Eric Eggers

speaker

36 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Eric Eggers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Morning Wire · The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25 · 15 Mar 2025 podcast

It remains to be seen if that happens and if it does, how much revenue they'll actually bring in. But. The IRS is another one. And based on what we've been able to identify, it does seem, if you can believe it, John, that cutting the IRS staff by half does seem to be something that a majority of Americans favor. Wow.

So I would say this is another example of just having an honest conversation in a transparent way about the way government's supposed to work. We all heard the fact that democracy was on the ballot during the election last year. The fact that Donald Trump won. You saw Democrats protesting during his most recent congressional address that he's a dictator.

The fact that the Supreme Court actually sided with a lower court judge in stopping the freeze on some USAID funding suggests that the multiple levers of government continue to work and that it's not just a unilateral effort on behalf of President Trump to just decree what he wants to happen and everyone else complies. The Supreme Court obviously did not in that instance.

But Congress does appear to be willing to come to his rescue. So there's an effort this week to do something called rescission. And this is Basically, it's an executive order that Ronald Reagan used a lot. In 1981, he proposed 133 rescissions and Congress approved 101 of them. Basically, he says, listen, I think this is a specific thing that we should no longer fund.

We should rescind the funding of it. And so Congress has the opportunity to do that. There's an expectation that they will attempt to do that on the budget for things like those proposed cuts.

And the good news for congressional Republicans and for the Trump administration is it requires only a simple majority on behalf of Congress to do that, which is good for Republicans because that's all they have.

Well, John, just to your point about the role that Elon Musk is playing, not just from an identification of wasteful spending, but also as essentially a chief marketing officer for this effort.

The reason why I think they've had so much success in anything they've attempted to do, including getting his nominees passed and having votes held in a way that's favorable for the Trump administration is largely due to the unwavering support of Elon Musk and the fact that he can use Twitter to put pressure on vulnerable and potentially

weak members of this Trump coalition and so I think there's the fact that you saw people like Joni Ernst vote in favor of someone like Pete Hegseth when she'd previously expressed a significant reluctance to do so does speak in part to the power of let's call it a transparent effort to elevate.

Here's somebody who's potentially pushing back on this and they hear from a lot of their constituents and it seems to be working so far.

I would say it's at least as effective as creating social media content where you have female members of Congress bouncing up and down as if they were a video game avatar. They should continue to do more of that. It seems to be incredibly effective. Nothing the Democrats appear to be doing seems to be effective right now.

They've gone so far as to suggest that the biggest thing that the Doge cuts are doing is hurting veterans. It's 2025, John, and Democrats are now very concerned about the plight of veterans in the federal government. 30% of civil service employees are veterans and many have lost jobs.

And the Trump administration is the line you will read in a number of mainstream media reporting accounts of what's happening here. And the reality is, is that whomever the background is of the people that work for the federal government, at the end of the day, everything that's being done in the name of cutting spending is being identified and posted on the Doge website.

And then you have conversations. And at the end of the day, we live in a democracy. And so people have a chance to see what it is and decide for themselves because you're now seeing local media reporting doing the work of saying, listen, these are cuts that are a result of what's happened to the federal government. And if people decide that that's hitting too close to home, then I think you'll see

public effort coming the other way, organic grassroots pushback on this. And then we'll see if their elected representatives are responsive to that or not. That's how it's supposed to work. And I think that's where the conversation is today.

Yeah, I I totally agree, John. In fact, I plan on sending you an email when we're done with this interview asking, what are the five things you think you accomplished during this conversation? Oh, yeah. So I look forward to your response.

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