Hi, It's Brian Thomas here with Senator John Houston. Welcome back to the program. John, It's always a pleasure having you on. Boy. There's a flurry of activity going to coming out of Washington, DC. Very impressed by what the Trump administration has been able to accomplish, and personally happy to see the Big Beautiful Bill get passed. I mean, I was hoping, and I think my listeners were hoping for more cuts, recognizing some of the work that Doge
had done. We expected, you know, a much larger slice of the government to be cut out. But a lot of great was accomplished in the Big Beautiful Bill, most notably the tax increase or the tax cuts have been made permanent, and that, despite what the Democrats keep saying, that is a benefit to a huge swath of Americans and of course Ohioans.
Yeah, small businesses, manufacturers, all of them benefit by knowing what the rules are. They know they can plan, they can plan a capital investment knowing that they're going to be able to deduct the cost of that in this year's taxes, which means they have predictability, and then they can hire people, they can grow. This kind of stuff is very important, but it's also important for middle class
working families. And I want to dig into that. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, you know, bigger deduction for Social Security recipients, a child tax credit for working families, not one that's rebatable to people that don't work, but for people who actually work. All of that fantastic stuff for working families in Ohio.
And so they just recently found out, you know, everyone on the left side of the ledgers screaming about how everyone's going to die because they're going to have their Medicaid taken away from them. I just saw an article on the Wall Street Journal I talked about earlier in the program yesterday, and fourteen billion dollars in fraud waste abuse,
most notably people signed up in multiple states. It didn't take them that long to apply modern computer technology to cross reference to these people and find out that they're registered in multiple states double dipping. That was an easy fix. How come it took so long to come up with that one.
Well, Frankly, one of the problems is is the federal government pays the bill and the states administered, so many states have no incentive to actually go track this down, and we did that with SNAP saying, hey, if you're gonna have a fraud and abuse, then the states that have it, you're going to pay a little bit more of the cost of doing these programs. That's certainly the case with Medicaid. You have people who are ineligible, who are on there, people who are registered in multiple states.
And what does that matter? Because you have insurance companies Medicaid manage care companies that pay states pay premiums. The federal government pays premiums in both states. So that's a huge cost of covering multiple people even though they should only be or multiple states, even though showed me in one state that stuff matters. It adds up to billions of dollars. And nobody was doing it before, and that's a big difference. It's like, you can identify these things,
but what are we doing about it? Were doing something about it in this bill. Yeah.
One thing we all have learned of late there is no follow through to find out what happens after the money goes out the door in Washington. Does it actually accomplish anything? All these non governmental organizations with their hands in the cookie jar of the taxpayer money, we don't I mean, like the Doge identified projects. We don't know if even the Sesame Street program in Iraq or whatever
was even done. The money did go towards something that was labeled as that, but nobody follows up and tracks the taxpayer dollars. So I think it's a refreshing thing that the Trump administration is doing along those lines, at least trying to make sure the money's doing something and accomplishing something on behalf of the American taxpayer. Now, one of the problems, well.
There was a there was a let me just say something on that. There's a big message sent. We stayed up till two thirty in the morning doing the recisions package to take back literally nine billion dollars in spending, not a huge amount. You would think that would be easy. Finally, cutting things like Sesame Street and Iraq and transgender surgeries
in Guatemala. We cut those packages. And the message to the bureaucracy is this, Brian, don't do stupid things and you'll be fine, But if you do stupid things, we are actually willing to cut your budgets. So that was a big message. It was sent.
That amazing concept John EUSt did. Now I saw Donald Trump sign the Halt Fentanyl Act into law. I wanted to pivot over to that. I think we and Ohio have a problem with fentanyl like all the other states. And of course I think the main problem is the Chinese Communist Party and sending all the precursor elements out into the world to be turned into fentanyl. Whether or not Trump accomplishes, getting that shutdown would go a long
way to stopping the fentanyl problem. But how is the Halt Fentanyl Act going to help us here in Ohio. It's going to give.
Law enforcement more tools to go after people. A lot of times they would hide these ingredients under you know, technicalities in the law. This just cleans it up, gives law enforcement more power to go after the bad actors. But it's also important in the trade fight with China. There's a premium in there on a tariff, a twenty percent additional tariff until China takes care of these is
shoes around fentanyl. So they're going to, you know, if they're going to keep turning a blind eye to the problems that they're creating in this country and the sort of the modern day opium opium more, Uh, we're going to have to continue to push back on them and giving law enforcement more tools with Halt, fent and al and all. They think that it's a terrible tragedy that
comes with it. It's also the human trafficking and all that from drug addicted people that ends up happening, from the gangs and the people coming across the border illegally. It's just a whole mess that was created by the Biden administration that we're still trying to sort out. And this is just one more tool for law enforcement, those men and women who go out there every day and put their lives on the line to protect us.
Senni Houston pivoting over to the cafe standards something in trouble administration wants to get rid of. I think it's a pointless thing to have laws of supply and demand should be in effective. If I want to drive a car that gets eight miles to the gallon and I don't, I should be able to buy one. But these cafe standards create artificial miles per gallon that are forcing manufacturers to old electric vehicles that apparently the population does not want.
They're losing money, they're hemorrhaging the tax credits, are disappearing, so there's fewer there's lessons centive to buy an electric vehicle. Can't we just scrap the whole process and let the market forces dig dictate what we drive and what are miles per gallop happened to be.
Well, we're in the process of scrapping a lot of that. Yes, on cafe standards. That also, we repealed the California ev mandate that seventeen other states had joined. If you remember, they were going to say all cars in California in seventeen other states had to be electric vehicles by twenty thirty five. Think about that, every new car had to be an electric vehicle by twenty thirty five. And we repealed that Biden era regulation that allowed them to do
that that kind of stuff. I mean, frankly, we saved them from themselves. Yeah, there's no way that the people of those states would have rebelled if you were going to force them to have to buy electric cars. But common sense and a Republican majority prevailed in that one, and we repealed it. But all of those things skew
the markets. Companies go out and make investments not on what the consumer wants, but what the government regulations say they must do, and that skews the whole landscape, and eventually you ping pong it around because it's it's one administration gets in, they set rules. The next one comes in, they set a different set of rules. Just clean the slate. Let the car companies respond to the consumers. Technology will drive better environmental and outcomes and emission achievements.
Good ideas. Great ideas do not require force or tax incentives. John, that's my point.
On that, and that is right, and every day we get new lessons about that.
Hey, real, briefly, I know we're out of time. Just one final question, where are you on the Epstein files? I hate to go over that diversion paying no attention to the man behind the curtain kind of thing. But are you in favor of releasing this? I think most of my listening audience like, just let it out, get over with and uh yeah.
Well yeah, we can do this. Look turnover all you can. Don't turn over anything that would undermine a potential prosecution if there is somebody who deserves to be prosecuted, yes, and also protect the victims. We don't want victims' names out there. They didn't do anything wrong. If you recall in the Prince Andrew case, the woman who who got
outed in this Epstein saga, she committed suicide. We want to protect the victims, but everything else, get it out there and get this let's move on by by being transparent.
Amen to that, and Senator Houston, you know, I think they would go a long way to solving this so called crisis. If the Justice Department say, we do have ongoing criminal investigations, which is why we can't release the information. I think that would satisfy a lot of people and at least put the whole issue to bed.
Yeah, and then and then prosecute someone.
Amen.
You can't imagine that only those two, you know, the Epstein and the Epstein girlfriend, were the ones, the only ones involved committing a crime here. You'd have to think that there's someone else too that deserves to be prosecuted.
I think that's a safe conclusion. Senator Hughes that it has been a real pleasure. Thank you for the time you spent with my listeners to me this morning. I truly appreciate. Keep up the great work.