Governor Andy Beshear
speaker
115 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 May
Governor Andy Beshear’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
70% of our long-term care costs are covered by Medicaid and rural healthcare. is supported and cannot exist without Medicaid and at its current level without expanded Medicaid. So imagine if you live in rural America and they do these cuts, your hospital system, which is your number two employer behind the public school shuts down. All those jobs are lost. It hits your economy.
But then you, whether you have private insurance or Medicaid, have to drive an hour or two for your appointment, for your parents' appointments, for your kids' appointments to see the same doctor who lost their job in your town in a bigger city.
Well, on the tariff side, we're seeing it right now. UPS just announced 20,000 layoffs, which is startling. What? Yes. Our bourbon industry has been hit. We've seen a bottling plant shut down.
Well, the last thing anyone should ever be deprived of is Kentucky bourbon. Sure. Because 95% of the world's bourbon is made here. The other 5% is counterfeit. And the whole world should be able to enjoy because with all this craziness going around. Sure. It can be helpful. But, you know, that does show how hurt Canada is, how it's not just these tariffs. It's the talk of the 51st state.
And, John, by the way, they'd have the most electoral votes out of any state if that happened.
But so hurt that they're pushing back.
It's gonna be a challenge. We have about a $17 billion annual budget. I've got about 30,000 employees that do important work from repairing our roads to doing different claims for healthcare, to ensuring our communities are safe. Government performs a lot of important functions. The federal government is doing a couple things right now that make it that much harder.
First, they're trying to cancel programs and cancel programs that are enshrined in law that have had Congress appropriate to it, and that we have a contract with them. And we've probably already expended the funds.
It can be from Doge. It can also come down from the cabinets themselves. We saw that with a lot of the FEMA funding that they were trying to pause or to cancel. What they call the COVID funding, which is really about stopping a future pandemic. Right. Money for addiction treatment.
And look at the cuts. The other part is not just freezing the money or bringing it back and we're going to court and we're winning on that. So I'm able to bring those dollars back in because I've got a contract. The government gave me their word. They even passed a law and I'm gonna stand up for my people.
But then the other thing they're doing is that they're firing so many federal employees that the employees that are there don't know how the programs work. Some of our cabinets are on their fifth contact in a hundred days. And so it might be that the group is even trying in the federal government, but they're brand new or they've never done this part.
And that comes down and hurts the American people. Think about that senior on social security in Eastern Kentucky, and they closed the office where they're at. So now on a fixed income, they've got to drive a couple of hours
They've announced the closure and hazard and a couple other areas. And you can tell they just looked at a map and that they don't know how long it takes driving in Appalachia to get somewhere. But then they shut down the call center.
So what they are trying to make happen is that senior, who in my state probably voted for Donald Trump, drives two hours and then doesn't have the documents that he or she needs. and thus don't get the next check that they paid into the system and that they should get.
This is an area where if you are going to speak out against the Trump administration when they do wrong, you've got to give them credit when they're doing right. FEMA, in response to especially our February flooding, is doing some of the best I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot, 14 federally declared disasters since I became governor.
Which is ironic, because again, it's operating well. I think the Biden administration made a lot of these changes, but the current administrator came in, made commitments to us that he kept. Secretary Noem pushed through our request for individual assistance because the president signed off on it. A number of people in Kentucky are getting help.
So I think it's important, even when you're a Democratic governor, that we have the credibility to say good job when administration does well, But then we stand up and speak out and sometimes file suit when they're doing wrong.
Well, we're making a lot of progress that I want to discuss, but let me start by saying Eastern Kentuckians and Appalachians helped build this country. They mined the coal that powered the industrial revolution. They powered us through two world wars. Yet when the energy economy started to change, The new jobs didn't go where the old jobs were.
The idea of environmental justice came along a lot earlier than economic justice. And so you have an area that rightfully feels that the country that they helped build has turned its back on them and not invested what's needed. And the biggest challenge is infrastructure. You're in the mountains because that's where the coal was.
Well, to build an extra lane on a road many places may cost a couple million dollars. It costs a billion dollars if you're cutting into the side of a mountain. So take our mountain parkway project, which I believe is transformational. We're building the first four-lane highway into the heart of Appalachia.
Showing 41–60 of 115 · page 3 of 6
← Previous
Next →