Tony Romm
speaker
148 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 8 May
Tony Romm’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 — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It tells the president how to spend money, and the president has to spend money on those things that Congress told him to spend the money on.
There's a provision in law that allows the president to move some money around at the Department of Defense, but the amount is capped and the use of that money is restricted.
can't just grab a bucket of money from the Department of Homeland Security and use that to, you know, pay for something at the Department of Energy.
And so that's what's made the president's actions so remarkable and in some ways unorthodox here, because he has pushed the limits of his ability to reprogram parts of the budget without Congress.
And privately, though, when you talk to some of these folks on the Hill and elsewhere, they will tell you that they are super concerned because even though they like paying the troops, they have this concern about this ends justify the means argument that the administration is sometimes making with the budget.
Because for, you know, right now, it's okay that he's using money for a purpose that both parties would like to see him spend it on with the troops.
But nothing is to say that the president will continue to push that envelope in ways that would see him use the money for more controversial purposes, perhaps in defiance of what Congress has said.
Got it.
Yeah, with a few exceptions, most of the government remains shut down.
And so as a result of that, there are hundreds of thousands of civilian employees at agencies that touch on functions like housing and health and education who are furloughed right now.
They're out of work, they're not receiving pay, and the administration has not taken any steps to reprogram the budget in a way for these individuals to be paid.
In fact, the president and his aides at times have suggested that some of these hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers may not even be automatically entitled to back pay once the shutdown ends.
Potentially.
I mean, there is a law that, in fact, President Trump himself signed at the end of the longest shutdown in U.S.
history that—
guaranteed so far, right, that guaranteed these individuals back pay.
But the White House has tried to interpret that law in a way that may suggest that they won't provide that automatic back pay.
So there are hundreds of thousands of people who really do have their finances at risk here.
And that's on top of those that the White House has now said it's potentially looking to fire.
Because President Trump and his aides have made very clear that in their attempts to weaponize this shutdown, they also want to conduct another round of mass layoffs.
Showing 101–120 of 148 · page 6 of 8
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