00:00Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Director Vogt, for being here.
00:04You know, as an American, before being here as a member of Congress,
00:08I just want to say thank you for finding efforts to find savings.
00:11I know what motivates me and a lot of people in our service here
00:14is the really demand that should be upon us to leave a better country than we find it.
00:20And so we find ourselves headed into $36 trillion in debt, as you just talked about.
00:26We're looking at what's going on in the bond markets.
00:29They're really concerned about our debt load.
00:31We talked about World War II debt loads during peacetime being a very big concern.
00:38Certainly, mandatory spending is a big part of that.
00:42But then we also, you know, have understood that as government grows, freedom contracts,
00:48and so there's a need as well to make sure that we're turning a good return on investment
00:53when it comes to our discretionary funding as well.
00:57Could you speak to what we can do to find savings during, with our discretionary funding,
01:08especially considering pre-COVID levels, we're spending, what, $2 trillion more a year now,
01:13every year.
01:14And then we were, what, $1.6 trillion in discretionary funding pre-COVID,
01:20or, I'm sorry, that's after COVID, and before COVID, it was $1.288 trillion in discretionary.
01:27That's a pretty substantial growth over just a couple-year period of time.
01:31And, you know, nobody pre-COVID was thinking that we had a lean, mean fighting machine of a federal government.
01:36Most people even then thought it was pretty bloated and a little lethargic
01:39and could use some tightening up.
01:42Could you speak to what we're doing to find savings and return a better return on investment?
01:48Sure.
01:48I mean, it's reflected in our budget proposal generally.
01:52We proposed $163 billion in non-defense cuts, the lowest level adjusted for inflation since 2000,
02:00not adjusted for inflation.
02:02It gets you back to your pre-COVID levels.
02:04And we really are trying to find programs that we believe are fundamentally wasteful or divisive.
02:12You know, when you're providing $315 million for preschool grants for CRT indoctrination for four-year-olds in Minnesota,
02:23we think that money is not just wasteful, but it's actually harming the country as a whole and those individuals.
02:32And we looked at it from every vantage point from that standpoint.
02:36It's one of the reasons we talk about the cuts to woke and weaponized bureaucracy and wasteful.
02:43And sometimes you just can't afford something when you're $37 trillion in debt that you would otherwise be able to afford.
02:51And, you know, there are drivers that you have in the appropriations process that we pay for.
02:56When we pay for the needs that we see for veterans, it almost acts like a mandatory program within your jurisdiction.
03:07We have proposals for rental reform to block rent to the states and require a cost share with states
03:15so that we don't have people that are too soon moving off these programs into self-sufficiency.
03:21That's another driver that you all are facing with that is on your books.
03:25It's not a mandatory program, but acts like a mandatory program.
03:28And we're trying to account and deal with those with the proposal that we sent up.
03:34I was late to this hearing because I was in the Doge subcommittee hearing in which we were talking about NGOs that are –
03:41we call them NGOs, but many of them have well over 50 percent of their funding coming from the federal government.
03:47One I highlighted was Endeavors, which was a big part of the apparatus, really the industry that stood up to bring illegal immigrants.
03:56Over 90 percent of their funding was coming from the federal government.
04:02And they kind of ceased to be an NGO at that point.
04:06Can you talk about how you're evaluating these – I would call them quasi-government entities as opposed to an NGO?
04:15I think it was over 35,000 of them are getting more federal dollars than they are donations.
04:22I mean, it was a major thrust throughout this process for constructing this budget.
04:27And we have our – what we call director's review.
04:30And literally, we would ask on every program not just what's the level, what's the need,
04:35but how is it distributed – distributed.
04:38We want to make sure that if this is going to a non-profit, the extent to which that non-profit shares our views
04:49and is not putting forward some of the ideologies that we have fundamental issues with.
04:54And so I can't give you a rack up of what we found other than to – in the areas that we put forward cuts,
05:01we have concerns in addition to the value proposition of those dollars.
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