Congress holds the power of the purse. The United States Government is the largest business in the world, but to conduct business – and national security – Congress has to approve the funds and the money.
Representative Jake Ellzey is now a 3-term Congressman representing Texas’s 6th District. He’s a Naval Academy graduate, a helicopter and fighter pilot, and a member of the House Appropriations Committee, where his decisions determine what the government funds and what it doesn’t. He’s also the co-chair of the bi-partisian military Veterans alliance, the For Country Caucus.
With the American government changing at lightning pace, Fran Racioppi asked the Congressman how the Appropriations Committee is prioritizing funding, what that means for national defense, rooting out fraud, waste and abuse; and if there’s ever a way for America to balance the budget and stop overspending.
Representative Ellzey also shares why we need to clearly define America’s next battlefield, funding military readiness and innovation to combat both nation-state adversaries and terror groups, and the critical role he sees our Special Operations Forces playing in the grey war the United States is now in. Plus he shares his leadership lessons from the cockpit and the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan to the halls of Congress.
Watch, listen or read our conversation from Congressman Ellzey’s office. Don’t miss our full coverage from Capitol Hill. Special thanks to For Country Caucus for setting up this series.
Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are an official program of The Green Beret Foundation.
The opinions presented on the The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are the opinions of my guests and myself. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Green Beret Foundation and the Green Beret Foundation assumes no liability for their accuracy, nor does Green Beret Foundation endorse any political candidate or any political party.
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Representative Ellzey, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
I left your Air Force comrade downstairs, Representative Davis, where we talked all about the Air Force Academy. He was very adamant about the importance of the Air Force Academy and what it means to national security. We had to come here to talk about the Navy and the importance of the Navy. I don’t care what anybody says. We talk a lot about American strength and combat power, but the reality of the situation is when America needs to project combat power, there is nothing like a carrier strike group coming off your coast.
If you need it quickly, it’s an aircraft carrier off your coast that has, historically for 80 years, been a power projection tool that the United States has. The first question out of every president’s mouth is, “Where’s the carrier?” It’s intended to prevent conflict from either starting or getting worse. It can certainly deliver a lot of ordinance if necessary and at a better cost than a lot of missiles that we’re shooting around. I was very proud of my Navy time on aircraft carriers. I did 8 deployments total on aircraft carriers, 1 on the ground with my SEAL brethren. I’m also a huge proponent of the Silent Service because you can’t find out where they are. They’re quiet. They put fear in the heart of the adversary as well.
We’re going to talk about all of the elements of combat power. Importantly, we have to thank you, your team, and the For Country Caucus for bringing us back into the halls of Congress to sit down with another series of members. We were here back in September right before the election. We had some great exchanges as we were gearing up for the election with a number of the members. To be able to come back and speak post-election with another group is critically important.
It’s a different world after the election.
You can feel it when you walk into the building. You represent Texas’ 6th District. That’s Southeast of Dallas-Fort Worth. I know my technicals being from the Northeast. You have a large portion of Tarrant County, which I know Dallas is part of that.
Tarrant County is Mansfield. Tarrant County is Fort Worth and Dallas County. I also have part of Irving and Las Colinas. It’s a very strange district, and then very rural South and Southeast of that.
It’s your third consecutive term in Congress. You were part of the 118th and the 117th. You graduated from the Naval Academy, spent twenty years as a helicopter pilot, and also flew F-14s and F-18s. You served on the Ronald Reagan among other ships. You talked about your combat deployments. Also, post-service, interestingly, and I’m going to ask you about this, you spent time as a Military contractor in Afghanistan. You ran small businesses, worked as a commercial airline pilot, and then held state titles as well.
That is important when we talk about understanding government and the difference between state government and federal government. That’s a conversation that’s being had. All you have to do is turn on the news. Importantly for this conversation, though, you are a member of the House Appropriations Committee, and that’s the power of the purse.
Also the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. I’m the vice chair of that.
We can’t do anything without the money. That is a topic that permeates every administration. When we look at change, which we’re certainly undergoing some rapid change, that’s going to be a very big topic of discussion. The 119th Congress has started. We’re a few weeks in. It’s your third go-around. Let’s start with the 119th Congress.
You’ve got 100 members who are veterans that serve in Congress in this session. That is the most over the course of the last eight Congresses that have convened. Veterans, by and large, are great team players. They’re results-driven and they create unity in organizations. I don’t think it matters what side of the aisle you sit on.
We have come out of the most politically charged campaign that we’ve had possibly since Aaron Burr shot someone. We had President Trump get shot at. Certainly, that is a very divisive campaign but everybody is coming together with the message of, “We’ve got to figure out how to get along now and bring America back together. Let’s get after it for the people.” As you look across your fellow veterans in Congress, how are you working with them and rallying them to see the unity that has to happen for your country?
It’s a new Congress. It’s a new administration. It’s a new philosophy on defense. We have 26 members of the For Country Caucus, some of whom are brand new to Congress. We are getting organized. I’m a new co-chair as is Don Davis. There have been some changes to the organizational setup. We’re looking forward to having a nonpartisan, defense-driven national security and veterans care caucus that is increasingly vocal and increasingly effective in making sure that as Americans who have served, we know what’s important. We put our lives on the line.
A couple of them have been drafted. We’ve got 2 Vietnam veterans, 1 Republican and 1 Democrat, who were drafted and everybody else is a volunteer. They have a vast array of experiences, both in combat and in peacetime. We have medical care pilots, infantry, and Green Berets. We run the gamut but we all get along well.
There’s a thing about veterans. It doesn’t matter which era, what your uniform was, or how well you know somebody who’s a veteran. There is a sense of humor that we can only share amongst veterans. Nobody else gets into that world. Nobody else can insult a fellow veteran and the understanding is that that’s brotherly love. Nobody else gets to do that.
Nobody gets to talk to me like that who’s not a veteran but my veteran friends can insult me all day long and I love it. Dan Crenshaw is a prime example. Mike Garcia who got defeated, I was in VFA-14 with him. He and I would go back and forth. It was all about how veterans can interact with each other. Nobody else gets to play that game but fellow veterans.
Speaking of, you did decide to join the Navy. You were looking for the easy way out.
That’s true. Landing on carriers for twenty years is the easy way out. I completely agree. I couldn’t swim, so I wasn’t going to be a seaman. I’m terrible at swimming. I didn’t want to stand in formation to find out when the next formation is like the Army does.
You have to wait for the word. That’s it. What are you doing over here? We’re waiting on the word.
I’m an independent thinker. I know you guys have to be told what to do. See? It’s that kind of thing. We don’t even know each other and we’re already going back and forth. Veterans get to do that. It’s a bonding mechanism between veterans. I do it to Don Davis. We don’t know each other that well but we’re getting to know each other well very quickly. It is because up here, especially in the For Country Caucus, we trust each other inherently because we’re all veterans. We know that there is a line in which you can’t betray that trust or you’re going to be out. We automatically trust each other and have that camaraderie that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
It’s about the mission. What matters is the mission. I want to ask you as we’re joking about the Navy. Why join the Navy in the first place?
I always wanted to fly jets. I used to get Air & Space Forces Magazine and wanted to fly the F-16 or the F-15. My stepdad and I were talking about it. He took me flying when I was seven. I was hooked. I knew I wanted to be a fighter pilot of some kind. He said, “F-18s land on aircraft carriers that have a 300-foot runway with 3 wires.”
I have a history of trying to do the hardest thing possible just because. You have to make that effort. That’s another commonality among veterans. You have to try something that’s going to test you. I wanted to fly fighters off aircraft carriers. When I was selected out of primary flight training, I got helicopters and I was told that I would never fly jets. That’s another thing, especially with SEALs and Green Berets. Most pilots tell me I can’t do something and then watch.
It’s about the result. Failure is never an option. Was there always a fear that you might not make it? It’s in the back of your head but you always had a plan. There was always a plan to succeed. That’s what matters.
That’s the SEALs. I spent six months with them. My colleague, Morgan Luttrell, and his brother, Marcus, we were on deployment together in Iraq in 2006. Marcus’s motto is “Team never quit.” He never did. That’s a commonality amongst all of us too.
Let’s talk about the Appropriations Committee. They control the money. What is, in your words, the mission of the Appropriations Committee?
It’s to fund what the authorizers have funded. Particularly when it comes to defense approps, it is ensuring that our best and brightest are paid appropriately and have the best equipment on the planet to prevent war and, if necessary, to go to war and overwhelmingly achieve victory. From the defense appropriations standpoint, that’s how I see it.
In the appropriations process, $0.30 of every dollar is discretionary spending. That’s what the Appropriations Committee deals with. Seventy cents of every dollar that the government spends is mandatory spending, which we don’t even see. That’s a flip from many years ago. Many years ago, it was 30% mandatory and 70% discretionary. Of that $0.30, $0.15 or 50% of discretionary spending is Military. Appropriations, as a piece of the pie, have gotten a lot smaller. We need to get it back to a majority of discretionary because it matters year to year what we’re spending.
It’s a complex process. We’re still dealing with the fiscal year 2025 spending bills. We’re operating on a CR that goes to the 14th of March 2025. We need to pass those remaining appropriations bills for fiscal year 2025 going forward. The fiscal year ends in September. It’s a very complex process. We haven’t passed all twelve appropriations bills in 1 year in 27 years. That needs to change. We have an opportunity to do that.
How, though? How do you get out of that cycle? It seems like we consistently have that same conversation. I remember being in the Army when they were like, “Don’t use too many paper goods. You’re not going to have them in a couple of weeks because you’re not going to have any pay.” Everybody scares you out of all this. How do we break that cycle?
A divided government usually leads to continuing resolutions, which means you’re paying for the operation of the government based on last year’s funding, which is not good for defense. CRs are bad. Year-long CRs are terrible, specifically for defense. If we’re interested in turning the corner on defending our country from one administration to the next, which I believe this one is, we have to pass the actual funding bills because we have a lot of new starts of equipment and systems that we need to start paying for, which we can’t do on a CR.
How do we get that done? We have a unique opportunity, especially in fiscal year 2026, with a new team, House, Senate, and White House to accomplish that mission based on the top lines that we’re given. We’re still waiting on the top lines. Meaning, how much money we can spend in fiscal year 2026. We don’t have that number yet. The Biden administration was two months late every year on their budget. It’s supposed to come out in February. We were behind the timeline from the very beginning. It’s a constant cycle. We have to break that cycle.
You brought up a lot about planning. We’re going to talk about Military readiness in a minute. What we see in the news every day is rapid change since the Trump administration came in. That’s one way to put it. To date, President Trump has signed sixty executive orders ranging from everything from tariffs to pauses on foreign aid, illegal immigration, and medical care issues. On Super Bowl Sunday, we saw the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. February 9th is Gulf of America Day.
I didn’t see that one.
Everybody knew that when the president came in, he was going to shake the tree. I’m not sure everybody knew how hard that tree was going to get shaken. In the Military, we have this saying that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. We also have the saying that speed and violence of action get immediate results. Sometimes, you have to do that.
When you look at the executive orders that have come out, normally, when we talk about funding initiatives in the government, it has to be through legislation. It has to be through laws that are passed here in Congress. However, executive orders are another way to get things done. How do you go about funding these things when you don’t necessarily have a law that’s been passed but the boss says, “Get to work. We’ve got things to do”
He’s got to have buy-in because he’s going to sign whatever spending bill you pass out of here. The best thing about this is Mike Johnson, Tom Cole, and Steve Scalise, the leadership team, are coordinating very effectively with President Trump, his legislative team, and his defense team. Pete Hayes got confirmed. There’s a lot of catching up to do but there is a lot of good coordination between everybody about the way forward.
We’re still dealing with 2025 stuff, which was the stuff from the last administration and last Congress. Going forward, once we know what the priorities of the president are, we’re not going to put something on the floor that ultimately he’s not going to sign. We’re going to be very closely aligned on what it is he wants because he’s at peak power and he’s got to sign it. We always know that regardless of the administration.
Planning is always underway with the staff. We have a fantastic staff on the Appropriations Committee. You throw in DOGE and that changes things. It remains to be seen what that looks like. We do have some time in the fiscal year 2026 since we don’t even have a top line yet, but we do know which programs we need to continue and we know which ones need to start. We can work within that framework.
Let’s talk about DOGE for a second because you brought it up. We know this from our early days in the academy. I remember sitting in OCS. You sat in classes on fraud, waste, and abuse. We talk about how I can identify it, what you do, and the fact that it exists despite all of our best efforts throughout history. You can go back to the Continental Army and there was probably fraud, waste, and abuse.
DOGE has come in. Elon Musk and his team are getting involved in seeing what’s happening in so many different organizations. We’re seeing broad cuts. We’re seeing entire agencies shut down. We’re seeing reductions in personnel and programs. Elon Musk has the entire support of the president. They were in the Oval Office voicing their support for each other.
They’ve made some good points. They’ve said, “America is the biggest business in the world. If we don’t run a business that’s profitable, then your business isn’t going to be around for a long time.” That’s a valid point. If you go back and look at the deficit and the debt that’s increasing and you see the ticker in Times Square that goes up endlessly, you have to ask yourself the question, “Where can we find efficiencies in what we’re doing?” How do you assess the performance thus far?
It’s breaking things. That’s a good thing, especially when it comes to the acquisition and requirements processes that we have at the Pentagon. If you’ll recall, the Pentagon didn’t start construction until 9/11 of 1941. It didn’t exist. We have a big behemoth on the other side of the river, the Pentagon, that is fully staffed with a bunch of different rice bowls. We have shown an era in which Russia and China are able to build things extremely fast without any input from anywhere else and we’ve got a process by which our programs are taking years, if not decades, to be fielded.
We won World War II in three and a half years. We didn’t have a Pentagon. If you read Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, which I don’t know if you’ve read that or not yet, the industry got together with the leadership. They sometimes cut out the Military because sometimes, the Military didn’t know what they wanted. They built more effective everything by the thousands.
We have a requirements and an acquisition process. I sat down for a committee hearing with HAC-D with CENTCOM Commander General Kurilla who echoed what we said. It’s broken, so let’s break it. Let’s break the whole thing. Especially as we’re seeing in Ukraine and with Russia, the development of weapons that are effective is so exponentially much faster than it has ever been. We can’t continue to have a system in which it takes fifteen years for a major weapons system to be fielded. We have to stop adding things to everyone.
We’ve got an Air Force One and a Marine One that’s behind the timeline. The F-35 was behind the timeline. Name me a system that’s on time. It’s the B-21. They developed that in a way that I think is the wave of the future. You’ll start seeing that because I don’t know anybody who doesn’t believe that the process is broken. We didn’t have a lot of the 2 and 3-stars at the Pentagon in World War II when we said, “We got to build this.” We didn’t have that process. You’re going to see some improvements in that process immediately.
The delay in production and the advancement in technology is real. We have to be cognizant of that. We have to have very relevant discussions. Here are a few examples. You brought up Ukraine. In the conversations that I’ve had with all the senior leadership throughout Special Operations Command, they all echo the same thing when you ask them the question, “What’s the next battlefield?” I’ll ask you that as well. The next battlefield is going to include mass drone warfare.
Also, swarms.
Previously, you would have a recce team that would be first in. First in is not going to be personnel. We’re seeing that in Ukraine. Look at things like hypersonic technology. The last time we advanced hypersonic technology was the SR-71 Blackbird, which is sitting over at Dulles in a museum. The Chinese have hypersonic technology.
As far as you know.
True. I’m hopeful. Hope is not a course of action, but I assume that we have some advancement there. You talked about aircraft carriers. We have aircraft carriers that are on a fifteen-year production cycle. We know that China has more deep-water ports than we do and they’re able to produce an aircraft carrier in a couple of years. We can talk about the capability of the aircraft carrier all day long versus ours, which matters. We can’t throw that out, but we do have to change the process.
When you build one year at a time and you’ve got these very exquisite systems, you have to have subcontractors for all of them. Let’s not forget what COVID did and the shutdown of our country did to all of these projects. It added years to the Air Force One, to name one of many projects. The workforce timed out. The supply chain timed out. We had very stringent requirements from the last administration on mining critical minerals.
There’s a lot of talk about Greenland, Ukraine, and critical minerals. Everything we use in the modern world requires critical minerals. Can we produce that here in the United States? Yes. You’ll see a lot of changes as far as EPA rules or environmental rules so that we can do that ourselves. We need to be energy-independent, which we will be very soon.
We also need to be critical mineral independent and self-sufficient as well. China has cornered the market on all that stuff. It’s not just one thing, but the supply chain has taken time. If you build 1 carrier every 15 years, you’re not going to have a workforce that’s able to build a whole bunch of them and build it to scale. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Everybody is on board with recognizing that and moving forward.
Let’s talk about national defense for a minute. We had the chance to come here to D.C. We sat down with former Sergeant Major of the Army, Dan Dailey, and had a great conversation about readiness. When we look at our NCO Corps, what’s their job in the Military? Readiness. We define readiness in Congress here as the ability of Military forces to fight and meet the demands of assigned missions. We can break that down into manning, training, equipment, and leader development. When you look at readiness and how Congress is funding the readiness of the Military, what’s the focus?
Not enough money for too many things that we need. I agree with Senator Wicker. It needs to be 5% of GDP. We’re around 3%. There’s not enough money to do everything we need to do to be completely ready. If we’re completely ready, completely manned, and completely funded, and we have the weapons systems we need, that’s how you find peace. That’s how you get peace. You run a risk of wider war when you don’t have those things.
There’s going to be a refocus. Secretary Hegseth has already started off on the right foot with merit and lethality. He’s singing my love song right there in our defense department. We need to ensure that we don’t have a year-long CR. We pass an appropriations bill certainly at least for defense. There are ways that you can do that. You can have a combination of CR and a defense bill but it’s all about actual boots on the ground being ready to go. If your adversary doesn’t think that you’re ready, that’s when they strike.
It looks a lot like 1938 to me. There were 4 dictators back then and there are 4 dictators now involved in imperial activity. Ukraine is about imperial activity. It’s about $26 trillion worth of lithium, natural gas, and natural resources in Ukraine so that they can control it. That’s what China has done with a number of critical minerals. That’s what Belt and Road is about. If we’re not ready, they’re going to come after us.
We can repeat the mistakes that we made in 1916 and 1938 or we can choose not to. Remember, we were supposed to build 5 times more F-22s than we ended up doing. We were supposed to have 750. Do you think we would be talking about how many F-35s we have if we had built 750 F-22s instead of 150? Absolutely not.
Let’s not go down that path again of saying, “We don’t need that many F-35s. It’s time to cut this because we got something else.” You don’t. You don’t kill one line without replacing it with something else. We can’t afford that risk. Ask the Israelis how they took down the entire air defense capability of the Iranians. It’s the F-35. Theirs is two levels below ours in capability. That should tell you something about that weapon system. I am a big fan of the F-35.
We have to look at the fact that we have multiple threats out there. What you’re talking about in the 1939 moment is the interwar period. We’ve had a lot of senior leaders say, “We feel like we’re there.” The other threat that we have, though, is international terrorism. We had the withdrawal out of Afghanistan. We know that there’s a resurgence of Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden’s son is running around out there, married to all the daughters of the biggest terrorists in history. That’s a real threat.
Not only do we have to prepare our conventional forces to combat the peer and near-peers, but we have to prepare our SOF forces to be able to keep the near in front of the peer and keep us out of the peer-to-peer fight. As you look to funding our SOF forces, how do you see the implementation of Special Operations in the next fight?
They’ve been an essential piece for many years. I don’t see that changing. I’d like to see them have the opportunity to participate in the development of some weapons systems on their own so that we can cut down on the time requirement between services. SOCOM should be considered a service that can go, “I want that. I want it off the shelf. I don’t want to do a certain number of testing and evaluation. It’s off the shelf. Give me that now.” You can scale up the size of weapons systems that are involved in that. FLRAA is one of those, which is the follow-on to the V-22 tilt-rotor.
FLRAA is going to give opportunities and capabilities that we’ve never seen before. There’s a slowdown in FLRAA. I’m not going to go into the reasons for that, but we can’t afford that. SOF needs that. SOF needs the V-22 in ways that I don’t think they even understand because they are the true tip of the spear. Having served with them for six months, they do real, efficient work. It’s essential that our adversaries know we’ve got the best in the world. When you close your eyes at night, you might wake up to somebody being in your room. That knowledge for our tier ones and our other SOF forces is something that keeps our adversaries up at night.
I agree. I know most of those leaders who are leading those formations. I’ll tell you that as great as they are, they’re mean when they need to be. When you look at the attitude of the country, we were joking that there’s a different feel here in Congress. All you have to do is go on X or Instagram and scroll the feeds of all of the government organizations. There’s a different look and feel to what’s being posted now than there was several months ago. How do you assess the sentiment of the population?
First of all, as a disclaimer, I don’t get on X.
You shouldn’t.
I don’t because I know as an elected member of Congress, there’s probably nothing good for me or about me there. I have two small kids. I’ll let other people doom-scroll for me. I get the overall sentiment. You’ll see it in news reports that will talk about X. Here’s what I’m seeing. Certainly in District 6, which is a very Republican district and largely rural, they’re proud of the fact that our Military is looking to be more lethal and merit-based and that our president is saying, “Don’t mess with us. Get our hostages out of Gaza. You all need to pay more for your own defense.”
I’m a proud American who’s glad we’re in NATO. I believe NATO has taken the place of the UN in providing for peace. No NATO member has ever been attacked. That’s taken on the role of the UN, which is a failed international organization. Not the Baltics who are spending about 3% to 4% and not Poland, but there are other members of NATO who need to pick up the slack. It goes without saying that the president has singled out Canada in that regard as well as Germany. I’m not even sure what the question was. I got off-topic, which is something I do from time to time.
Talk about the sentiment of Americans.
The sentiment of Americans is that we’re strong again. We’re not to be trifled with. If you attack us, we’re going to hammer you. If you watch The Untouchables, it’s, “You punch me in the face, you’re not going to like what happens next. It’s going to be much worse than a punch in the face.” Americans have been ready for that for a long time. Instinctively, since kindergarten, when the bully comes for your milk money, you have a binary choice. You can give it to him and you’ll give it to him every day for the rest of your life or you can go, “No,” and punch him in the face and he’ll never ask again. It’s human nature.
What we see in the world is a bunch of bullies who are willing to kill, rape, destroy, and empirically take over other nations in a way we haven’t seen in 80 years. Americans want to know that on the border, we’re strong, that we’re going to prevent fentanyl from killing 70,000 Americans every year, and that our troops are being promoted and trained on merit and lethality only so that our adversaries know if they come after us, we will destroy them.
Kurt Schlichter, who I’m a huge fan of, wrote an article some time ago. He said, “We need to rediscover ruthlessness.” I ask the question from time to time, “If Truman, FDR, Patton, and Eisenhower were alive and running our forces and we had to re-fight World War II, would they be tried for war crimes? Do we have the will to win anymore?”
What I have seen in the previous years is a willingness to not lose instead of a willingness to win. In war, there’s only one way to win, and that is not, “Let’s be nice.” It doesn’t work that way. Our adversaries need to know we’re going to win and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win. They need to know to not start this fight.
If you talk about the South China Sea or talk about Taiwan, Xi Jinping is not going to start that fight if he thinks it’s a tie or worse. We’re doing okay. If he gets the sense that he can win, that’s when he goes. We can’t let him have that feeling. Pappy Paparo, who I serve with, is the Indo-PACOM Commander. I would do anything for Pappy Paparo. That guy’s got a plan to win. That’s what Americans everywhere are feeling. We’re feeling, “We’re going to win. Don’t mess with us.” That’s the attitude certainly in my district and throughout the country. That’s how he gets cheered at the Super Bowl and somebody else doesn’t.
They’re upset about that. I would agree with you. The attitude of playing to win versus trying not to lose is something that you have to have in you as a leader if you expect to be successful. My daughter is in high school. We had that conversation about her volleyball team. Playing to win versus playing not to lose changes the whole game. That permeates anything that you do. Last question, and then I got to let you go.
You don’t. Keep going. We’re having fun. Can I address something quickly before I forget?
Yeah.
I want to talk about Mike Waltz. I want to talk about our national security advisor.
He is a great friend of the show. He has been on a number of times.
I told you before this interview that I want to talk about Green Berets. He is perfect in that role. My observation of Green Berets, who I’ve never served with other than in Congress with Mike, is that Green Berets are strategic. They are long-term. I asked you what language you learned. They learn a language. They embed themselves in a group of people, wherever they are, that may have nothing in common with them. They will learn their habits and mimic or mirror those. They will get trusted and accepted by that group of people and they will train them for self-defense as if they were part of the family.
That’s why he’s going to be so good at NSA, juggling the intelligence community, State, Defense, President Trump, Vice President Vance. He’s perfect for that job. As I watched him in Congress, it’s exactly what he did here. That’s what you guys do, bring together a group of people who may not have any reason to coordinate or collaborate. He’ll bring them all together so that the security of the United States is secure. I’m a huge fan of Green Berets. I’m a huge fan of Mike Waltz.
Mike Waltz’s book is called Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret’s Battles from Washington to Afghanistan. When you look at the job of a Green Beret, it’s to be your best friend and your worst enemy. You don’t know which one you might get. It depends on what’s going to be needed at that moment. I agree with you. Mike has done a great job of doing that.
It is great to see him advancing that. He’s been on the show a number of times. We’ve had some great conversations about what is the risk from China and what is the risk from Iran, not how we could baby them. It’s what you’re saying. If we are in conflict with China, then we have to stop talking about things like the Military aspect.
I had a conversation several years ago with Newt Gingrich when he was on. We talked about DIME, the elements of national power, Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic. How do we look at our adversaries across the world? When we talk about being at war, what is the definition of the battlefield? The battlefield is going to be different.
Theirs is different than ours is. We still think it’s mano a mano on the sea and on the battlefield. They’re already engaged in it. If you’re losing 70,000 Americans, 200 a day, to fentanyl that all comes from China, do you think Xi Jinping doesn’t know that stuff’s coming over here from there? He does. How do you diminish the birth rate artificially of the future of their economy? You kill 200 eighteen to 49-year-olds every day, most of whom are going to be great contributors to that society.
We’re already in it. I see weapons of mass destruction as the compounds that are making fentanyl as the first battlefield. The last administration paid no attention to it. This one is going to do that. Especially those members who are from Texas recognize that junk is coming up through our communities from the border. We’re excited about that. It’s poisonous. It’s not an addictive drug. One pill can kill. These people are getting poisoned. That’s a weapon of mass destruction that’s being used on us with that penalty. To your point, China is playing by Sun Tzu’s rules of warfare, which, if you read them, is multi-domain.
How come we don’t talk about it? Let’s take the number you put there. You said 200 people a day.
300 a day from drugs and fentanyl. That’s the same number we lost every day in World War II.
That’s where I was going to go with that because we lost 7,000-ish, I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head, in the global war on terror. On a day where we would have a handful, it’d be all over the news and we would be crying that we’ve got to end the war.
I was at D-Day for the 80th anniversary this year. You stand there, look at the beach, and say, “Thousands were killed in a morning before the sun was fully up.” You ask, “Do we have the will to win anymore?” Why don’t we cover that? Why is nobody out there showing that? If you were to put 200 servicemen being killed every day on the news, the country would go crazy. How come we can lose 200 people to drugs that are coming across the Southern border and nobody says anything?
I have no answer for that. If you do fentanyl alone, 200 a day, that is a big airliner. If we crashed an airliner every day with all fatalities on board, do you think we’d stop that aircraft from flying? Absolutely.
We’d stop all aircraft.
Somehow, it gets lost in the fog. I don’t think most people break it down to how many we’re losing every day, but it’s in our bedrooms and our backyards. It’s one airliner a day. If you include drug overdoses and make it 300, then you’ve got two mid-sized airliners a day. That is the true number. I won’t use any models because I don’t want them to be associated with it. A couple of airliners with 150 people on board every day, you would stop that from flying. I don’t understand. That’s what we’re losing every day in our bedrooms and our backyards.
We had the chance to sit down with Representative Tony Gonzales, also your neighbor from Texas.
He is also my predecessor as co-chair of the For Country Caucus.
He got 800 miles. I threw out 800. He told me it was 822.
He got the most borders of any member.
You’re North of them. The effects of the open border policy have certainly been felt in your district and throughout Texas. We’ve even said every state is a border state. We had migrants going to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
The fentanyl, too
When you look at the immigration policy over the last couple of years and the rapid change that has occurred since President Trump and the administration came into office, can you explain why there’s such a dichotomy of perspectives? Why did one group believe that you can let everybody in, and then you have the administration come in and say, “It’s that easy to shut it off.” My question is, why did we have an open border policy in the first place? How could it have been so easy to stop that it was enacted through a couple of executive orders?
Strength and determination. If they know we’re serious, they’re going to stop. Everybody knew that the 25% tariff on Mexico had nothing to do with goods coming in. We can survive a 25% tariff on Mexican goods. They can’t. Take your pick. Do you want your economy to completely fall apart or do you want to secure that border?
They got the point, and he’s used it brilliantly. Even before he was president, he started saying, “We’re going to do tariffs unless you do this.” They came running. They got the point. It has worked very effectively. Honestly, most people, not just Americans, appreciate a strong leader. That’s what he has stood up to be. That’s what Pete Hegseth is turning out to be. That’s what this administration is turning out to be. It is to show strength and a willingness to say, “Enough. We’re serious. We’ll take a little pain too but you’re going to feel it more, so make your pick.”
We’ve seen that. You brought up the tariffs. The tariffs are a perfect example of the negotiating power that the US economy has. It brings you back to the conversation of you have to begin to run an effective economy that’s not relying on cash injections from foreign nations in order to continue to strengthen that. Do you think that we could have a balanced budget?
At this point, you would have to carve out a lot of the mandatory spending. You got the interest on our debt. It would take some time. We did that right after World War II when we reached 123% of GDP-to-debt, and then we slashed spending. I don’t see this as a mirror of that, certainly not with world threats on our doorstep, but we’re going to have to take some pretty drastic action to get to that point.
After COVID, after the Great Recession, and after trillions of dollars in bailouts, it’s going to be very hard to get to with natural disasters that we’ve been spending money on, too. We can. Can we do it in 2026? No, not if we don’t have a defense department. Do you have the political will to do what’s necessary for mandatory spending? That remains to be seen.
Is the Military ready for the next conflict?
Yes. How many conflicts are you talking about, though? I asked General Kurilla, “What are you needing and getting denied that is going to a different COCOM?” There are a number of combatant commanders in various spheres. That’s why I’m grateful for what the Israelis have done to Iran because they’ve taken 1 of those 4 dictators off the table. They don’t have any integrated air defense. We can march right into Tehran. That’s why I’m grateful for what Ukraine has done to Russia because that economy is teetering. Had those two countries not fought back so hard and so decisively, then we’d be having a different conversation.
Of those 4 dictators, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China, 2 of those dictators have been deeply weakened. That does give us the opportunity to make sure that Xi Jinping knows he can’t win in the South China Sea. Russia is floundering because they’re getting weapons from Iran and North Korea. North Korea, who knows? Based on the alliances we have and the allies we have, at this point, we would win. I have no doubt about that.
We have one more question for you about leadership. We have a tremendous amount of experience when we come out of the Military. I call it perspective. Being in the Military, because of the experiences that we’ve had, whether it be leading soldiers, being in challenging situations or combat, or working with an ally who may not see the world the same way you do and you’ve got to sit there and convince them why it’s important they do, we come into our post-service careers with a certain perspective. We use the leadership lessons that we learned in the Military in our new roles. You served in the state legislature. You are a legislator here at the federal level. As you walk through the halls of Congress, what are the lessons that you take from your Military service to apply to your job?
I never pass up the opportunity to shut up. That’s number one. When you are willing to be in receive mode and learn from others, that is a way for them to understand, “He’s interested in learning.” Sometimes, that’s a struggle, especially in Congress, to take that tack. Believe it or not, we don’t know everything when we get elected to Congress. I have a lot of learning to do.
I have plenty of opinions. We talked for 50 minutes. There’s no shortage of those. When I go into hearings, I try to listen as effectively as possible to all arguments. That way, they know that I’m willing to listen. You can work with somebody who’s willing to listen. That’s the first one. I show that I’m on time. If you show up on time here, you’re way ahead of the game.
If you’re five minutes early to whatever conference or meeting we’ve got and the leadership sees you sitting there ready to go at the top of the hour, they get that. Most Military members do that. It sets them apart quickly. Also, it’s about the mission, the servant’s heart, and the willingness to sacrifice. Sometimes, taking those difficult votes lets them know that you are in it for something greater than yourself. All the people that I served with on the For Country Caucus have shown that in the past to be willing to do that.
America remains that shining city on the hill that Ronald Reagan talked about. Our best days are ahead of us.
Did you hear me say that?
No.
Ask anybody on my staff. I’m a Reagan Republican. I say, “We’re the city on the hill and our brightest days are ahead.” You’re ready for Congress. Run, Fran, run. You do have to be patient. The hardest thing to learn here is, you can’t change the institution. It has been built over 250 years. Like Green Berets, embed yourself in the community, get to know them, achieve their trust, and then there’s no stopping how far you can go.
I’m glad that we have great leaders like yourself who are doing that as well as those around you and the members of the For Country Caucus. Thanks again to your staff for setting this up. We’re finishing up day one. We’ve got one more day to go. I look forward to getting back here. Thank you so much.
Thanks for coming in. I appreciate it.
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