, a no brainer to go after this. There is some hesitancy because ultimately the political argument is you're taking healthcare away from people and I would argue that you're actually not. You're actually making the program more accessible to those that the program is actually intended for. It was not intended to cover single adult childless able-bodied male. It was meant to cover the elderly single mothers that are in need, the disabled, that kind of thing.
Narrator (00:38:30):
And if they go get a job, most of the time, if they have a job, they're going to have health insurance through the job. So it's not taking it away, it's just changing how they get health insurance. Correct. Okay. Now let's talk about, and I know there are a couple of questions in the audience. We see those and I am going to come to those, but let's finish getting through these different terms and different tranches and then we'll go to the audience. And I know we're in the weeds, but I think these weeds are really important for you to understand. So we know what's going on in the administration when it comes to Doge. How can we make a difference with that? I think we've seen the beginning of that this week, right? With
Jenny Beth Martin (00:39:11):
Rescissions? Sure. The rescission package has been sent up and a rescission is when the president sends a message to Congress and then in statute, in the IM Empowerment Control Act, which is where all this is outlined, the president has 45 days withhold funds. And in that period, Congress either brings it up and passes it, they don't bring it up at all, and then in which case it doesn't pass, or they only pass parts of it, in which case the parts that weren't passed don't get cut. And you only have one crack at the apple for fiscal year on a rescission. So there is some risk in sending this rescission package up and that if Congress doesn't approve all of it, we can't later refin the rest of it. Now, that doesn't mean we can't use impoundment authority or reprogramming authority or some other authority, but it's harder.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:40:02):
It's harder to do that. And so rescission is risky, but it is ultimately strategy dependent on when it's submitted. And so if you submit it at a certain timeframe, it's a sure thing. So I've been arguing that we should be, and look, I've been an activist. I was a tea party activist before I ever worked in politics. It's actually what got me into this business before I ever worked on the hill or in a think tank. I now live in the DC area for 20 years. I've always heard DC people tell me we can't do it right now, trust us will do it later, which is always a lie. So for me to now say this is highly ironic myself, and I'm sure to a lot of people who know me, but this is an instance where we actually do need to wait. We need to wait because remember I said there's a 45 day withholding period where the president can withhold those funds.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:40:57):
It's statutory the Congress outfit. It should they have, that's a debate for Congress. So if you submit a rescission package after August 18th and then the president withholds those funds for 45 days, it gets you into October. And why does that matter? Well, the fiscal year 25 ends on September 30th. If the president withholds those funds into October, the budget authority to expend those funds lapses, meaning that if the president sends a rescission package after August 18th, roughly, it automatically goes into effect regardless of what Congress does. Congress could vote on it and defeat it. They could vote it down, they could vote for it and pass all of it. They could only pass some of it. It doesn't matter. The entire package, essentially by default goes into effect. So I've been really urging as many people as I can in the last week or so to hold off on demanding dose cuts because if Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, or Mitch McConnell don't want to pass one of these rescission bills, it's dead and we can't cut it through rescission later. If we do it after August 18th, doesn't matter what they say. Doesn't matter what they think. We get it. So we have a strategy to get all of the Doge cuts and then some we can go beyond the Doge cuts, whatever fiscal year 25 money is left that they have not spent at that point and they're withholding a lot of money right now. We could potentially get hundreds of billions in cuts through rescissions packages towards the end of the year.
Narrator (00:42:29):
Okay. And that's very important for people to understand. And that's called a pocket rescission, correct? Correct. What you're saying is that if they wait until 45 days before the end of the fiscal year, which is the end of the year, September 30th, 2020 FY, fiscal year 2026 for the United States of America's government begins on October 1st, 2025. And so if they wait until August 18th and they don't spend the money, then that money just goes away. Is that right? So that money is no longer then allocated and it doesn't continue to be spent?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:43:11):
Correct. There's no authority to spend that money at that point. Every year appropriations authorize the president to spend money in that year. Now, there are some exceptions. There are some multi-year appropriations. There's some appropriations that are written in terms of X date, meaning there is no real expiration, but almost all if not all of the Doge cuts are single year appropriation, meaning that that money can't be spent if it's not spent by September 30th. So the President wins by default. I know that OMB knows about this. I don't know their exact strategy because unlike other administrations, this administration doesn't leak, which is a normalcy frustrating because I know the OMB director and he's a friend of mine, but he won't tell me the plan, but I know Russ, I know OMB knows about this. I would be shocked if this was not their game plan plan.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:44:03):
So I do think that's the strategy we should employ. OMB wrote a memo about this in 2021, and the same lawyer that wrote that is one of Russ's friends, and he was actually one of our senior fellows here at Center for Renewing America, mark Paletta. So I know that they know, I know it's on their radar, and the fact that they haven't sent up more and the fact that Russ vote on CNN said, the word pocket rescission leads me to believe that this is what they want to do. So we should be patient. When it comes to doge cuts, and again, I hate to say that, and don't get me wrong, we should be putting pressure on getting the Doge cuts. We should be demanding dose cuts, but we should be demanding that they put them in the form of a pocket rescission after August 18th. And I think if we do that, we're giving the White House, the President and OMB, a lot of political leverage to then cut a lot of money at the end of the year. And again, we're talking about reconciliation right now. The rescissions that will come later this year are going to be significant. And so that's not added into the cost of the Build back better Bill, but we are going to get the Doge cut this way, and that's going to be a lot of money.
Narrator (00:45:14):
It's 10 and a half weeks from now till August 18th. It's not that long. It really isn't that long. I only heard of Pocket Rescissions about a week ago, and I was like, wait, what is this? And I've heard of mandatory spending, discretionary spending, all these other terms, but I had not heard of Pocket Rescissions. And when I heard that, I thought, it's part of the reason why I asked you to come do this webinar, because it seemed to me like, oh, a huge light bulb went off when I heard that it understood what it meant. I was like, oh, I wonder if that's how we can get the Doge cuts and actually make them permanent and we don't have to worry about 50 votes or 60 votes in the Senate at that point.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:46:03):
Right. The reason people don't know about Pocket Rescissions is because it hasn't been done in a long time. It hasn't been done, I think since the seventies. And so it's just been forgotten. And also, normally by the end of the fiscal year, you don't have a president that has withheld this much money. So even if you did want to do 'em, there's not a lot of money to rescind at that point, but we're withholding hundreds of billions of dollars in various forms and through various legal strategies. So there's going to be a huge pot of money to cut from later this year through pocket rescission.
Narrator (00:46:39):
Okay. Now you one person is texting me and saying, but you can't rescind money that has already been spent. Correct. But is the administration and the work that Doge has been doing, not spending some of the money, even if it's been appropriated?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:47:00):
Yes, correct. If money has already been spent, you can't rescind it. But what has been going on behind the scenes very quietly because it's highly legal and technical in nature, is they've just not been spending a lot of this money. So it's on the books, no one's seeing it yet, because technically money that's appropriated and you won't see it reflected until the end of the year once they actually do it. But that money can just go back to the treasury. It's not spent, it won't get added to the deficit. So yes, you can't rescind money that's already been spent, but there's a whole bunch of money that's not being spent right now.
Narrator (00:47:37):
Well, and let's say that you terminated employees or there were employees who took the packages so that they could go ahead and retire or leave and resign and go find other work that money would not be spent. And then if it's not being spent, then we don't have to have that for salaries the next time. Correct. Would that be the kind of thing we're talking about? Some of it?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:48:03):
Correct. There's a lot of things that we don't have yet that I have heard are in the work. So there's some evidence already that the amount of money that's being sent to the federal government is increasingly a lot less, and that's going to be reflected at the end of the year when we get all of these various year end statements of the federal government. But you're already seeing it reflected in the amount of money that's going to the federal government. And then we haven't even factored in the deregulatory agenda that I hinted at that they're crushing it right now. I think the goal with 10 to one, and I'm hearing that they're blowing that number out of the water. There's all sorts of things going on on money that's not being spent on money that's not being asked for. And I think that once we get all of the year end data, I think that it's going to be a lot rosier than people really understand because so much of the cut and reforms are technical in nature right now. And honestly, some of it that the left just doesn't, they can't, there's so much of it going on, they can't keep up with it. They can't complain about it loudly enough. And so a lot of it's just flying under the radar.
Narrator (00:49:08):
And even during the Reagan administration, I think there was only one or two departments that actually reduced spending during the Reagan administration. Most of the other still increase spending. So the fact that this administration is going in and looking for ways to cut spending and go, we don't need this. We don't need that contract anymore. We don't need to be wasting money on this program or that grant. It's something I don't ever remember seeing in, at least in my adult lifetime, happening in the government.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:49:42):
And Doge is just starting. So the beautiful thing about Elon's participation in Doge is he brought in a lot of outsiders that were looking at this as through a business mentality. No one in DC would've thought, let me see all of the phone lines that are currently connected to this agency, and let's see which ones of them we can cancel out to save millions of dollars. That's just not the way a dc they think in terms of we need to reform Medicaid. That is being, it's not done. There's more of that type of work to be done. But now that Elon's exiting, there's now an opportunity to use Doge towards the way a DC Insider that one of us would want it to work. And so you're getting a powerful one two punch through Doge, and that second punch hasn't even really started yet. We're still kind of working on the first punch and getting a lot of things daily that you don't really see or hear about that are being logged in and reported, and contracts cut and all these things are happening behind the scenes. But soon you're going to get the second punch, which is people like Russ Vote and other people who are one of us, the things that they know about the government and how it works and how it shouldn't work, they're going to get a bite at the Apple and work with the Doge effort to work on that side of it. So there's more to come. Doge is an ongoing effort, and we're just scratching the surface on what Doge can do, and
Narrator (00:51:02):
We're what, 130 or so days into it. It's four months into, or four and a half months into a four year term. So there's still a lot of work to be done. One last question about these items and then we'll go to questions from the audience. And I know we haven't gone into a lot about what will happen on October 1st, and maybe I should do two questions. What do you think is going to happen with spending as we head into the next fiscal year, especially the discretionary spending? And then the other question is, what is impoundment and why does it matter?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:51:45):
Well, we've talked about reconciliation, we've talked about rescissions. After all of that occurs, or in the midst of it, we're going to have the appropriations process. And will that be, my guess is because of all of the various things that are not going to have time to do each individual bill, so it's either going to be an omnibus bill or a cr. And the upside of an omnibus is if things play out the way they could, and I've never seen this before, so I'm hesitant to say that I believe it will happen, but for the first time ever, I've seen the appropriators wanting to meet with OMB and saying things publicly like they want to adhere and align with the White House budget, which is important because Russ wrote a White House budget that put us on a pass to balance intent. He's got a good blueprint.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:52:39):
Now, that's not all reflected in this one in this White House budget. Russ wrote one when he was with Center for Renewing America, but a lot of it is in this one. And if we can get Tom Cole again, do I believe it, I'll trust but verify. I'm a little hesitant to trust that Tom Cole is going to be a spending champion. But if Tom Cole gets it close to the White House budget and sets the new baseline on DOD and on discretionary, it helps us put us on a path to having a serious conversation about how in the next year we can do some more stuff to get us on a path to balance in 10 years. So again, I'll trust it when I see it, if that process breaks down. Because in that process, we would want all of the dose cuts included for, we've got an FY 25 to be included in FY 26 through appropriation, so we don't need to do RESCISSIONS on them again and then the new baseline.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:53:35):
But if that process breaks down, and that's highly possible given the GOP that we have in Congress, then it's probably going to be a cr. So then the question is what do we want in exchange for, in terms of policy writers? And I would argue we got to see how this flushes out, but at a minimum, we want all the Doge cuts as policy writers on a CR and then see what else we want, what went wrong in reconciliation that we didn't anticipate? What else can we throw onto a CR in terms of a policy rider to make it enticing to want to do a cr? And then the next question is, what is the duration of that cr? Do we do it into early next year? Should we have another fight? Do we do it for a full year? I don't know. This comes down to when we get there, we'll be able to know, are we opposed to a cr? Are we opposed to the omnibus? And we just can't say that Now we got to see how this plays out and then take the best option possible for conservatives and get behind that vehicle and then hopefully support our HFC guys in fighting to get the best deal that they can and however that plays out. And then on empowerment, you want me to explain impoundment?
Narrator (00:54:39):
Yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:54:40):
So impoundment is for 200 years, presidents would just, they looked at appropriated money as a ceiling but not a floor. So if Congress said, here's 50 million for a tank, and the president could get it for 35 million, he would just impound that last 15 million in the seventies during the height of the weakness of their presidency during the Nixon scandals, the Congress rescinded the authority to do I through the Impoundment Control Act, and that's how we got Rescissions and all that out of that whole thing. We and others have made an argument that the power to impound, the Congress doesn't have the constitutional authority to trample on the article. Two, power to impound. And this is the view of the president. This is the view of a lot of lawyers at B. This is the view of Russ Votes. And so they want to impound funds, which is to say that we're not, if money doesn't need to be spent because we've already achieved the legislative objective, we're not just going to arbitrarily spend that money.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:55:42):
And so my guess is that in this year, OMB and the president are going to want to rely heavily on rescissions and pocket Rescissions and do a test case on impoundment to get a court victory on it in the best possible fashion so that next year we can also use pocket rescissions and precisions heavily. We don't know what's going to happen in the next election. So I think what OB is thinking is, let's set up Im empowerment on a narrow basis, get the best legal grounds we can, and then set ourselves up. So then FY 27 and FY 28, if Democrats hold power, we can just impound funds. If Democrats are sending us ridiculous of spending that we don't need to achieve legislative objectives.
Narrator (00:56:28):
That makes a lot of sense. So I think that we have talked about reconciliation. We've talked about a continuing resolution or an omnibus through appropriations, rescissions, pocket Rescissions, impoundment regulatory reform we kind of touched on. And then the president has also talked about tariffs as a part of helping grow the economy. And then the other thing is energy and opening up the energy, because everything relies on oil, whether we like it or not. And that the higher the cost of energy is, the more everything costs. So if we can reduce that cost, it helps reduce costs everywhere. So those are the different areas that I'm aware of that the administration is working. Am I missing anything?
Jenny Beth Martin (00:57:25):
No, I mean, it's dereg, it's border, it's tax cuts, it's spending cuts. I mean, there's a lot going on that I think will be a net helpful to getting us towards a position in the next two years to saying with a little bit of elbow grease that we can put ourselves on a pathway to. The good news is the president has indicated that he does want to be the first president in a long time to get us on a path. I think he actually wants to, I don't know if that's possible with this Congress, the makeup of the Congress, but I like that the President wants to do that. At the very least, I think it should be our objective, and we should not make this through gimmicks. We should put ourselves on a serious path to a 10 year balance. And I think that's achievable. If we can get, not build back better, big, beautiful bill. If we can get rescissions tariff revenues, all of these border enforcement, all of these things can get us into a really good on deck position to finally having a serious conversation about balancing the budget.
Narrator (00:58:33):
And I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think you're right about this Congress, that it's going to be tough to get this particular Congress to balance a budget if we get these things done that we're working on. I mean, maybe we, but I think it's going to be tough, but if we get these items that we've been talking about and the other items that still are to come done with this Congress, it's way better than what we've had. And then I would challenge all of us as activists to say then our job over the next 18, 19 months is to go make the case to the American people that we need them to vote for when they're going to vote next year in 2026. We need to be making a balanced budget, part of the reason why they're going to vote. So there is a mandate to Congress to balance a budget, and they understand that that is a big deal. Going into the election last year, it was about stopping inflation. It wasn't about balancing the budget, it was about stopping inflation and about securing the border. So I think we always should be advocating for a balanced budget. I also think part of the checks and balances in our government, part of it is us putting pressure on Congress to make them do the right thing.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:01):
Amen. I don't have anything to add to that as perfectly said.
Narrator (01:00:05):
Okay. A question from the audience. Joan said that Speaker Johnson asked Senator Thune to only do minimal changes to the house pass, big beautiful Bill. Is the real concern different than the big beautiful bill having to be passed in the house again?
Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:23):
Yes. HFC has signaled that the bill cannot get worse. It can be different, but it must be materially better or if they want to do F Maps but a little bit less on some of the green subsidies, I don't know how HSC would view that, but if it's not from a structural debt basis, as long as it's not cutting less and we're not spending more, then I think that they will be okay with it. But I can't speak for HSC, but I've seen some senators having serious conversations about doing more on Medicaid and if that's the case, I think it makes it a lot easier to get to a yes if this bill comes back to the house with a higher level top line spending level cut.
Narrator (01:01:11):
Yeah, I think that the Speaker Johnson is concerned because he got a very delicate balance and a very, very tiny majority in the house. So I understand the concerns he has from the position he has in his job. My job is to pull the conference and Congress as far to the right as I can get them and get them towards a balanced budget or add a balanced budget. So my job is much different than his job, but we don't know yet what the Senate is going to do. So I think a lot of it just depends on what they do. If they really strengthen it and make it a better bill, I think that it wouldn't be hard at all to get it passed again in the house.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:01:55):
If you can get Murkowski, McConnell and Collins and a couple more to vote for a better Senate bill, then I don't see the argument that moderates in the house are going to be in the way, not with President Trump telling them to vote for the bill. So I agree with you if the bill gets better, I don't think that Speaker Johnson has a problem there, but I think that the hurdle is getting the Senate to put forward a worthy enough package that's not materially any worse than it already is.
Narrator (01:02:24):
Okay. Joan also ask can the FMAP revision be dealt with in another way other than through reconciliation?
Jenny Beth Martin (01:02:35):
Yeah, I think that you could do it through other bills. You could actually do another reconciliation bill. We could do a FY 26 budget resolution and just kind of slide it through and you could do that this year. So we could do it through another reconciliation process. You could do it through, I'd have to see, try to do it on a appropriations bill. I don't know how that would work in the Senate. I don't know if the votes would be there, but I think that the best way to do mandatory spending reforms like that is coupled with other things that are politically very popular to kind of force the moderate to support it. Otherwise, I just don't know how politically you get it across the line. There's probably many ways you could do it. It's a factor of vote numbers and I think that the way it's being done right now is our most advantageous leverage point to get those mandatory cuts done.
Narrator (01:03:34):
Okay. Marissa in Phoenix has a couple of questions. She said that her group's main question and criticism of the current reconciliation bill is that it does not cut all of Biden's Green New Deal infrastructure and what pork is left that's being criticized. She just really, they want the green New Deal gone and a lot of people want the COVID spending and the money, the inflation, I can't use the word reduction with that. So the inflation act money to that spending to go away as well. A lot of our supporters agree with Ron Johnson that money needs to go back. So they want to know, they're just trying to understand how are we going to get, get all of that done.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:30):
Yeah, I mean it's a question of how many votes will the Senate have for some of those provisions? I mean, HSC made this point. They wanted more of the green subsidies in all of the IRA out or cut. I would love that. I don't know if we have the votes. And so the question becomes if we don't have that, should we kill the bill? And I think that that would be a mistake. So what I'm hoping the best case scenario is conservatives use their leverage right now to get the bill to as best place as they can, and then we pass it and then let's have another reconciliation process. If we need to get into some more on this, have a fight on that. Use the appropriations process. We can do reconciliation again next year as well. We have a lot of opportunities of us to get more mandatory cuts and it is a lot of excuse making from moderate Republicans who are opposing this, but the question is, are we willing to sacrifice 1.6 trillion in cuts border security money,
Narrator (01:05:33):
Permanent tax cuts,
Jenny Beth Martin (01:05:34):
Extensions? There's a lot there. I mean, it's a tough one if you're a conservative. It's not an easy answer right now on how much of a no am I and where's my red line? It's not clear cut. There's a lot to lose if our red line is too hard on this one. And at the end of the day, we have to deal with the reality of where the GOP caucus is. And if we had a caucus of Chip Roy's, we would be balancing the budget this year. But we have a caucus with Dan Crenshaw and people like that. And it's hard to balance the budget when you're dealing with a GOP caucus made up of Mike Lawler and those types.
Narrator (01:06:12):
It is, and as I said a little while ago, they are all elected and they each represent their own constituency. So when they drive me crazy, apparently they don't drive their own constituents crazy enough for them to be voted out in a primary. So we do have to deal with them even when it frustrates us. Okay. She had a question at the beginning, but I think we've addressed this. She was asking what is the expectation of an August 18th rescission package to stop the physical cliff we are currently on and to fully codify the Doge cuts, which I think that you answered that in explaining pocket rescissions,
Jenny Beth Martin (01:07:01):
I'm pretty bullish, or is that the right word? Bearish bullish. I always get those two mixed up. I should know better. I'm pretty confident that we are going to see a significant amount of doge cuts later this year, but sometime between August 18th and September 30th.
Narrator (01:07:20):
Okay. And then another question that Marissa had, she said, and I think this is very constructive, it's constructive criticism, but it's actually very constructive. She said that they, meaning the administration, and I would even say she is talking about OMB, whether she understands it's what she's talking about or not, they have not made estimations of what amount pocket would be included in pocket rescissions in any of the statements they've been making. So nobody knows how much they're talking about. And it really is giving rise to the frustration and the outrage that people across the country have because there haven't, there's been no commitment on what is about to come and how much that would be. You are friends with Russ and you work at the group that he founded, but you still don't even know these numbers yet. So I think that that is, it's nothing necessarily that you can do about it right now, but we can pass that on.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:08:27):
Well, let me just say that if you want the pocket Rescissions process to work for a variety of reasons, you want to be very ambiguous on how much and because you have to know that the left will look at that and they'll want to get their legal fights in order. So we're in between a rock and a hard place where we have very strong indications from the admin, they're going to want to do pocket rescissions. We don't know what. And there's probably a really good reason for that in terms of if we want them to be successful. Some ambiguity on that front right now is good for the admin. It's frustrating for a conservative activists like myself and others who want certainty and they want, and we exist in a world where we are constantly misled by politicians and they don't always follow through on their promises, but in this case, I think there is a strategic reason why we might not be hearing it. And so some of this comes down to we got to trust Trump and we got to trust Russ that they'll do everything they can when the time is right.
Narrator (01:09:36):
And I totally understand not trusting politicians. I mean, anyone who has followed politics for more than about 60 days or 90 days usually gets in a point where they're like, oh, I don't think I can trust pretty much any politician but Trump, he's been faithful to the things that he says he's going to do. And he wanted Doge. He made a big deal about Doge, he made sure Doge happened, and he just did that press conference on Friday with Elon Musk because he appreciates the work that Elon Musk and the entire Doge team has happened. And I don't think for a minute that a president who created the Department of Government Efficiency wants to see those cuts just disappear and not actually happen. So I think when,
Jenny Beth Martin (01:10:26):
And most of these cuts are in pockets of money that were weaponized against Trump. So I feel like I'm fairly confident Trump is on fire to get those cuts because it defangs a lot of the administrative deep state.
Narrator (01:10:40):
So I understand that, and I think right now we have to understand that there is still another, we've got the rescission package that was just sent to Congress on Tuesday, and then we have another bite at the apple when it comes to rescission. And we may have to just be a little bit patient as we're waiting to hear what is in that one. And then we also have to remember the administration has only been functioning for 130 days and there's still over a hundred nominees ready to go before the Senate that aren't even placed and many more that still have to be confirmed. So the entire administration isn't even fully functioning yet.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:11:20):
A lot of great things are happening. I think we've gotten a little used to 10 15 wins a day, and now if there's only two or three wins a day, that seems like nothing. But we're still racking up a lot of wins. I'm fairly confident that we're going to look back at the end of this year if we can get the bill, the reconciliation bill done. And I think we're going to say that we cut more money this year than has ever been cut. And I think that we're going to be in a good position to make an argument as a fiscal conservative that we're heading in the right direction once we're looking in the rear view mirror in October.
Narrator (01:11:57):
And I'm hoping that you are right. I'm hopeful that you are right if
Jenny Beth Martin (01:12:02):
I'm wrong, we're all going to have a lot of things to be very mad about.
Narrator (01:12:05):
Well, we certainly will. Then another question some people have asked is why isn't the save at the Citizen only voting Act included in the reconciliation bill?
Jenny Beth Martin (01:12:20):
That's a good question. It may be that the Senate would say that it wouldn't muster the ability to pass the Bird rule because it doesn't have a significant impact on revenues or spending. So they may consider it extraneous. That may be the argument for it. But I do think that we should be making the argument now that the Save Act needs to be included in the appropriations process either through a writer on a cr. That should be one of our asks. If we're in a CR conversation or in the baseline text of appropriations bills, that should be a no brainer. We don't see that at the end of the year in our spending bills. Then we should be up in arms.
Narrator (01:13:00):
Absolutely. And for those who are asking especially about citizen only voting specifically, T Pretty Patriot's action is going to make the summer citizen only have a huge focus on citizen only voting the month of August we are going to dedicate towards citizen only voting Congress will be in recess then. So we'll be able to really focus on that. We've got a lot of things coming up. We've sent one or two emails about it, but we'll be sending a lot more. And the whole goal is to get to September, and we very likely will have a press conference or a day for people to come up and go talk to their members of Congress in September, urging them to add the Save act to the continuing resolution that they'll be voting on in September. So much more to come on that. And we were told early on because we were asking that same question that it cannot happen because of the bird rule in the Senate. And could you elaborate just a little bit more on what is a bird rule and why does it matter?
Jenny Beth Martin (01:14:08):
A process that was put forward in the Senate of been institutionalized that says that in order for something to be done on a reconciliation bill, it needs to have a significant impact on revenue and spending. And it's not like an exact science, which is what makes it a little bit frustrating and what they would deem convertible or extraneous to the bill because it doesn't muster the bird process. So there's things that I would say would have an impact on revenues and they would say it's not enough, so we're not going to count it because it's incidental the cost. In other words, if you do this, you have to go through three arguments in order to say that it's going to save money. And so they want it to be a direct impact. So a lot of these things that we, like, a lot of these reforms we could argue will save money or increase revenue, and then they would just say that it just doesn't. And as your listener pointed out, these decisions are adjudicated by the Senate parliamentarian who's not a Tea Party activist. So you just never know how that's going to play out.
Narrator (01:15:20):
And I have heard people say, well, why don't they just overrule the parliamentarian? And even I have said that a few times in the past, and I don't know that is a bad or a good thing. I do know this. We just need to pay attention to anything, any change that happens, especially in these kind of processes, if Democrats controlled everything, would we want them doing it back to us. And so I think you have to be really very intellectually honest. Would you want that to happen with us or would you want the parliamentarian to still be there kind of making those decisions? And if you don't care and you think that the parliamentarian can be overridden now and you wouldn't care if it happened to us, if Democrats controlled everything, then that should be the answer. But just sometimes we have to remember there are unintended consequences. And we also have to think if we didn't have all the levers of power, would we want this tool to be able to use in the minority?
Jenny Beth Martin (01:16:30):
Right. And I'm not opposed to that strategy of overruling a parliamentarian on a critical issue. I think it needs to be strategic when we do it. And I just don't know that we have the leverage right now to convince enough Republican senators that this would be the time on this specific type of a provision, whatever that provision might be. We have so many targets right now, overruling the parliamentarian is probably a strategy that conservatives want to use when we're talking about one thing. And all of our weapons are trained on that thing. Right now everyone's debating tax revenue from the tax defense money and then the green subsidies, and we've got things that we're all debating. And so I just don't think we have the leverage to win a parliamentarian debate right now.
Narrator (01:17:22):
I think you're right on that. And there may be a time and a place for, we just have to make sure that it's something we're willing to live with in the longterm. And I hated the Democrats using the filibuster to block Trump and the first administration, and I appreciated the ability to have the filibuster in the Biden administration. So I think it is just a, I don't know. I don't have to keep going about what I already said. Okay. There's one other question that maybe you can answer or maybe not from Bill. He says, we went from 660 billion in deficit to 3.13 trillion in deficit in one year in 2020 with the COVID lockdown spending, and we've brought it down to 1.8 trillion in deficit. Why didn't it come back down to 660 billion? And will we ever truly be able to get to zero or a surplus? Because without that, we're never going to actually balance a budget much less paid on the debt.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:18:31):
Yeah. I mean, mandatory spending went up significantly during that time period, and a lot of the baselines on discretionary didn't go back down fully. That's one thing that the White House is attempting to do in their budget proposal, and they're trying to get house appropriators to agree to going back down significantly to those lower baselines. If we do that, I think it puts us on a trajectory to cut into that deficit hole significantly. And then the other part of this is, and this is where the left will say that we were wrong on taxes, is that they'll say that we've had less revenue than we otherwise could have. Because anytime you put in a tax cut, there is probably very likely going to be a dip in the overall amount of revenue that you could have collected in the first few years. And so we're seeing the first parts of that play out in our favor if we just hold ground on tax policy that bounce back towards us over the next 6, 7, 8 years where we actually have more net revenue than we would've otherwise had if we kept a higher older tax rate.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:19:36):
So we're a little bit of a victim of good tax policy, but we're suffering on the front end of that. And then also we've got to go back down on the baselines. And also there was also a lot of economic downturn and relative less revenues because of the downturn. And so we're clawing our way back out of that. We had a lot of inflationary impacts of that. We're clawing our way out of that. We're doing a lot of the right things. Some of those things will take a year or year and a half to really start to show in the stock market and on our growth rates.
Narrator (01:20:14):
Okay. And then let me just check the chat log one last time and see if there are any other questions. Okay. This one is from Kimberly, and she's saying Alana's not a politician. Do you trust him? Or maybe she's replying to something else, but another question that she is asking, maybe it's not a question for us and it's within the chat, but how do we bring DOS to every single government at all levels like our county governments immediately? Is that something you've paid attention to? If not, I know that we could work on asking another group to do a webinar or a podcast about that.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:20:58):
I haven't been thinking about it. I do think it's worth another conversation. I think we need to identify in every state who is the elected official that would actually do that. And in some states it's going to be the governor. In some states it's going to be lieutenant governor, other states it's going to be the comptroller in Texas. I've just personally, a friend of mine, Don Huffines is running there. I want him to win there because I think that he will actually do what Elon has done and the Texas government, and I think he'll do so aggressively. And so I think that we need to think strategically through who are our champions in each state. Because what we've seen so far is a bunch of state lawmakers in most instances, maybe not all, but in most instances, do fake doge things and just kind of glomming onto the name and it's establishment candidates who say, we're going to do dose. Like in Texas, there was a Doge committee that was run by all of these establishment hacks, and they did nothing. And it was just a total joke, but they said doze. So I do think that we do need a methodical efficiency strategy like Doge in every state, and that's worth a longer strategic conversation on how we get there.
Narrator (01:22:05):
Okay. And I agree with that, and I think that is the last question, Wade. I know we went really long today, but I appreciate you just answering all these questions and explaining all of these terms that people in DC just think are, it's just they know it all and they live and breathe and eat and drink and sleep this and out in the rest of the world. We don't do that. So just going back and explaining it all to people I think is very important so that we can have the patience to let them get the job done, and so we know where we need to be putting pressure to get even more out of Congress.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:22:50):
Amen. I agree.
Narrator (01:22:52):
Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Wade Miller (01:22:56):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Han and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Narrator (01:23:15):
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