Best of the Program | Guests: Russell Vought & Douglas Murray | 5/9/25

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This is the best of and the best of today.

We talk about the Pope.

John Henry Weston is with us.

He is a Catholic over in Rome who knows the ins and outs of this current Pope.

Tell me about him, the American Pope.

Also, Russ Boat from Washington, D.C., as they're preparing the new bill, the big beautiful bill for Congress.

When is that going through?

What is the status on it?

What is the status of our debt debt and the cuts?

And this talk about raising the taxes on the rich.

And one of the most important voices, I believe, of our time, Douglas Murray, joins me on today's podcast.

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You're listening to the best of the Glenbeck program.

Welcome to the Glenbeck program.

We're so glad that you're here.

We have John Henry Weston on with us.

He is the co-founder and CEO of LifesightNews.com.

He is over in Rome right now.

He was there when they announced the new pope, an American Pope.

I don't know why that scares me just a little bit.

You know,

would you like fries with that?

Anyway,

maybe it's because I know all the elites in the United States.

Not so good.

Not so good.

But anyway,

I don't know anything about this guy.

But the guy who does know is John Henry Weston, and he is here with us now.

Hi, John.

How are you?

Very good to be with you, Glenn.

I am literally standing in front of St.

Peter's Basilica.

We're

sunny day, and it is unbelievable what's just happened.

We were walking around while the announcement was being made in the crush.

To walk around, you had to like...

excuse yourself through people.

You were in a crush of a crowd, kind of like a rock concert.

But it was everywhere.

It was all the streets filled.

And no one knew he was an American because he didn't speak a word of English during the announcement from the Logi at Knuckle.

I know.

And he speaks perfect English.

So he's American-born.

He's a Chicago boy.

So how are you feeling about that one?

Is it just me that's like, I don't know.

I mean, you know, Bishop Strickland would be good.

I'd go for that one.

But what do we know about this guy?

Okay, so this is where it gets scary.

So in the Catholic world, Bishop Strickland was the bishop, the holiest bishop in the whole church, in the America.

Everybody knew it.

The guy spent three hours of prayer a day in church.

That was apart from his Mass.

In other words, the service that he himself says.

So

everybody knew who he was the holiest.

He got removed, though, because he was,

well, he went up against the machine.

Francis was going anti-Catholic in his teaching on all sorts of issues, including

fooling around with abortion, contraception, homosexuality, divorce.

So all of it was going offline.

And Strickland was one of the only ones who spoke up.

And he is a, you know, a guy from Tyler, Texas, like middle of nowhere.

Even if you're in America, have you heard of Tyler?

And so, you know, the poor guy,

he gets removed.

Now, the problem is, when you're a holy bishop like that,

you attract people.

There's a story about the Couré of ours you guys can look up and it's wonderful, you know.

Ho-dunk town, middle of nowhere, and they built trains to it because they sent this holy priest there.

Bishop is the same.

700 families moved to Tyler, Texas, if you can believe it.

And they, you know, and there was all sorts of priests, all sorts of religious orders moved there, and then he was yanked from them.

So

super sad story, but unfortunately, and much more so even now, it was done with the cooperation of our current pope.

The reason being is our current pope was then the head of the congregation for bishops and was involved in doing an investigation on Strickland and in removing him.

And you might think, oh, was there anything really wrong with Strickland?

No, he had the best numbers in terms of per capita seminarians.

His financial situation was in great shape, like the rest of them aren't.

And, you know, there was just

great things going on in the diocese.

Unlike most places, they don't have any sexual abuse scandal or anything like that.

What they had was a great bishop.

He was a holy one.

And those holy ones are used to making noise sometimes.

So my podcast

tomorrow that comes out everywhere is with Bishop Strickland.

And we were talking during when the smoke started and we were recording this podcast.

And

so he asked, when we get the name, he's like, what is the name?

What's the name?

What's the name?

And I told him, and he said, oh, he's.

He was the head of the Council of Bishops.

And I said, what do you know about him?

And he said, well, you know, there's some things that he's done that I don't necessarily agree with.

But he did not.

I mean, he honestly, I got the impression he really didn't know much about him.

There's no way he didn't know about this guy, right?

Well, yeah, he also knew.

He's just being kind.

He would regard it true, and he would regard it as worse than him.

He wouldn't even think of himself in the scenario.

But what's much worse, well, from his perspective, is that he elevated, that's Francis elevated Cardinal McCarrick.

excuse me mccarrick that's a slip of the that's a freudian slip honestly uh mckelroy to uh to washington and this is the thing that also had to be done with the current pope so now there's going to be an excuse because the excuse right away is look that is pope francis's will what could you do it you're the underling yeah if you object you're just going to get turfed anyway Okay, let's say that makes you that's kind of weak anyway, but let's let's just say that's it.

That's why why the number one sign all of america in fact all the world should be looking for is the restoration of bishop strickland bishop strickland is still young for a bishop there's no way he can be retired he's a young man um and he's like he's for a bishop he's like 65 and so

He has to be restored.

If you want the true signal, the one sign that will indicate where Pope Leo XIV is coming from, watch Tyler Texas or wherever he's put, because if that man is not reinstated, there's something really wrong.

Wow.

What else do you know about him?

I mean, are there any good signs that maybe he's going to be different?

Well, there's this.

Okay, so when

if you look up in history, there is a pope called Pius IX.

He came in actually as kind of a liberal.

Once he got elected, he

and and there was a bit of trfuffle in the world, especially in Italy.

He converted.

He became orthodox.

He became, in fact, he became one of the most Orthodox popes.

He made, he worked against all heresies.

Wait, wait, is that Pius?

Is that the Pope Pius 9th?

Was that the one in the 20th century?

No, that was before that.

The one before that.

That was Pius X, you're thinking of.

But

what that tells us is the grace of the office can change the man because literally all the world's Catholics pray for the Pope.

So, you know, he gets bestowed on him this huge responsibility in office and position, if you will.

And it's unlike

a political position.

It's a position established by Jesus.

And he said, Jesus said to the first Pope, to Peter, you know, I will pray for you.

So it's a very, very specific kind of a role.

So there's a great hope when it comes to the Pope and the possibility of change, even for weak men, because all men are weak.

And yet he's called to fulfill almost a supernatural task, you know, to be the vicar of Christ on earth, the representative of Jesus for Jesus' church.

He's not some kind of altered Jesus.

He is just the representative of Jesus' church.

And so that's why the Pope is not about making his own rules.

He can't change anything to do with the religion at all.

He's just there to enforce it, to bring unity in the faith.

And that there's only unity in the truth.

So he's there to basically uphold the truth of the faith.

Well, but you do know, I mean, you know this, you're Catholic, and so you know this, but I mean, look at the change that John Paul made in the world.

I mean, it was Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul that ended communism.

And we just don't have those kinds of leaders.

And this particular now Pope

has been railing against Donald Trump.

So it's not exactly like he's friendly to Donald Trump or what Donald Trump

is doing.

Yeah.

And it's funny because he's a registered Republican in China.

Is he really?

Yeah.

So that's kind of odd.

But at the same time, he's anti-Trump.

So what does that mean?

It didn't strike me as healthy, particularly because, hey, if you look at his last tweet before he became Pope, it was from like April 15th,

you'll see it's bashing Trump's immigration policy.

It's a retweet of somebody else bashing Trump's immigration policy.

So that's pretty bad.

He's real bad on immigration.

And, you know, most of the bishops in the U.S.

are.

They either don't get it or choose not to get it or they want to show favor with Francis, who knows.

But he seems to be on the same page.

Also, when it comes to things like COVID, there were very few people, honestly, Glenn, though, who were on the right side of the COVID thing, which is now plain and clear, but back then wasn't.

So, you know, he was fully masked, talking to the media.

He was back and forth about how you should receive Holy Communion in the hand, which actually should be disastrous for Catholics.

I don't know how that went down.

He wanted confession by phone call, which doesn't even work.

So those are oddities as well.

But, you know, there were some signs of hope.

You asked about anything hopeful.

There was.

So when he got out there on the loggia for the first time,

Francis was like in his liturgical underwear relative to this, what this guy did.

This guy went back to the traditional vestments of a pope when you get out there, because these are thousand-year-old traditions.

Francis basically threw them out and just said, now I'm going to do my own thing.

He went back to it.

So that was interesting.

He said lots of good in Latin.

And then he did something really neat.

So you know how in the Bible it says, at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every head shall bend?

Well, he did that.

He was praying, and at the name of Jesus, you could see, if you look at the camera close, you'll see.

He just

slightly bows.

And I thought, wow, that's a pious practice of many, many Catholics and Christians.

a scriptural understanding where they literally do what the scriptures say, bow their head in the name of Jesus.

And then he did something else that I thought was really neat.

He went to give his first blessing as Pope.

And, you know, it's in Latin because there's every country in the world standing out here, and Latin's the one language that everybody understands.

And he gives him this blessing, and he starts to tear up as he gives him the blessing.

I thought, you know,

signs of hope

and hopefully signs of conversion and whatnot.

And so we'll see.

There is hope that way.

And there's other things that you could say he was

not nearly as far left as French stuff.

So, yes, there's hope.

And, you know,

that's where we're at.

Well, the mood in

Rome,

what was it like when everybody realized, oh, crap, he's an American?

I mean,

nobody expected that.

Didn't.

I don't think that happened till today when everybody went home and realized.

Because the guy's Italian is perfect.

His Spanish is perfect.

He was in Peru for the longest time.

And on the logia, not a single word of English the first time English came out was today today in his first mass as Pope all the way through they're going through the mass and lots of it Latin and very chant and and so it's for for your your American audience for most of the audiences it'll look like a Latin Mass it it was uh it was an Italian mass with a lot of Latin in it which was kind of cool but

at the start of the hobbling

out comes perfect English.

And you're like, oh my gosh, because this is the first time we have an American Pope so we've never had this kind of an English that we could all inherently not only understand but it's so clear and you're like whoa

so that's gonna be something new

because the American church is gonna be reached in a way that

it never has been because you're gonna have absolute clarity of language and we'll find out for good or for ill what that's going to mean.

But, you know, despite all of what I know, and I know a lot, unfortunately, that's not great, I'm still hopeful.

We're called to be a people of hope, and I believe in conversions, I believe in miracles,

and uh, I'm looking forward to it.

And if it's, you know, what if it's another Francis, if it's a Francis 2.0,

the one great thing is our Lord said, I will be with you to the end of time, the gates of hell shall not prevail, and I will never give you a cross too heavy for you to bear.

Yeah, so and it always works out, it always works out to his advantage, you know, and which is always our advantage as well.

So

I am hopeful.

And I pray for not only this new pope, but also for all of the leadership from every religion in the world.

We need them to stand up.

They are critical

at this time.

There's no other force against the wolves' mob that has a chance.

John Henry Weston.

You know what?

Go ahead, real quick.

God bless you, my friend.

Yeah, you were made for this time.

You, Glenn, and your listeners, trust in that, trust in the Lord.

Pray, pray, pray.

And remember, God loves you.

John Henry Weston, thank you so much from LifesightNews.com.

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Now back to the podcast.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Douglas Murray, welcome to the program, sir.

How are you?

Very good to be back with you.

Thank you.

So,

I mean, I hate to get into this because it's been talked about for so long, but I just, I think I agree with you, Douglas.

And I just want to make sure that we're saying the same thing.

Can you lay out the controversy that you've been embroiled in here recently?

Do you mean, sorry, because I tend to be embroiled in quite a lot of controversy.

Which one are you talking about?

The one where you're accused of saying, don't listen to anybody unless they have an Oxford degree.

Something which, of course, I never said.

Yeah, I know.

Never would say.

I think this is the controversy that came up from my recent appearance on Joe Rogan podcast.

The simple thing I said, which has been, I think, misrepresented by a very large number of people deliberately, is that everybody has the right to say anything they like about anything.

But that doesn't mean that all opinions should be regarded as being equal.

And when I was brought on to debate, and it's not often in Joe Rogan's podcast that he ever does that.

He normally has

people on to just give their opinion and you can take it or leave it.

But he felt that clearly that a pro-Israel voice like mine had to be countered

on air.

And when I was talking about my recent book, Risa Best Seller, on democracies and deaf cults, Israel and the future of civilization, I got into the weeds of what has been happening in the last two years in the Middle East.

I got into it because not just because I've written about it, but because I've seen it all up close.

I've spent the last couple of years mainly living in Israel and being embedded with the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza and in Lebanon and elsewhere.

And I've seen this war up close.

And I discovered that the person I was being pitched against, who was wildly, wildly uninformed on issue after issue, which is spouting and spouting and spouting, turned turned out never to have even been to the region.

And I said,

this is like if we were to discover that Chinese state media had somebody on all the time talking about America, claiming that America is a racist country, claiming that black Americans are currently being lynched and sold into slavery.

If we discovered that that person was rampaging across the Chinese media, but he had never been to America, didn't speak English, and obviously so because he's so wildly misinformed, we would regard that person as being almost comical in their ignorance, certainly malevolent.

So, why should it be that when there are people at home here in America who are also just not informed, just as many British people are not informed, about big situations in the world that they're talking about, why should their opinion be regarded as being somehow sacrosanct?

I don't think it is.

And yes, I believe in standards.

I believe that elites have let us down badly.

Experts have led us down badly, but it doesn't mean there is no such thing as expertise or comparative expertise in matters.

And if people don't understand that and don't understand that, for instance, a journalist who goes and reports first hand may well get things wrong, but it's a darn sight better than somebody who's never left their bedroom and thinks they know the world.

You know, I just read a quote.

I think it was from Jefferson, and I've adapted it to modern times.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but social media.

He said newspapers, but

I think that's the kind of expert we have now that are running around.

And I don't believe believe in you have to be credentialed or anything like that.

I don't think you have to have a formal education.

I don't think that hurts.

But I think serious people can do serious study on their own, especially in today's world,

and become an expert in a field.

But, you know,

you also have to have enough...

humility to go, look, I'm not an expert in this.

I don't know.

I've just done a lot of homework and I'm open to different opinions, but here's what I found.

Right, absolutely.

And there's a lot of good that can come from that.

And we all do that to some extent.

But that is, as you say, the ignorance that social media in particular is able to push on people is extraordinary, not least because of the lack of humility.

And one of the things in that debate, it was really me against Joe and the comedian he'd put me on with.

One of the things that was startling about it was the sheer lack of humility of the guy I was debating.

I mean, he seemed to think that he knew everything about Israel and the IDF, despite never having been there or met anyone or spoken with anyone on the ground in the IDF.

And he seemed to think that he knew better than the Israeli Defense Forces how they should protect their people from another massacre like October the 7th.

Like, maybe the generals in the Israeli army and the politicians and others who have been losing family for the last 18 months fighting in Gaza.

Maybe they do know something more than you have seen from social media sitting in Austin, Texas.

Maybe.

It's my view.

I mean, people quite often say to me,

you know,

what would you tell this politician or what would you tell this general when you meet them?

And I always say, I don't tell them anything.

I listen.

I listen.

Because that's much, much more important

because they know more about the proximate causes of the conflict and what they're doing to prevent it.

And when I hear and see these people, there was a guy, one of Joe Rogan's friends, who'd been propping up on social media recently, and he accepted this challenge that I put out, which was, if you know, if you have a plan for how you would get 250 hostages back from the densely built up and booby-trapped area of Gaza, And if you know how to get 250 hostages back and how to kill or capture all the leadership of Hamas,

if you have a better plan than what the Israelis have been doing from the last 18 months, let me know and I will pass it on to anyone I know in Jerusalem.

Okay?

And one of these comedians decided to take up this challenge.

And you know what he said?

He said, among other things, he said, why don't they fight like men?

Why don't they fight like men?

And you say, I'm sorry, I've been to the funerals of young men who had no desire to have to ever be in Gaza again, who lost their lives because they were fighting house to house with terrorists embedded in mosques and in hospitals and in civilian homes and cropping up from tunnels all over the place.

And if the IDF and the Israeli Air Force had wanted to level the place, they could have done.

But they didn't because they wanted to minimize casualties on their opponent's side and minimize casualties on their own.

And you have to put up with some doofus claiming that he's the real man and he knows because he's sitting in a podcast studio somewhere two continents away.

And I think that is just objectionable on every level and displays a lack of humility and understanding that is almost pathological.

I tell you, Douglas,

I mean, I think I struggled from this a little bit.

I mean, I've done this job for almost 50 years now.

But when I got into

television, everything changes so rapidly.

I was pretty assured that I was right.

I think we had a big, you know, I spent a lot of money on research and everything else at really good,

you know, we were buttoned up.

But when I left there and I was reflecting on

what I had done,

I came to the understanding, and I think this just comes from maturity and experience, and that is the only thing I'm certain of is that I'm not certain of anything.

I don't know.

I'm like you.

I will ask questions.

I will voice my opinion.

I will voice what I do know, but that doesn't necessarily make it

the absolute truth.

I need to understand more of the situation.

Yes.

And you do do that.

And, you know, one of the things, Gwen, is that all of us who, I hope, are curious and want to learn more and know more and understand things better,

we have that instinct, but it also doesn't mean that on the things we know about, including the things we've seen with our own eyes, that we should be lacking in confidence to say what we know and what we've seen.

It's a really tough place to be.

You have to have the confidence in what you do know, but you also have to have the humility to say, but I don't know everything.

Right.

And one of the things that I do know is that having seen war up close, not just in this conflict, but in others as well, I know what the difference is between

a death cult, as I call Hamaz, like a death cult like Hamaz that fights for death, fights to bring death to its enemies, fights to bring death to its own side, even to its own children.

I know the difference between the death cult like that and a democracy like Israel or the United States of America and our armies who fight for life, who fight to minimize casualties on our own side and fight to minimize casualties on the enemy side.

And there is all the difference in the world between these two two things.

And when I see people finding it complicated to tell the difference between a democracy and a death cult, I think they are lost.

You're streaming the best of Glenn Beck.

To hear more of this interview and others, download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts.

Russell Vogue, Office of Management and Budget.

He is the director and

one of my personal heroes, and I think yours too, Stu.

Welcome to the program, Russell.

Thanks, Glenn.

Appreciate having me on.

You bet.

Okay, so I want to talk to you about the Republicans because I believe they're kind of a waste of space.

They are not doing the things that I think the president promised, and that is cut the budget and cut regulation in dramatic ways.

And President Trump has been playing very, very nice with them, trying to get them to do what I think is something by passing the big, beautiful bill.

Can you tell me where we stand on this and what's in it?

We're working through it.

Right now, the House is

has a they're trying to meet their instructions.

They basically passed a budget that would have one hundred or one point five trillion in savings and about four point five trillion in tax relief.

And they are working through to get a bill that can pass.

And we're right there with them trying to get it done.

And I think it would be big savings.

We could go north of that.

And I think that's the that is the goal is to try to figure out how to make this a historic opportunity to both extend the tax cuts, do the tax cuts the president wanted to do on the on the campaign, no tax on overtime, some other things, no tax on Social Security benefits,

and then to really make sure that this is an opportunity to have some of the highest reforms to mandatory spending since the 1990s.

And there's a lot that we can do in this area.

And I think that the House right now is trying to put these bills together.

You know, we spent so much time debating whether you have a couple bills or one bill.

We lost some time in that, and we're trying to catch up.

And I think they're hard at work, and we just got to be right there by them to help them get it done.

So, when are we expecting this to be voted on and possibly go through?

My hope is next week that they pass it out of committee, the two big committees of ways and means and energy and commerce, and then go to budget and set up a vote thereafter on the House floor.

That's our hope.

That's what we're working towards.

I don't think they've noticed yet the committees, but

that's what we're

working.

Russ, can you do me a favor?

I mean, I'm sure you've done this to Congress, but I don't know the American people really understand

how dire this situation is.

I mean, I got a letter from a family member who I just love dearly a couple of weeks ago, and he said, Glenn, you know what the president is doing?

And I said, well, what the president is doing is trying to save the country from the great reset because a reset is coming.

And you want it to be towards shareholder capitalism, not stakeholder capitalism.

But with our debt the way it is, the interest rates that we're now paying bigger than the defense budget, no country has ever survived this.

Can you give us some idea on how serious, I mean, Congress needs to move a little quicker.

Look, we have $36 trillion in debt.

When I left office the first time under President Trump, we had about $300 billion per year in interest costs, and now it's above the defense spending at $900 billion.

So we've got this enormous interest cost as a result.

And it's one of the reasons why

you've heard an emphasis from the administration on balance, on taking dramatic actions through Doge.

Our budget that you referenced in the lead up is the lowest non-defense spending since 2000, just for inflation.

And so, and I think what we would try to do to deal with kind of the paralysis from Capitol Hill is to change the reality on the ground.

I mean, I think that's what Doge has done in a fundamental way.

And we're going to try to make those savings permanent through a couple of different ways, but

it's to force Congress to, if they want to be a part of the process, you know, come alongside of us, but we're going to move in as much as we can within the parameters of the law and the Constitution.

We're going to move as fast and aggressively as possible to change the reality on the ground

with reductions in force, with reorganizations, with doing a programmatic review of spending that doesn't have to go out through the use of rescions.

There's a whole set of tools in our box that we're going to use aggressively to get Congress moving in our direction because

we cannot be in a normal situation as an administration where we just kind of send bills up and wait on them.

We have one big bill that needs to occur.

We've tried to put everything as we possibly can on that because it has procedural protection in the Senate.

But

even in that, it was part of our thinking was to make sure we limit the number of things that we have to go to Congress for.

The

taxes,

I mean, I was hoping that we were going to get new tax cuts

and

not just the renewal of the Trump tax cuts, but I was hoping Congress would get serious and we'd go even deeper than that.

And now

the White House last night, the president last night tweeted, you know, I know that Congress, you know, they're going to be wishy-washy on, you know, they're going to get blamed if they raise any taxes on the very rich, but I'll go along with it if they want to do that.

That's a little scary.

We should be going the other way, shouldn't we?

Well, I think the President ran on a set of tax proposals that he's been very excited about, committed out, designed towards the working class, that we, from an economic standpoint, also believe are really critical to getting

more and more of labor force participation out of this part of the economy.

And we think it would be a huge boon to

the impetus on the economy to growth.

And so we are living in a world where

we don't have the ability to have unlimited tax cuts.

Right.

And I think

you're seeing a lot of different navigation on that.

Is it impossible to go back to the 2019 budget?

I mean, why can't we just reset and say, we're going back to that budget?

It was fine then.

It's fine now.

We are trying to do that with what you saw in the budget that we sent up.

That is essentially what that budget represents.

It's an effort to go back.

You know, non-adjusted for inflation, it goes back to 2017.

It's a 35% cut for most programs when we account for maintaining infrastructure and veteran spending.

But that's what we're trying to do.

Do the entitlements, the mandatory spending, the interest, do those have an impact on our ability to go back overnight to 2019?

Yes, they do.

And so that's really what we're trying to say.

And I do think that there's a newfound desire to cut spending, even in the context of a tax cut on the Hill.

I mean, you have a ton of members that are really trying to make sure this is either deficit neutral or you have a, you know, this is a moment that can be used for significant mandatory reforms.

So to get there, are tax hikes on the rich part of that plan?

Look, the president put out a truth this morning.

He said, look, I think he's of a couple of different minds.

He has always been very focused on the things he ran on.

This was not something that he ran on.

He ran on

no tax on overtime.

Right, right.

No tax on tips.

No tax on tips, all that kind of things.

And so

that's really what we've been trying to fit in to the amount that Congress is ready to reduce at the same time we have to extend the tax cuts from his first term.

I saw in the budget that we are increasing defense and homeland security.

Is that border?

Is that why this is happening?

On the border, it is like we want to increase and really buy out all of our increases over the next three to four years in one bill.

And we're doing that.

This is the paradigm shift, and I'm really glad you asked.

We no longer want to be in a situation where we have to get Democrat votes for defense increases, that then they put us in a situation where they have to lever up and demand that non-defense not only do our cuts not happen, but that we actually increase non-defense spending because we need their votes in the Senate.

Secondly, they flat out oppose any border spending.

I mean, they put us on the precipice of a shutdown every single time we wanted to increase spend for ICE or the wall.

And so our view is

to actually look to how they did it under the Joe Biden administration and put those increases on the mandatory one big dutiful reconciliation bill.

And then it puts us in a situation where we have united the Republican Party so your defense hawks are not working against us.

in the appropriations process to actually get non-defense cuts.

That's what we're trying to do.

And then we've got Doge working overtime overtime with Pete Hagseth to get reforms within DOD because obviously there's waste there as well.

And at least in this first year, to make sure we reinvest those

and let the new leaders there get a sense of where the reforms need to be.

So with all the Doge stuff, I mean, A, this has nothing to do with Doge, but I was glad to see

Cash Patel yesterday come back out and say, no, no, I'll go with the budget on the FBI because he was saying, no, we can't live on that.

We need more.

And, you know, cut, cut, cut, cot, cut.

And I was glad to see that he kind of changed his position on that yesterday.

But, you know, with Doge, I'm seeing that Congress is like, well, we're not going to take all of the Doge recommendations.

Why?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the question that Congress needs to ask.

So we've, you know, they've been on two minds.

Number one, they say, send us all these rescission bills, rescission bills.

And I'm willing to send rescissions bills.

Our administration is, the Trump administration is, but we, man, they have to pass.

And so if they don't pass, it impacts our ability to use some of the tools that we would have executively to spend less of that money.

And so

we are working with them.

That's why I haven't formally sent up the 9.3 first round of rescissions from Doge.

I am having great conversations, surprisingly, with the Appropriations Committee, kind of historic in and of itself.

And they're trying to think through, okay, what's the version that we could do this a little bit different, but hit the same amount of savings.

And so that's a healthy back and forth.

I think that in and of itself is a sign of this is a little bit different, Glenn.

I mean,

this is more like the early 1980s when Reagan first came in than anything we've seen recently.

Congress is saying we, instead of we were going to ignore your budget, said we want to hit your number.

So it's early.

I don't know if that will materialize, but I am optimistic about it.

How optimistic are you that?

I mean, because I've talked to the president about this just a couple of weeks ago, and I said, we are playing such a dangerous game because we have to.

I mean, I think America,

no country's ever turned around from this point, and we have to.

And it just requires some really big boy pants to do it.

But

I'm just so concerned about it.

And

I'm hoping that we can get the

reduction on the staff.

I know that

you're doing a fantastic job on reducing the number of federal employees.

Do you believe we're going to be able to get these things actually

codified?

So if things don't go well, or even if they do go well, but it's not President Trump the next time, that this remains, this path remains this direction?

I do.

So I think if you zoom out for a a second, I think we're going to come away from this year in particular.

We've had no wins on spending in like two or three decades.

You know, Paul Ryan kind of put us in this cul-de-sac forever.

I think we're going to come away from this year with probably the largest mandatory savings

ever or adjusted for inflation since the 1997 balanced budget agreement.

That's going to happen.

I think we're going to see the appropriations process fixed for the first time because of our talking about executive tools like rescissions and impoundment.

It's going to cause the appropriations process a return to separation of powers that Congress actually listens to our cuts.

And we may not get all of them, but we'll get some of them.

And I think we're going to see something that is material progress on that front.

Third, I think I remember coming on your show in the first term and you're just like this the extent to which the career bureaucracy is just impregnable is just totally unacceptable.

And you pushed us on that.

And I think

many of us, the President, Elon, have spent a ton of time thinking about this.

And I think that will be one of the biggest stories, the extent to which the things that have been done,

the fork in the road, has fundamentally changed the reality on the ground.

And so we have a much small we will have a much smaller bureaucracy as a result of it, notwithstanding the laws that are on the books that that have been a barrier thus far i have to tell you i i stay away from washington dc uh you know as as much as i try to stay away from the plague um but next time i'm up russ i'd love to sit down with you and do a long-form interview with you because i i you're really one of the good guys and thank you for everything you're doing you got it

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