Clay Travis (13:38)

Elon has said that his time as a special government employee has come to a conclusion. He put this out on X, the platform that he owns, which now is actually a free speech platform. As my scheduled time as a special government employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending. The Doge mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government. So Elon is going to go back to being the most important single CEO and, you know, business. I don't like the term thought leader. Right, because it's like thought leader, but, I mean, the guy is a thought leader, but I don't like to use that term. But he's going to go back to doing the full Elon routine, which is going to be, I think, great for SpaceX, for Tesla, for X, for boring company, for all the things that he is involved in. So this is where we get into a little bit speaking of expectations, management of they've done what they could do. He did not unilaterally, and this was known all along, he does not unilaterally have the authority, the power. Doge didn't have to just say, these cuts are going into effect, money that Congress has appropriated. If Congress says this, you know, this program for fiscal year 2025 has $10 million or $10 billion, Doge couldn't just come along and say, yeah, they don't have $10 billion anymore. But this is where rescissions come in. This also goes to our conversations over the big beautiful bill. There's been a little bit of pushback here, including from some of the most pro Trump voices you will find in the Senate and just in general, who are saying, hey, Trump, I love you with all respect, you're doing great things. We all get that. This isn't like some never Trumpy wine fest. You're like, but like, I don't like the way you said it. No, that's for libs, that's for fake Republicans. This is just about, okay, it's halftime. It's not even halftime, to be clear. It's early. It's a timeout in the first quarter of this administration. And we're all huddled together and some of us are saying, hey, Trump, thank you for being the quarterback. But, you know, can you hit that guy on the button hook? Clay would be proud, by the way. I'm just going to say, look at that button hook. But yeah, you know what? I'm saying that that's the mentality, or rather that's the, the rationale behind some of the pushback on this from people like Senator Ron Johnson, people like Senator Rand Paul. They're on board for the mission, but they want to shape this. This is why it goes to the Senate. I bring it up because, you know, yesterday I said we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And I think I'm trying to. Some of the administration said it later that day. I'm trying to remember, I don't wanna misquote, but somebody, I heard somebody else say it. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's right. They listened to this show. So I'm happy to, Happy to help. Happy to help. And if that means I throw around a cliche that somebody else will have in their head, later. Great. But we've talked about the process. And Stephen Miller, I read his post on the Big beautiful bill, still in process. And there are big things in this bill that will affect us, that will affect your family budget, that will affect the business that you own or that you work for and in your town. I mean, there's this real stuff, right? This isn't sitting around arguing about the naming of the next post office in Topeka. No offense, Topeka, but this is about big economic issues, structural issues, and setting the economy on a footing that will allow it to get to the best possible places. Right? I mean, tremendous prosperity, which I'm very confident in. I have not been gloom and doom about the Trump economy since he won that election. For one moment, for one day, even when, oh, the Trump recession is here. Oh, the market has dropped. You can go back and listen to those shows. We're like, I kept saying he knows what he's doing. Everyone just who's freaking out needs to, as I believe they would say here in South Florida, tranquilo. Everyone just needs to calm down. It's fine, ok? Nothing terrible has happened. He knows what he's doing. Part of the complaints about the Big beautiful bill, though, have been on where is where are the cuts? Where is DOGE and the ethos of Doge being made real? And this is where you have OMB Director Russell Vaught, who was on the Kudlow show, saying that, yes, in fact, the administration is sending a rescissions package to Congress. Let's hear it from the OMB director himself. Play 4 I can.

Elon Musk (18:42)

We'll be sending that up on Monday or Tuesday, whenever the House is back in session. They will get our first rescissions bill. And again, this has been proposed and we've talked about it, we want to make sure that Congress passes its first rescissions bill, including the doge, and we will send more if they pass it. And so this is the first one is foreign aid, USAID cuts, many of the waste and garbage that was funding, not only wasteful but hurting our foreign policy. But also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and npr, we'll be sending that up and we'll be working with Congress. And we've had good conversations to make sure that they knew what was coming. They had some input as to changes that could be made to make it something that could pass the House. And we're excited for that to occur next week.

Clay Travis (19:28)

There you have it. I said, hold on a second. Where are the Doge cuts in the big beautiful bill? And Stephen Miller, who understands this process as well as anybody, because he is, look, he is at the center of what's going on in this White House. He is absolutely dialed in, and he explained it to everybody, and he said, look, this is how it has to happen within the system. And let's be honest, even if you follow government and politics for a living, some of this stuff, unless you. I'll tell you this, some members of Congress don't even know this stuff that well. Their staff members do, their staffers do, and they. They brief them on it. But they're like, wait, I got to do the. The. Who's a. What's it here? How does this work? Stephen Miller came out and said, here is what has to happen for the cuts to become real and. And final or to come to fruition. And now that process has gone to the next step, and now you'll see. Okay, does usaid, does the budget. Does Congress do what it's supposed to do? Does PBS get its government funding cut? I have, I think, the most perfect argument about this of anybody or, you know, anyone else is welcome to borrow it. I like to make arguments, then other people can borrow them. That's fine. I just want the truth to win. But PBS and anybody else who is getting straight up government funding as a media entity, they cannot claim simultaneously, oh, we don't really need that funding. It's only a small percentage of our budget and, comma. How dare they cut our budget? What are we going to do? This is tyranny. You are not entitled to federal funds as a media entity. This is insane. You know, imagine all of a sudden, and I would just say this, why is PBS getting money from the government? Clay and Buckshoe doesn't get any money from the government. We're a capitalist enterprise. Thanks to all of you who listen and thanks to all of you who make our sponsors so successful in the campaigns we have and the partnerships we have on this show. It is thanks to you that this show exists. There's no. There's no. There's no. I mean, it would be kind of nice, you know, I don't know, get a check for $10 million for the government. You know, we'd give. We give bonuses for the New York team or something out of that. Right? I mean, this is. This is the kind of thing that you sit there and you say, how has this even been able to exist as long as it has? And I want to get into this a little bit more on the Trump fight with Harvard, which I'll dive into in the bottom, which I think. I think this stuff is important. And there's a new addition to this, too, about foreign students from China. What's going on here? You know, were we bringing. Were we bringing the best and the brightest from Moscow to study at Caltech and MIT in, I don't know, nuclear engineering or something? Were we doing that during the Cold War? I'm not aware of it in any real numbers. I mean, there was a lot of espionage going on, but I. I don't think we were welcoming, you know, tens of thousands of students from Moscow to come work at high levels of sensitive. We're doing that with China. We are. We have been doing. And it's so dumb and so contra the national interest that when you say it out loud, it almost feels like, how is this. How is this possible? And then you can even take it a step further. How many Americans are getting access to the research being done by. I don't know what the top Chinese universities are, but, you know, let's just say the equivalent of University of Beijing. How many Americans are sitting in their classes learning about 5G, learning about artificial intelligence, learning about next generation of. Of microchips and what they're. I mean, supercomputers, all that? We all know the answer. Even if you don't follow the issue, you know the answer because you'd say, well, China's not that dumb, but we are. Trump comes along. This is one of his superpowers. The dumb things that we have as a country have been doing for such a long time that we just start to think that this is the way it has to be, because seems like it's always been that way. Trump comes along and says, you know, that's a dumb thing and we should stop doing it. Whether it's getting involved in foreign wars that were not going to win and that aren't bringing any benefit to us or even the people in that country over the long term. Or it's something as straightforward as why are we educating at the highest possible levels in sense of. They want to study Shakespeare. Okay, I'm a little more open to it, as long as there's no Americans who are losing that spot in that school. Whole other conversation, but the top. Electrical engineering, top. Microprocessor, top, you know, theoretical physics, astrophysics, we're educating our biggest adversaries, students, and by the way, in numbers. That would blow your mind. I actually had a conversation randomly with the guy in the Princeton University electrical engineering labs a long time ago, and he said that if they wanted to, this was a long Time ago was back when I was just out of school. He said if they wanted to, they could take three classes or, you know, three times as many students as they have from just China with perfect, perfect scores for engineering. I mean, perfect math scores, everything. He says, you know, they don't take that many. They don't. It's not 100%, but they could because they all want to come and they take a lot of them. And that's true of a lot of these schools. That needs to stop because they operate in America and they have to start seeing themselves as part of this country. They are not islands unto themselves. They do not have global tenure. So if anything, what you're seeing right now is Trump putting into action that very important but very straightforward theory. The dumb things that prior administrations have done that there can be no intelligent defense of. Whether it is funding pbs. I know they do it because it's left wing propaganda. But there's no real defense of this. Not, not a serious defense, not an intellectually consistent one. Or spending too much money, fraudulent stuff, sending money to people overseas. The stuff that Doge has found. Dumb. Right. We can all agree. Or training the foreign adversaries, brightest minds in the most sensitive technologies, when the wars and the economies of the future will be determined by, by technological prowess. Very dumb. And it is, as I said, Trump's superpower, among. Among several. But one of his superpowers is to come along and say, I no longer wish this country to do the things that we all know are dumb but have just kept doing with no good reason other than maybe politics or corruption.

Buck Sexton (26:28)

Team 47 with clay and Buck.

Clay Travis (26:31)

All right, let's get into Trump and Elon and this conversation there. Cause there's what they said, which we'll play at some of the highlights. There's also, of course, the press getting some opportunities to push on some questions and put that out there. So I wanted to bring you this, cuz this was just happening now and certainly worth our time to dial this in. Here is. This is Trump giving examples. I think it's an important, important review. Trump giving examples of the kind of wasteful nonsense that the government was doing. Play 30, just as an example.

Donald Trump (27:06)

Doge canceled $101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education. $101 million. And that was just a small section of the Department of Education. $59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City. And the landlord never made the kind of money that he made in the land last short period of time. $59 million to a hotel in New York City. $45 million for diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarships. In Burma. In Burma. Does anyone know about Burma? $20 million for Arab Sesame street in the Middle East. Nobody knows what that's all about. Nobody's been able to find it. $8 million for making mice transgender.

Clay Travis (27:54)

I didn't know about. I've forgotten about that one. I feel like we might have talked. $8 million for making mice transgender. That's. $8 million is a lot of money. If I told you you had $8 million to start a foundation or a charity or you'd say, wow, okay, I can hire staff and get a facility and do some stuff. $8 million for transgender mice. I know that's in the federal government budgeting a. That's less than a rounding error. Right? And that says more about federal government budgeting than it does about anything else. We're spending way too much money. We're wasting way too much money. That's clear. But the stories here are important because stories are what? Stay with people. Numbers can all get mixed together. Is it 8 million? Is it 8 billion? Is it? Who knows? But wait, they were spending money to transmit. The government was doing that. We were setting up scholarships for people in Burma. So think about that. There are Americans who are struggling to put their child into college, lots of them, and even those who can afford to do it. It's painful. It's a lot of money. Right. And yet your tax dollars are setting up scholarships for people in Burma. What is the compelling national security interest of scholarships in Burma? What is the compelling. Because, remember, this is all supposed to. It's not a global charity. That is not the purpose of usaid. It is supposed to be to advance American interests. What is the purpose of the transgender puppet show in Guatemala or wherever it was? I forget. I think it was Guatemala. Well, the purpose was that the people who had government funds don't care and just want to push their own ideology, and that's it. They think it's their own private slush fund to do with as they please in these institutions of government. Well, hopefully, that comes to an end, and that goes to the ethos of doge. It's not just Elon being there. It is setting this up in a way that there is now, going forward, this space that is filled by people whose job it is to figure this out, show waste, fraud, and abuse. You know, maybe it's more like A. Like a 4 deployed action cell situation, meaning that there are times when we need it and you bring it together. There Are times where you don't and it's closed down. And wouldn't that be within the spirit of Doge too? It's not supposed to be some forever bureaucracy. They set it up. It's like a crisis cell in government. Right? You set it up. We gotta do this. Done a bunch of things and continues on. Here's Elon saying exactly that. This cut 31 doge is just getting started, everybody.

E (30:38)

This is not the end of Doge, but really the beginning. My time as a special government employee necessarily had to end. It was a limited time thing. It's 134 days, I believe, which ends in a few days. So that, you know, comes with a time limit. But the Doge team will only grow stronger over time. The Doge influence will only grow stronger. I liken it to a sort of booster of Buddhism. It's like way of life. So it is permeating throughout the government. And I'm confident that over time, we'll see a trillion dollars of savings and a reduction in a trillion dollars of waste and fraud reduction.

Clay Travis (31:14)

Trillion dollars of waste and fraud reduction. If this is seen through now, the rescissions package has to go to Congress, and the team checked. The Biden administration did spend millions of dollars on transgender animal experiments. Real thing. Real thing. Those of you who are in towns and cities, you're like, you know, we could use some money to, you know, I don't know, fix the water pipes that deliver our drinking water or whatever it is, right? We could use money for any number of things. I don't think transgender mice was high on your agenda. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think transgender mice was something that you were like, you know, I'm so glad this tax day that a portion of the American people's tax dollars will go toward the trans mice agenda. I don't think that happened. You can call me crazy. So Elon is saying that this is going to continue on and that the essence of Doge, or as I said, the ethos of Doge, is the thing that needs to keep going, because this cannot continue as it is. We have seen what it means when the government just expands like the blob. And it's not good. It's not good for our rights, not good for our pocketbooks, not good for liberty. And that has to start to turn around. The receding of this will take, or I guess the recession, whatever. The way that this will begin to recede. There we go. Is that we continue to push and stay focused. It will Take time. This is why I give the Trump administration in general on some of these issues, whether it's, we talked about the FBI before, we're talking about this issue, I give them some leeway here when it comes to the schedule, when it comes to the timing, because they're doing the things they said they would do. Trump is doing those things. And that alone feels revolutionary. And I think we're a little spoiled. I'm just going to say this. I think we're a little bit like this. Some of us are a little bit like the spoiled kids, where we said, you know, I want to, I want an ice cream cone. I want an ice cream cone. And we gave him one right away. And now we go, I want another ice cream cone with the border, because Trump solved the border so quickly and it was so successful. And it's just, you know, that's a big issue. And to totally transform that and to really, for now, at least take that off the table. I know interior enforcement, deportations, that's another piece of that piece. But to take the southern border offline as an issue because you solved it, not because you're ignoring it or you're, you're saying it's better than it is. I think that that's raised expectations to an impossible level for some people. Well, we do, you know, Trump fixed that. Why hasn't he fixed the debt? Well, hold on a second. It's $36 trillion, a lot of money. It's going to take a little time. And, and it's about, also, let's be honest, it's about the education of the American populace on the, these issues. The more we know about this as a group. Now, I get it, there's the Communists, there's the lunatic Democrats. They're never going to, you can't teach them, they can't learn. Fine. But if we have enough people who know and enough people who want to fix the problem, then it becomes possible. And so that's where I think there's a lot of power in what Doge has done, because this stuff is so absurd that it gathers, it gathers eyeballs, gains attention. And that's really important. As I said, stories are what stay with people, numbers get jumbled, stories stay. And the stories that Doge has told are very, very important. And then there's something else that came up, which I think could be a bigger thing in time, a little bit separate from the Doge issue, but came up with the Doge press conference conference. Peter Doocy of Fox News I5 Peter doing great work. Peter Doocy of Fox News asked Trump about whether Dr. Jill Biden maybe she can take a break from her time doing heart surgery in the OR Dr. Jill Biden testifying about the usage of Biden's auto pen while he's president. Play 32.

Buck Sexton (35:26)

Do you think that Dr. Jill Biden should also have to come in and testify about what she did or didn't do?

Donald Trump (35:34)

Well, I hate the concept of it. It's the wife of a man who was going through a lot of problems and everybody that dealt with him understood that. And I guess it came out during the debate loud and clear. That was the big, that was the biggest signal of all. They have to do what's right. The country was, there was a lot of dishonesty in the electioners. You know, 2020 that's been now caught. People understand it was a rigged election. And when you go further out, when you see the auto pen, I mean, I think the auto pen is going to become one of the great scandals of all time.

Clay Travis (36:11)

Now, couple of things there, some big takeaways there. Now, Trump is very calm, cool, collected. You know, his tone is very even here. Think about this, though. First of all, you're reminded Trump is not a vindictive guy. He has that basic sense of like male honor where he goes, look, it's, it's the guy's wife. You know, I don't, you know, you can tell he does not relish this prospect because he knows and that this is a guy they tried to throw in prison. This is a guy that got shot through the ear. This is a guy who has been through it a million ways and then some. But he still has that sense of a real man doesn't want to get in between a man and his wife with this kind of thing, a testimony to dementia and everything else. Like, that's not, there's something that bothers Trump about that still. I think that's, that just shows you the guy that he is. He's not anyone. He's not a mean guy. He's not a mean guy. I'll tell you something, I think Biden and not even talking about the dementia, I think Biden was a mean guy. I think he's a nasty, vindictive person. I really, I think all the, oh, I'm grinning and shaking hands, that was all malarkey. Not a nice guy. Not a nice guy. And you see this with his family. Look at Trump's kids. I think the kids tell you a lot. Folks, I know I'm only been a dad Six weeks and I, you know, it's like my favorite thing in the world. But the kids tell you, look at Trump's kids. Kids are all amazing. I know all of them. They're all great kids. I mean, kids are. They're like my age. They're in their 40s now. But they're all good, solid people. They're not perfect. No one's perfect, but they're good. They're, in fact, pretty impressive across the board, legitimately. You look at Biden, you go, look at this guy. This guy is a mess. His son grew up in D.C. crack addict. You kidding me? This was completely overlooked. Okay, okay, I know I'm going down that pathway more than I want. We're running out of time. I wish I had. Well, I do have three more hours to do on Monday, so we can return to this. But the other thing, he says this could be the biggest scandal, the dementia, hiding by the media and the Democrat Party. That may not be the biggest part of the scandal. It might actually be the auto pen usage that happened as a result of that. That's what Trump just said. We're gonna keep an eye on this. This is a big deal. Big deal.

Buck Sexton (38:27)

This is team 47 with Clay and Buck.

Clay Travis (38:31)

This is an Iheart pod.