'They Have To Answer For That': Dem Lawmaker Rails Against Trump Admin's Mass Layoffs Of Veterans

17 hours ago

During a town hall on Tuesday, Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) spoke about the mass layoffs of federal workers which disproportionately affect veterans.

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Transcript

00:00That'll be my closing question, but we'll

00:02have time for a couple more here.

00:04The financial aid crisis of homeless veterans is a problem.

00:08How do you propose a solution?

00:09And then the second question also

00:11talks about a response to the issue of immigration.

00:16And so we could do homeless veterans,

00:18and then immigration question.

00:21One of the features about Trump's firing of people

00:26is that for many years, and particularly

00:29in the Biden administration, we've

00:30had very strong hiring preferences

00:33for veterans, which is something that's great.

00:35I mean, veterans have put their life on the line.

00:37And for many years, we've had a policy

00:45that if two equally qualified candidates present themselves,

00:49one's a veteran, one's not, we'll

00:51give the job to the veteran.

00:52And I think I'm just fine with that.

00:54And it's been strengthened substantially

00:57in the Biden administration.

00:59And then now the DOJ has come in, and they say,

01:01oh, we're going to fire everyone who's recently hired.

01:03Well, guess what?

01:05This is like tens of thousands of veterans

01:07that they are firing.

01:09And they have to have the answer for that.

01:12And that's part of it.

01:16The other part has to do with the housing

01:18crisis in this country.

01:20And we just had sort of a strategy meeting

01:23on financial services with Liz Warren and Maxine Waters

01:27and the leadership on both the Senate and House committees.

01:30And it's the Banking Committee, but it's also

01:32the Housing Committee.

01:34And so a lot of what we talked about was housing.

01:37And what can we do?

01:38The number one thing, there's two things.

01:41What you'd like to do, and then what

01:42you think you can accomplish with Republicans in charge.

01:45And the thing we could maybe get accomplished

01:48is to increase the supply of housing.

01:50Because there's sort of two ways to solve a problem.

01:52You can give money to people who are trying

01:54to rent or to buy a house.

01:56Or you can give money to people who

01:57are trying to build a house.

02:00And if you get people to build more houses

02:02because you're subsidizing them, you

02:03build a house that will be on the market forever

02:05and will drive down prices.

02:07And so from an economics point of view,

02:09you can solve it either on the supply side or the demand side.

02:12The Republicans seem to be OK with solving

02:14on the supply side.

02:15And if that's what we can get, Liz Warren

02:17gave a really good speech on this.

02:19And that is actually something that we should just

02:22be focusing on right now.

02:24And the problem is that what the Trump administration is

02:27doing with all these tariffs is going in the opposite direction.

02:30If you're a home builder, you don't

02:31like the idea that lumber prices are skyrocketing

02:34because we're tariffing Canadian lumber.

02:36Or if you have a lot of steel parts,

02:38and then the price of steel is skyrocketing

02:41because of tariffs.

02:42And just normal housing, doorknobs and stuff

02:47like that are imported from various countries.

02:49And when those prices go up by 30% or 50% because of tariffs,

02:53housing costs go up.

02:55And that's inevitable.

02:56And so he's actually moving in the opposite direction

02:59that we think we could get support by Republicans

03:01for to try to make the home builders more

03:04productive and build more homes.

03:06Anyway, so that's sort of the state of play there.

03:08There's something like two to four million missing homes

03:13in this country.

03:15And that's a fact that we just have to fix.

'They Have To Answer For That': Dem Lawmaker Rails Against Trump Admin's Mass Layoffs Of Veterans

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