During a town hall event on Tuesday, Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) discussed cuts being made in the Department of Education.
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00:00the Department of Education and Funding Hubs for Students with Disabilities, how will you respond to that?
00:07You know, one of the most distasteful things about what the Trump administration is doing is the glee with which they do it.
00:16They pick on someone and they wave around chainsaws, right?
00:24And actually it's another example of a Republican behaving decently.
00:29It was, I think, the Senator from Utah who took over Mitt Romney's seat.
00:34Okay, maybe there's something about that seat that makes you a decent human being.
00:38But he said, what are you doing firing people in the most cruel manner possible?
00:42And when you're a Republican and say that, you're actually getting out there.
00:46And they're not yet voting to reverse those, but that's a start.
00:53And that is what we have to, one of the things we have to do is try to encourage,
00:57to turn one by one, on issue by issue, one Senator because of the outrage over Ukraine,
01:02another Senator over the gleeful firing of people who are just trying to do a good job for the taxpayers of the United States.
01:09You know, there is waste in government.
01:12We fight that every single year.
01:15You know, any bureaucracy will naturally grow unless you sort of lean on it, and we have a process for that.
01:22It's the budget process. We go through, we ask internally in each agency,
01:26and then they come up with a proposal for next year.
01:30Their bosses look it over and say, okay, this should be increased, that should be decreased.
01:34My wife was actually very deep in this process in the Department of Energy.
01:40She was second in command of the Science Division of the Energy Department when she quit to work on my campaign.
01:54But she had been working on the budget for years, watching this work, and it's a pretty decent system.
01:59And when you find that there's a section of government that's bigger than you actually need,
02:03you don't just sit there and fire the last 30 people you hired.
02:07You say, okay, we're going to downsize this, come up with a plan to gracefully change the headcount,
02:13offer the people whose jobs will be disappearing jobs in other places in the area.
02:19And that's the way businesses work. Decent businesses work.
02:24And that's the way our government works.
02:32Well, education is one of the things, one of the stupidest things you can cut.
02:36One of the tough things about democracy is that there's always an incentive to do things that look good in the short term and hurt you in the long term.
02:48And that's why we underinvest in things like education or neonatal care.
02:54A huge return on investment that we give up by not...
02:57Or scientific research, long-term scientific research.
03:02And so the problem is that if you can run for office next, for re-election, saying,
03:07see, I cut the budget, I'm such a hero, okay, and not acknowledge the long-term damage that did.
03:13And that's, you know, that's really what part of the education fight is about and why I'm always on that side.
03:23Always.