Why Democrats Need to Focus On the Economy (feat. Rep. Jared Moskowitz)

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Jessica Tarlove, and today we're joined by Florida Congressman Representative Jared Moskowitz.

Congressman Moskowitz has recently made headlines for his efforts to expand the requirements of the child tax credit under a new bill, the American Family Act, and has also teamed up with Republican Congressman Byron Donalds to improve the effectiveness of FEMA.

Along with this, the Congressman has been vocal in his disagreement with the 57% cuts made to the Pentagon's congressionally directed medical research programs.

after the continuing resolution went into effect.

Congressman Moskowitz, welcome to the show.

How you doing?

I'm doing great.

How are you?

Just another day, you know, I mean.

In paradise?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know what we're raging about today, but I'm sure it's something amazing.

Well, you're going to tell me.

I take the pressure off myself and I invite people on to tell me what you're raging about.

Fair.

I like that.

Yeah.

But we'll do that at the end.

Well, it'll trickle out actually throughout.

And the first thing that I wanted to talk to you about, I'm sure, does make you rage.

And you've been so vocal in talking about school shootings.

And I wanted to to touch on last week's incident at Florida State University.

Two dead, five wounded.

Can you talk to me about

what lawmakers are doing about this?

How you felt, obviously, representing Parkland from that shooting in 2018, like where are you in the headspace?

And we continue to think about the families affected by yet another tragic American school shooting.

Yeah, well, I'm from Parkland.

I'm in Parkland right now.

I went to Marjorie Stolman Douglas High School.

I remember February 2018 like it was yesterday, seven years ago,

coming to my school that evening and seeing, you know, your school looked like a war zone, you know, all these police cars and FBI and triage, mass casualty triage outside of your school.

I mean, Parkland's a small town was rated the safest neighbor, safest city in all of Florida before that happened.

And, you know, then you go to the reunification center, right, where you're meeting with parents of the kids that were missing.

You know, I knew they weren't missing.

And then you watch parents go through the worst thing I have ever watched in my life, where, you know, they get taken out of a ballroom and put into a separate room and police officers come in and they say, you know, your kid's dead on the first floor, your kid's dead on the third floor.

And, you know, you don't hear crying.

You hear screaming.

And,

you know, that

was the experience that I witnessed.

I then, you know, was going to as many funerals as I could.

I was passing other funerals to go to funerals.

And then the three weeks after the shooting, something happened in Florida that hadn't happened before and hasn't happened since.

So we got a Republican legislature, Republican House, Republican Senate.

We had a Republican governor, full Republican cabinet.

And

getting them to come down and see the school was the difference.

So I invited the speaker, Senate president.

Everyone came down.

They saw the school.

They saw what it looked like when there's bullet holes through the windows, backpacks piled upside, homework scattered all over the place, blood all over the walls, shoes have fallen off as kids were running for their lives.

And we eventually passed what was the Marjorie Stonewind Douglas School Safety Bill, which raised the age in Florida to buy any gun to 21, three-day waiting periods for all guns, and red flag laws.

Red flag laws have been used 21,000 times now since we've put them in place over the last seven years.

Hundreds of millions of dollars for mental health, school safety, school resource officers.

I fast forward now to the shooting at FSU,

and I look at what happened there, and we're still dealing with it.

We're still dealing with kids not feeling safe in school.

But I will say this, this kid who was 20 had to take his mom's handgun, which should not have been available to him.

It should have been safely stored.

But the reason he had to take his mom's handgun is because he couldn't go to the store and buy two AR-15s, unlimited rounds of ammunition and body armor, like the student from Douglas.

So in that instance, we're not going to prevent all crime, but in that instance, the law that we passed that has been criticized every year now

stopped more carnage at FSU.

It's the loss of life of two people and the kids that have to now go through this mental health experience is horrific.

But had this kid been able to actually go to a store and buy assault weapons, unlimited rounds of ash and body armor, and that's what they do every time they're able to do that, that's what they do when you don't have these laws, there'd be 30 or 40 kids that would be dead at FSU.

You would have had another Virginia Tech on your hands.

And so these laws matter.

These laws work.

They mitigate.

But look, this is something we've dealt with in Florida now from two shootings at FSU, Pulse, Parkland, the Fort Lauderdale Airport shooting.

At the very time the shooting was going on, just three weeks before, the House was working on undoing my bill that I passed, lowering it back down to 18.

The Senate, thankfully, had already decided before the shooting not to take that up.

And this is two years in a row that the Senate decided not to do that.

And this should be a warning to everyone in Tallahassee that this is something that should you undo that bill, should you let 18-year-olds be able to go into a store without their parents' knowledge and buy unlimited rounds of ammunition, any gun they want, right?

Then this is going to continue to happen and it'll be worse than what we saw at FSU.

So I guess it's a little bit of a silver lining that this legislation did exist.

Is there any way, and I know Connecticut has also passed some pretty stringent statewide gun safety laws.

Is there any opportunity for you or coalition of Democrats or Republicans who are enthusiastic about saving lives to kind of evangelize this or roadshow this around the country because it seems like such an easy way to make the case to people that oppose

deaths in school.

I don't even know the right way to articulate it.

Like, we all don't want dead kids in school.

And I understand people want to make sure that their Second Amendment rights are protected, but you have enough Republicans in Florida who feel like this law does not infringe upon your Second Amendment rights.

So is there a way to spread this across the country?

Well, the way to spread it is to tell this story, right?

And what I mean by that is, is you had Florida known as the gunshine state, right?

Had the strongest.

I had not heard that before.

Oh, yeah, right.

Yeah.

That's what we were known as.

We were known as the gunshine state because we had the strongest NRA lobbyist here in Marion Hammer.

She was the former NRA president.

She's the one who wrote Stand Your Ground.

She wrote that here in Florida and then it rolled out to every other red state across the nation.

So you're talking A-plus-rated members of the NRA, people who have, you know, as many weapons as they want to have, decided after what they saw at Parkland to do something, right?

It wasn't a complete Democratic bill, okay, but to do something to try to mitigate what was going on.

And we didn't ban possession for 18-year-olds.

That was the big difference, right?

Because it was like, well, what about, you know, I want to go hunting with my

dad or my grandfather.

You can.

They can give you a gun.

Possession isn't banned.

It's the purchase.

And that was, you know, how we compromised.

Same thing with red flag laws.

We gave you due process.

So yes, if your weapons are taken away, you get an immediate hearing in front of a judge if it's done improperly, right?

That was a compromise.

And so the lesson learned here.

that we've i've talked about to other people in red states is this was totally done by republicans they had control of all chambers rick scott was the governor he's now a u.s senator rick Scott still supports the bill, not at the federal level, of course, but he says it's a state issue.

But every Republican who was involved with the bill didn't lose their re-election.

Their political career wasn't over, right?

The Speaker became the Secretary of Education, now

it runs a college.

The two people in line for Senate president both became Senate president.

One of them became the Agricultural Commissioner.

I mean, you know, the governor became a U.S.

Senator.

It's never been an issue in any of his campaigns.

And so this misnomer that you can, you can't work on it because if you do, your political career will be over proved not to be true in Florida.

There are no protests going on anywhere in the state right now that people's Second Amendment rights are infringed.

And in fact, that law is still popular with the majority of Floridians, and it's a 50-50 issue with Republicans here in Florida.

And so

the point of talking about about it is that it can be done.

Now, if we talk about DC, Jessica, that's a different story.

Yeah.

Right.

Because I can't even get school safety legislation, which I have filed with Republicans, okay?

Bipartisan legislation, I can't even get a hearing on that stuff.

Okay.

And now we're talking about, you know, panic buttons, making schools safer, you know, what kind of glass, what kind of doors do you use in schools, you know, hardening the facility.

right can't even get a hearing on that stuff so dc is just beyond broken as you you know, especially Congress.

It's not just this issue.

It's just we've decided not to do legislation anymore, right?

Like Congress is like, legislation, not for me.

I mean, we thought the 118th Congress wasn't productive.

And then like the 119th is like, hold my beer.

Okay.

I mean, we've sent the president the least amount of legislation in the first hundred days since any Congress in the last 70 years.

Well, they just do everything without legislation.

It's the beauty of authoritarianism.

That's right.

Just give him more power.

So this, it's not like this issue is now, you know, held hostage.

It's everything that's going on.

But yeah, there is no, when we passed the law in Parkland, as I like to say, everything went wrong on February 14th.

And then for the three weeks after that, we got everything right and got a little lucky.

It was three weeks of session.

The kids from Douglas came up.

The parents, all 17 of them, Democrats and Republicans, unified around this one legislation.

And Republicans came to the school, saw it themselves, and decided they were going to do something, right?

Rather than not going, trying to change the subject, thoughts, and prayers, and try to move on.

Those things,

you know, all happened.

There were several Republicans in leadership that decided to be leaders.

And so, you know, whether that can happen again in a red state, blue states are different, but whether that can happen again in a red state, I don't know.

There were a lot of relationships at the time.

I mean, I was very close to the speaker.

He came within 24 hours.

The appropriations chair was my friend.

He came immediately.

There were relationships, a lot of which just don't exist now in state legislatures and in Washington as we've become so much more partisan and divisive.

Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs in general, but especially when you think that there could be lives literally saved if people could just have a conversation.

Well, and that's been my argument to them, which is, okay, look, fine, you don't want to ban assault weapons.

Okay, put that over here.

We can do a lot of stuff that will save lives.

And so every family that doesn't have to become a member of an exclusive club that no one wants to belong to, right?

That that's a, that's a family we save.

That's a family we keep from being broken, right?

And so even if we just did school safety, we would save lives, didn't touch guns, but we can't move that, right?

Even if we just did red flag laws or just did universal background checks, right?

If we just did piecemeal, not one big, beautiful bill.

right if we just did something smaller we would be saving lives and we'd be mitigating the issue but we can move nothing zero in Washington.

Yeah, it's one of those, you know, how the right is always saying if it's an 80-20 or 90-10 issue, just take the W, like when you talk about trans women and women's sports, for instance.

And then I always say, Okay, universal background checks, please.

Yeah, well, look, Democrats are the pros at being on the 20 on the 80-20 issue.

We're we live in the 20.

Oh, yeah, we love the 20.

Okay.

I mean, we're teaching masterclass courses right now.

Okay.

Every time I turn on the news on Democrats deciding, you know what, we're like a squirrel with anxiety.

Like every noise we hear, we just like turn to it.

We're like, oh, 20 issue.

And we run that way.

Yeah.

I am going to ask you, are you talking about Albrego Garcia?

I'm talking about everything.

Hold on.

I'm talking about.

No, I know.

It's just that one sticks out.

The amount of times I've been called an MS-13 lover is too many to count.

And so.

Listen, well, let's go through it.

First, it was Canada's the 51st state.

We took that bait.

Then it was Greenland.

We took that bait.

Then it was Gaza is going to be this beautiful place we're going to vacation.

We took that bait, right?

Panama, we took that bait.

Then we took the student from Colombia, we took that bait.

And now it's Garcia.

And I want to be clear, it's not that these aren't issues.

It's not that due process isn't a big deal.

Of course it is.

He's not a citizen, okay?

You know, which is a different conversation, but these things are big issues.

Democrats should be talking about the economy and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

And that's it.

That's what we should be doing, but we can't.

Every time something comes up, we're raging about this 20 issue, right?

And we're like, oh, well, hold on.

Garcia is not about immigration.

It's about due process, right?

Because that nuance is going to be caught on by the American people, right?

We have been out-messaged, okay, in dramatic ways by the Republicans, and we have not yet learned our lesson because now we're going to nuance with due process with one individual.

What's happening to Mr.

Garcia is terrible, okay?

And he should be able to get his due process right.

But this is not, we've talked about this issue then more than we've talked about the economy.

And let me give you two data points about the economy.

One, okay, 11 times in history, the Dow has fallen 1,000 points in a day.

Four of those 11 have happened since Liberation Day.

And we've had our worst April since the Depression.

I'm not hearing Democrats talk about that.

I'm hearing them talk about these 20 issues.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Sorry, I was was raging about that.

No, you raged early and I appreciate that.

And hopefully it'll carry through for the next 20 minutes that I have you.

But I agree with you.

And as, you know, someone that hangs out in conservative media circles,

it's frustrating because you do.

have to defend the position when it comes up.

And they're really good at bringing it up because no one wants to talk about the implications of Liberation Day.

Or frankly, no one wants to talk about the economic consequences of this immigration plan.

And I feel like that's where we should go with this.

So, you just say, actually, if you care about the deficit, $900 billion were coming off the deficit because of the immigrants that were in this country that you're saying that you're going to throw out.

Or the, you know, hundreds of billions in lost revenue from tourism because of these immigration policies, because people are afraid of being picked up off the street, like the German tourists in Hawaii.

Trump ran

his almost entire campaign on the price of eggs and the economy.

And then it was immigration.

But the price of eggs and the economy.

Okay.

Both of these things are worse now than when he ran, when he became president.

They're worse now.

Okay.

You would think we would be putting this on a silver platter every day, talking about it every day.

And we're talking about a hundred other things, right?

And that's the brilliance of, you know, the Trump media campaign on overloading the system, flooding the zone.

And they know the national media is going to go for it.

And then the Democrats are going to respond.

And look, I get it, right?

Like I'm in a moderate district.

Okay.

I can tell you I've not fielded many calls about Mr.

Garcia.

My friends that represent plus 30 districts, I'm sure that's all the calls they're getting, right?

And then that's where the messaging goes.

But Hakeem Jeffries isn't going to become speaker through those 100.

He's going to become speaker through the 20.

And so people talk about how why there isn't a consistent message right now through the Democratic Party.

And it's because the Republicans are doing a great job pulling the party apart by putting these things out there that progressives are going to jump on, but moderates know that that issue is out of touch with their district.

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Obviously, being from Parkland and knowing the Parkland kids, I'm sure you know David Hogg really well.

And he has this proposal to spend $20 million

to go after incumbents.

And at first, it started as an age thing.

Now it's moved to an effectiveness barometer that he's going to use to judge that.

What do you think about that kind of push?

You know, this need for new blood.

And you're you're part of that.

You're part of it.

Honestly, you're a shining example of what a younger, outspoken, moderate, but also fun Democrat can accomplish.

And I know, I mean, I consume.

My wife doesn't find me fun.

Really?

No, no, she finds me boring.

No, really?

She's just trying to keep me grounded.

Yeah, that's, I mean, all good wives do that.

Like, my, I'm pretty sure my husband thinks that I, that I hate him.

But I like show her a clip.

I'm like, how is that?

She's like, it's fine.

Yeah, that's the worst when you send a clip and you're like, isn't this hilarious?

And they're like, eh, it could have been better.

It was okay.

But the fun part of it is it's so important.

And I've, you know, everything with Comer and the Smurf stuff that

you did, and every chart that you bring into a committee hearing that also leads to something substantive where you say, okay, you've said there are high crimes and misdemeanors.

It's time to impeach Joe Biden and actually just calling them out to their faces.

And it feels like we are missing that energy on a grand scale within the party.

How do you think about the way that you legislate and present and build relationships with people in Congress?

And how do you think about that in terms of the party more generally?

So look, Dave and I know each other very well, obviously, being from Parkland, right?

And so look, there are bits of the strategy that he's doing that I agree with and there's a bunch bits I don't.

Right.

And this is something that the Democratic Party has gone through before, right?

We've gone through where, you know,

people, incumbents that were there in safe seats, were being primaried by more progressive members.

And we were kind of spending a ton of money eating our own rather than fighting Republicans.

And hold on, Republicans have gone through this too.

Let's not pretend like this is just an issue on the Democratic side.

Republicans went through this with the whole Tea Party movement.

I mean, they removed, you know, Representative Cantor, if you recall, right?

Who was in leadership, okay?

Eric Cantor.

So they've gone through this this as well.

We're so frustrated because we're not in, we have no power.

Okay.

We have no branches of government.

The rules of Congress in the minority don't give you power.

And so, you know, Democrats are frustrated.

So there's no doubt about that frustration boiling over.

But what we have to do is we have to realize the only thing that matters is making Hakeem Jeffries speaker at the moment and getting a chamber, getting a gavel.

That has to be the sole mission.

And so every dollar we have should be going to that, right?

All these other things sometimes I feel like are distraction to me.

Look, we've spent like $400 million in Texas trying to win the governor's mansion or the Senate races there, 400 million, and we've never come close, right?

We just spent $20 million in House races in Florida.

We lost them by double digits.

So we got to stay focused on, in my opinion, the seats that are going to make Hot King Jeffries Speaker.

What David is channeling into, though, and David's very good at messaging, is that Republicans have a lot of messengers.

They have moderate messengers.

They have, you know, obviously MAGA messengers and they have the flat earth messengers, who are my favorite, those people.

Okay.

But they have messengers.

They have all these podcasts and they are still out messaging Democrats.

But what I would say to David is, David, we don't have a, we have plenty of progressive messengers, right?

That's not.

an issue.

Like there's lots of progressive messengers.

What we need is we need, you know, more messengers in the middle.

Right.

And we got to work on that piece.

You know, getting young people elected is fantastic.

I was 25 when I first got elected.

But the question is, is that going to get us to the majority?

Right.

And so there's this push-pull in, okay, we have these, you know, more senior members.

We won't call them older, but members that have been there for a longer period of time.

And the game has changed.

since they got elected, right?

And they don't know how to communicate in today's politics right should those members retire should we get more people who can communicate because let's be honest congress now is not about policy and legislating

congress is communications it's it's it's a everyone's like a little pr office i'm not kidding when i say this i was a political science major at gw i studied public policy i meet with college students who are like i want to go into public service i'm like great what are you studying they're like political science i said change your major to communications and they look at me like what are you talking about?

And I'm like, Donald Trump is president twice, not because he's some policy major, but because of commons.

And he's changed the game.

And so I get a little bit on what David is saying.

The question is, is it the right timing, the right method?

And will this lead us to Hakeem Jeffries being speaker?

I think those are questionable.

Yeah.

I like the way you put that.

And that is good advice for people in college.

I, as a political science and history person, I probably would have been better served actually straight up studying communications versus kind of learning on the fly.

I want to make sure that we talk about some policy stuff.

The American Family Act, which will expand the child tax credit, which is maxed out at 2,000 per kid at this moment.

Can you tell us about it?

Yeah, look, it's a piece of legislation, obviously, that would provide a $4,300 credit for children that are six, you know, $3,600 for children six to seven.

You know, it's a tax cut.

Okay.

It's a tax cut for regular day Americans.

While my colleagues are trying to give tax cuts to the wealthy, right?

This is a tax cut that would literally help families.

Okay.

And it would literally help, you know, families with low income.

You know, there's about 32,000 children in my own district right now that are ineligible.

And so this would extend that credit.

This would make people eligible.

This would help people who need a tax cut.

And it would help families, especially when costs are going up.

Everything is going up.

Okay.

You know, again, going back to the previous argument, Trump was supposed to lower costs and literally it's inverse.

Everything is more expensive.

The tariffs are causing things to be more expensive.

And so this would be a way to

help out those families.

And there are Republicans, right?

Marco Rubia was very big into the child tax credit.

There are Republicans that...

But now it's socialism, right?

Look, you know, he works for somebody.

It's different when, you know, you're your own person for when you, when you have a boss.

And I know what that's like.

I worked for Ron DeSantis for two and a half years.

So I get it.

But, you know, this would be something that would help families and help kids, quite frankly.

Yeah, it seems like, and this has been a frustration that I know a lot of people are feeling, like we don't have identifiable policies that you can say going into an election year, these are the things that we want to effectuate, right?

This is our education policy.

This is our healthcare policy.

These are our economic policies.

And the child tax credit,

it didn't cut child poverty by like 50%?

Yeah, hugely successful, hugely successful, right?

And so we want, we want to expand on that.

And again, I look at this, we say tax credit.

It's a tax cut, right?

What, you know, again, we, we like to use big words, right?

When you're giving back money to people, it's a tax cut.

So this is a targeted tax cut for families and families who have kids and families who need it,

rather than, you know, not letting the top bracket go from 37 to 39, because somehow if that happens, you know, you know, the sky would be falling.

Um, I want to talk about you and Byron Donald's working on reforming FEMA.

It is rare to see bipartisan buddies on a legislative issue.

Um,

you guys have a good relationship, I guess, right?

Is that yeah, no, Byron and I served together in the Florida House and now in Congress, we have a good relationship.

That's great.

I love that.

So, I'll put you guys in the yes column to having that.

Can you talk about how you want to reform fema byron i like to do stuff together i have a new ruled out that when i do media with byron i have to be seated rather than standing oh i did see yeah you need a little stool yeah they offered me a stool and did they they did and i was like i'm not lying to the voter like they're gonna watch this in real time

right because otherwise people would be like wow he grew i didn't know moscots was so big right yeah so On the FEMA front, and I just want to, I'm going to rage about this for a second here.

Give it to me.

Okay.

Here's an issue, actually that isn't getting a lot of play and isn't getting a lot of coverage.

And that's usually what happens in emergency management.

I did emergency management in the private sector for 10 years.

Then I became the emergency management director in Florida, did Hurricane Michael.

I did all of the COVID response, right?

And I did that for a guy I didn't vote for, Ron DeSantis, who gave me that job.

And so.

What would happen if FEMA were to disappear, okay, or FEMA would be cut in dramatic ways would be devastating.

And it would be devastating more to red states than blue states.

Okay.

You know, Texas, Florida, and then you get into states that don't have that budget, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina.

You get into states which have Tornado Alley, right?

You get into states Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky with floods.

Okay.

I mean, these states would be absolutely devastated if Stafford Act money didn't go down to reimburse.

They would go bankrupt.

They would have to raise taxes if they got a big event.

And yeah, sure, Florida and Texas might be able to weather that a little more.

Not if they had a Harvey like Texas had, or not if Florida had two storms in one season like we've had many times.

So this would be the amount of devastation to the state budgets that would happen without FEMA.

Now, that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be reform.

And I'll give, I'm happy to say that President Trump is right that there should be FEMA reform.

Why is he right?

FEMA has been taken off its core purpose.

When it was put into homeland after 9-11, which was the right decision, Joe Lieberman was right about trying to get agencies to talk to each other.

But 20 years of that, homeland has become this giant, bloated bureaucracy.

And it's become something that really is so focused on immigration, nothing else can get any oxygen.

You should look at both Secret Service, which failed last year, and FEMA, which didn't have its greatest year.

Where are both of those agencies?

They're in homeland.

So what I've been saying is if you want to reform FEMA, you got to take it out of homeland, bring it back, give it back to the White House, which is where it was.

It was a secretary position before 9-11.

That automatically would shrink the department.

Why?

Because they're doing all of the grant writing for all 22 other agencies within Homeland.

They shouldn't be doing that.

When people were like, why is FEMA sending out these immigration grants?

Why?

Because Homeland directed them to do that.

So I want to get FEMA out of immigration.

I want to get FEMA out of homeland.

And I want to get them back to their core mission.

Their core mission isn't grant writing.

Their core mission is response and recovery.

That's the first thing.

The second thing we could do is we could block grant some more of this money down to the states.

Florida has run block grants before.

So has many other states.

So states can run block grants rather than all the grant writing being done in DC.

Again, I need FEMA to respond on coordinating those federal assets.

FEMA doesn't have a lot of assets.

They coordinate other agencies, DOD assets.

They bring those in to help with response.

And response is where you save lives, right?

That's the most important piece.

And that's what you get judged on.

But the money is very important.

In Hurricane Michael, all red areas, all Republican, rural, not well off, without those FEMA dollars,

those towns don't get rebuilt.

They don't come back.

They're gone.

So, you know, Byron, obviously, someone from Florida, his district was hit by Hurricane Ian, right?

He knows how important it is.

He's running for governor.

And so, you know, I've made this case to him and I was happy that he signed on.

We also have a bipartisan bicameral bill.

In the Senate, you got Tom Tillis and Senator Padilla, right?

So you got North Carolina and California.

So this is a bipartisan, bicameral piece of legislation to reform FEMA.

But of course, we can't get it moved while Christy Noam talks about eliminating FEMA.

She's even talked about taking pieces of FEMA and dividing it out and giving it to other agencies.

Why?

Because that will be efficient.

Okay.

So, you know, the Trump administration's got a lot going on and the American people people have a lot going on with their overday lives and stuff that's being thrown at them every day.

But I'm telling you, this FEMA thing is much bigger.

And just like everything else with emergency management, we pay no attention to it when we're in blue skies.

But as soon as that gray sky hits, as soon as that disaster hits, FEMA is very important.

And if we don't pay attention to it now, if it's not ready for hurricane season, the results are going to be devastating.

This actually seems like what Doge was supposed to be.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I joined the Doge caucus.

I remember.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because I was like, most Americans think government does spend too much money and government can get more efficient, right?

And I didn't want to give Republicans this idea that they're the only ones who care about government spending and efficiency.

Barack Obama had a program on that.

So did Bill Clinton, led by Al Gore, right?

And so that's why I joined.

Now, I can tell you the Doge caucus in Congress has been totally left out of the process.

We weren't involved.

We're a defunct organization.

Okay.

Elon did it all himself.

And he didn't do efficiency.

He did Project 2025.

He just fired people.

He cut programs.

I mean, you know, they're cutting NOAA and the weather service.

You're not going to balance the budget off the weather service.

It's a joke.

But they want to privatize the weather service, right?

And so they did all this stuff, chapter and verse, right out of it.

Okay.

The guy at OMB wrote it all.

I feel somewhat vindicated.

I mean, Democrats were walking around with this giant Project 2025 book like it was a tablet from Moses.

Okay.

And actually, they wound up doing that stuff.

Okay.

We were right about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We were right about that.

Doge did not do efficiency.

In fact, there's not a piece of government right now that is more efficient.

Okay.

Yeah, they've cut stuff, but they've made the departments less efficient as a result.

Yeah.

And you're seeing that across the board.

And then everyone having to crawl back with their tail between their legs saying, like, actually, could I have my people back?

Could we have our budget reinstalled?

And I imagine that factored into Elon's decision to cut bait, at least, or it sounds like.

Might be the shareholders of all of his companies.

That might have a little piece.

Oh, his business is crashing.

Yeah, that might be contributing too.

I want to be mindful of your time and get to the final question.

What's one thing besides FEMA that makes you rage and one thing that you think we should all calm down about?

Well, I kind of, you know, leaked it a little earlier, but I think Democrats should be raging more about the economy.

I can't believe we're not talking about the economy.

Like every word that comes out of our mouths should be talking about the economy, the cost of goods, the stock market, all of that stuff, right?

What should we be raging less about?

Everything else.

Everything else we should be raging less about, except for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, right?

Well, that's part of the economy.

Right.

All of that.

Those are the issues.

Economy, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

That's all we should be talking about.

And we should be raging about that every day.

And every time we're talking about something else, Trump is winning.

He's losing on the economy.

He's underwater.

He's still winning on immigration.

The data shows that's still a high point for him.

So we need to rage less about immigration and more about the economy.

And so that's what I want to tell people.

Let's rage about the economy and let's rage less about everything else.

All right.

I love it.

Congressman Moskowitz, it was so great to have you.

It's so exciting.

I was telling some of my colleagues at FOSS that I was having you on and they were jealous.

Not that you don't show up, but they love you.

Tell Jesse Waters I say hello.

I know he misses me.

Yeah, totally.

His mom likes you a lot.

That's good.

That's the hookup.

You got to get.

Once you get on text with Ann, you have made it.

She is hilarious.

Wow.

I'll send this to her.

And if you're listening, I'll send you my number.

I want to hear baby stories about Jesse.

Oh, he was really cute.

I mean, he still is cute.

You know, you can't like hate him.

He's so adorable.

Just so wrong.

No, I don't, I don't hate.

I go on his show.

I like mixing it up with him.

No, no, no, I know.

Just some people who vote vote like we do do actually hate him.

And I'm like, you would really struggle in a room with him to not like him.

Yeah.

I mean, look, everyone has a little bit.

It's a bit that he does, you know, this manly thing.

Oh, no straws, no soup.

Yeah, no straws, no soup.

You know, everyone else belongs in the kitchen.

I mean, no grocery shopping.

Yeah.

First of all, I like going and grocery shopping.

Yeah, it's fun.

With my wife, Jesse, it's a way to control the bill.

Okay.

It's a way to control spending.

Go shopping with your wife.

And there you go talking about the economy again.

Costs of goods are up.

Keep her in line.

When my wife goes to the mall by herself, that's a bad day.

Okay.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for your time, and I hope you'll come back someday.

Thanks, Jessica.

Appreciate it.

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