I was in the analytics of this channel and I noticed something a little bit off 65% of you listen or watch and are not subscribed to the channel, but 35% of you are. And I appreciate you and thank you for subscribing. Now the other 65% of you that aren't subscribed, I'm going to make you a deal. If you subscribe to the channel right now, I will continue to bring you content that is better every single time. So it takes you a second to do that, but also you get something out of this too.
Not only do you get my content, but you get content similar to mine that you'd be interested in in your feed because the platforms, they see what you do on their platform. If you like and subscribe here and also leave a comment, you're going to get more stuff like this in your feed and you're going to love it. Not just for me, but from other creators on the platform. So that's the deal. I make better content every time and all I ask is for a subscriber real quick. All right.
Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There's a lot of back and forth here about a lot of different things. It's hard to figure out what to focus on. I think we all want to try and get rid of waste, fraud and abuse in government. It's a major problem. It's going to require us to work together. A less finger pointing. It'd be great if we could get Mr. Must to come in here and outline different ideas he has for cuts, and then we could vote on it through what's called the rescission process.
That would be a great thing if we could, Mr. Chairman, I know you're going to take it under advisement, but it would be great if we can get Mr. Mustard just come here and sit here and and lay out the different cuts that he thinks that should be made to the federal government. I think, you know, there's a lot of back and forth here. Mr. Smucker was talking earlier about the deficits. I mean, we just voted yesterday.
You guys voted yes. We voted no on a budget with 6.75 million, the billion dollars, trillion dollars in expenses and only 4.9 trillion in revenues. You voted yesterday for a massive deficit increasing budget. In addition, the big beautiful bill that everybody's talking about is going to increase the federal deficit by even more $3 trillion because there's only this. There's 4 1/2 trillion in tax cuts, but there's only about 1 1/2 trillion proposed in expense
cuts. And those 1 1/2 trillion in expense cuts can't be made unless you cut Medicaid. And you say you don't want to cut Medicaid. So that's an additional, even under those rosy scenarios, an additional $3 trillion in deficits. So I don't know what you guys are talking about. You want to cut things, but you won't give us the specifics as to what's being done. Mr. Musk is operating. Miss Van Dyne talked about the witnesses that were here the
other day. I asked each of the witnesses specifically, do you know what Mr. Musk is doing? Do you know if the hunt? I think you said 100 people are working for him. Lloyd, 100 people are working for Musk. I think he said. But I mean, did they get background checks? Do we know that? Do you know Mr. I'll yield to Mr. Smucker? Do you know if they got background checks? No, you don't know. Nobody knows. We don't know if they got background checks. We don't know what kind of
security clearances they have. We don't know what their backgrounds are. I mean, these are simple basic questions in running a multi trillion dollar organization are the people that you have and and you know, we we people hear different names about them, but they're young people that are gamers and hackers and computer experts. We don't know what their backgrounds are. We don't know if they got proper security clearances. We don't know if they have background checks.
So we've got a big problem in the federal government. We've got way more in expenses than we have in revenues. It causes deficits. Our deficits are the highest percentage of our GDP that it's been in decades. The proposal the the CR that was passed yesterday increases the deficit. The big beautiful bill that this group is proposing will dramatically increase the deficit. So you say we have to find expenses to cut. We need to go after waste, fraud, abuse. Yes, let's do that.
But we don't know what the expenses are that they're proposing. They're supposed to come before the Congress and propose specific cuts so that we can a judge whether that makes sense. I don't think anybody here supports the idea. When they cut the people that oversaw the nuclear stockpile, nobody thought it was a good idea. Nobody thought it was a good idea when they cut the people that oversee the avian flu. Nobody thought it was a good idea when they cut the people
that oversee a measles outbreak. Nobody thought those were good ideas. I don't think anybody here is going to think it's a good idea when they're cutting thousands and thousands and thousands of employees at Social Security so that when people start calling up Social Security and they can't get their calls answered. And then you guys are going to say, look at that, I told you it was broken. But you want to cut 10,000 employees out of the 54,000 that
are there. And then there's going to be an argument like there's been in the past to privatize Social Security. So let's just work together. Let's say we all want to try and balance the budget. We all want to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. To do that, we have a process and procedure in place for the federal government. You can't do it through impoundment. That's been ruled by the courts and there's laws specifically passed by Congress that you
can't do it that way. You have to go through the rescission process. So to come and make a proposal, I want to cut this, I want to cut that. I want to cut this, I want to cut that. This doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. And then we decide yes or no based upon those individual things. It's a process that you're supposed to go through. It's not so supposed to be done in the dark by some 20 year old kids that we don't know if they
got background checks or not. So let's all work together and try and accomplish our common goals of trying to make our country a better place. Thank you. I yield back. Recognize, Mr. Thanador, you are recognized. Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our guest here. The Inspector Generals play a crucial role in combating waste, fraud and abuse, and promoting efficiency and effectiveness in government programs and
operations. However, they must adhere to integrity, objectivity, and independence standards. Previously, GAO found that a lack of transparency in DHSOIGS selection of work topics called into questions the independence of the organization. What changes? This is a question for Miss Bernard and Miss Lang. What changes has the OIG made to ensure transparency when selecting work proposals and how does the agency ensure it is targeting the highest risk areas at DHS?
Thank you so much for the question and thank you for recognizing the importance of Inspectors General DHSOIG. That is very important for us. We always want to make sure we're allocating our resources very wisely, especially recognizing we are overseeing an A department with 22 components over 260,000 employees worldwide. It's very important that we allocate our resources to
address the highest risk. So I am really proud of our risk based approach to make sure we are helping DHS accomplish its most critical mission areas and its most critical challenges. So we do have a recurring and repeatable framework for that. It encourages staff to consider project ideas from multiple sources internally and externally.
My question here is, will you commit to commit that the OIG audits, evaluations, and investigations of the Trump administration will meet integrity, objectivity and independence standards and help ensure DHS operates within the law? Yes. I can assure you we will continue conducting our oversight work in accordance with our statutory statutory
authority. We will remain independent and objective and we'll continue to follow our auditing standards and our work continues unabated as we currently are still working under our Inspector General, Doctor Kafari. Thank you. And my question to Mr. Curry is, for over 100 years, GAO has played a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of government programs and ensuring
taxpayer money is well spent. Over the past 20 years, GAO work has resulted in about 1.45 trillion in financial benefits and over 30,000 programs and operational benefits. Through its high risk list, GAO focused attention on the most significant challenges facing the government. Once the challenge is human capital, including skills shortage, a challenge Doge does not seem to appreciate as it
purges civil servants. What are the consequences of reducing the federal workforce using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel? Well, you're correct. Many of the high risk areas, and there's over 30 of them across all of the federal government that we've identified are on the list because of some sort of staffing or capacity challenge. That means that either they don't have the right number of people to perform the mission or they don't have the right
skills. So typically what you do is you, you figure out what you want the government or the agencies to do and how you want to do it, and then you figure out what sort of staff you need to do it. So obviously it's, it's going to have some implications, but you know, we, we don't know yet what exactly those will be. Thank you. And Miss Lang, I didn't give you any time to respond. So if you want to take a couple 30 seconds if you like.
No thank. You I. Think my colleague covered everything. Thank you, Chair, and I yield back. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up quickly.
And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stagezero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow.