Nick Craig In For Pete Kaliner (03-28-2025--Hour2)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeatkalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] We're talking about government efficiency, waste, fraud and abuse in a very interesting interview last night. Brett Baer did a like 35 minute sit down with Elon Musk and the Doge Boys about all of the things that they have found some shocking clips coming out of that. Before we get into some of that interview, I want to jump back to our phone lines. Mark's been hanging on for the last couple of minutes. Mark, good afternoon. You're on The Pete Kaliner Show with Nick Craig. What's going on? Hey, Nick. Thanks for taking my call. Sure.

[00:00:58] Yeah, I just wanted to say I'm preaching to the choir here. So this is more of a PSA. But I started my career in the military and then a few years in the federal government. And then I couldn't stand it anymore. Basically saw gross incompetence, laziness, etc.

[00:01:24] So I left that and went for many years in the big companies and was responsible for a lot of groups overseeing M&A and the associated rationalization of those groups. That's something you never see in the government.

[00:01:51] There's no incentives to do that. The only incentives in government is just to continually grow the group. And there's never any feedback to cut that. So I think the difference that's happening with Doge and the cabinet members is they're looking at it horizontally from an organizational perspective with the cabinet guys.

[00:02:19] And then the vertical is everything that Elon and his group can do from a financial perspective and following the money. So in short, we're well overdue for this. My fear is that once this is done, it's not put in place to be repeatable and continually do.

[00:02:47] And my last comment is when they when they do that, it's almost like these bills that are built by lobbyists. And, you know, why do you think these numbers are always like? 50 billion, you know, or 100 billion. Right. There's no there's no bottom up estimates or direct correlation of where the money is going. And I'll end I'll end with this.

[00:03:16] Appreciate your time is it is bringing it back locally. As a investor in homes. When I since I have everything paid for. When I pay my taxes at the end of the year. You know, half of my property tax goes to Mecklenburg schools. Oh, yeah. Which, as we know, which can't be controlled.

[00:03:40] And in the state, lost the Supreme Court case with trying to hold them accountable with metrics. So we have that problem locally as well. It's in all forms of government, Mark. And let me say not only thanks for the call this afternoon, but thanks for your service to our country and appreciate that. And your comments. It reminds me of a story or a conversation I was having with a buddy. This is probably about two months ago.

[00:04:06] He works for a government contractor that works in the military space that that's as broad as I'm going to get with it. And he was at a trade show and got up and was chatting with with an individual at the trade show that had just started working within the federal government in some avenue of of of the military. And the guy told him that he started like maybe six months before they had this conversation.

[00:04:36] And he's an engineer working for the federal government. And he started his new position and he was banging out jobs very quickly, right? That somebody would come with him to him with a request. Hey, we need this engineer. We need this looked at. We need this put together, whether it was cat or some sort of auto draft design, whatever. And he was he was banging out these projects, getting them done very quickly. And then his co-workers came over to him. And this was after he was there a couple of weeks and said, hey, man, you got to slow down.

[00:05:06] They told him you're handing out these projects too quickly. You're working too efficiently. You got to slow this down. We typically take six to eight weeks to get back to people when they come to us and say they need something done. We typically have a six to eight week turnaround. So here's a guy, younger guy, retired from the military, now working for the federal government in the engineering field,

[00:05:30] who is being told by his co-workers that he needs to slow his role and he needs to work at a slower pace because he was getting too many jobs done too quickly. Have you ever heard of that happening anywhere else?

[00:05:46] If you went down and drove down to any business in Charlotte today, walked into the front door and said, I demand to speak to the CEO of this company and ask them, have you ever encouraged your employees to do things at a slower pace? Have you ever said to your team, hey, you guys are working too quickly and too efficiently. You need to slow this down. You need to drag the process out and make things take longer.

[00:06:14] I think you'd be hard pressed to find anybody in private business that operates in that manner. But that is a just a real example relayed to me from a good friend of mine as to how things happen within the federal government. This idea that you just slow walk and it's normal and acceptable for things that should take just two weeks to take six or eight weeks. And what are you going to do? What's the alternative?

[00:06:43] If you're inside government asking other government for help, what are you going to do? There's nowhere else to go. You're not going to shop around and find somebody else to do it. You've got to stay within your channel. You've got to stay within your avenue, within your road, and that's within the federal government. So you need some engineering project done. You need some AutoCAD thing drafted. This is where you go. And if it takes six to eight weeks, well, then your project gets delayed by six to eight weeks. Who cares?

[00:07:13] Just the process. Now, I wasn't shocked to hear that story. I wasn't necessarily surprised to hear that story. But there was a certain part of me that thought, like, okay, it's as bad as I thought it was. When this story was being relayed to me a couple of weeks ago, I thought, you know, okay, I'm not surprised. But yeah, it kind of pins home every single issue I thought was going on in the federal government, exemplified right here in real time.

[00:07:41] 7-0-4, 5-7-0, 11-10. Catherine's hanging online once she's got a story about some friends in D.C. Catherine, you're on the Pete Callender Show with Nick Craig. Go ahead. Hi. Yeah, the first story I heard of many, well, quite a few since then, is from a lady teaching a lady's Bible study at my church,

[00:08:03] and she was the supervisor manager of a contracting firm that was hired to help out in a department in Washington, D.C., and she personally went there with her team, and she said to me that what she was able to do in half an hour, it took the people there in that department eight hours to do.

[00:08:33] That's a nice full day worth of work you can get done there, Catherine. Eight hours, 30-minute project? I mean, that sounds pretty good to me. And I have another story. A fellow nurse had a good friend, a very good close friend in Washington, D.C., who told her, her friend was a federal employee working in a department there, and told her that some assistant secretary of, I don't know what it was, Secretary of Labor or whatever,

[00:09:02] but the assistant secretary came to tour their offices where her friend worked, and she said her friend told her that they had a hard time in her department looking busy for the hour that the assistant secretary toured the place. I'm sure you can, there's probably some YouTube video you can pull up in full screen on your computer that makes it look like you're clicking back and forth between Excel spreadsheets

[00:09:30] and getting all of this stuff done. First, these are just two of several stories. One lady I know of, she, I was sitting next to her, I think on a plane or train ride, and she had worked in a department there in Washington, D.C., and it was a good job, and I said, well, why did you leave? And she said, I just couldn't handle not working. I just, I like to stay busy.

[00:09:59] Well, that's exactly, Catherine, to your point, that's exactly what we just heard from the previous caller, and appreciate your call this afternoon, those stories at 704-570-1110. That's exactly the case. People that actually can't stand sitting there all day doing nothing, they can't work for the federal government. It just doesn't work for them. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain? And Cabins of Asheville is your connection.

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[00:11:20] Call or text 828-367-7068. Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Talking about some stories out of the government and just the baked-in inefficiencies that exist right there, exist there right now. Let's head on over to line three. Say good afternoon to Dave, who's hanging on the line. Dave, you are on the Pete Callender Show with Nick Craig. Go ahead. Hey, hello, Nick. This is Dave from Rock Hill.

[00:11:49] I've been retired now three years, so I put 40-plus years in manufacturing. Went from, you know, hands-on to managerial to design, et cetera. So let me just give you a couple stories and what people say about what you've been talking about. So I had a friend I knew who was a union electrician. Son graduated from high school and got him a job. Went into work, and of course he had all the skill sets. Dad taught him this his whole life.

[00:12:19] Started doing all the wiring. Well, someone came along and started with a hammer blasting all of his work. It was outlets. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You're doing too many. You're allowed to do this many because it's a union job. Stop doing it. Go get lost somewhere. And then in my profession, you had estimations. You had to do so many things per hour. Or this job took so many hours. Say, for instance, the estimate was way off, and you were able to get it done in two hours,

[00:12:48] but it was estimated for eight. There are people there that literally would milk the rest of the day but get paid for eight and do nothing else. And then as a manager, I would swear that when the clock struck the start hour, there were people there that would say to themselves, okay, let me see what can I not do today. And you'd see that in certain individuals over and over again. Of course, you'd have to weed them out to get the doers and not the people that want to do less but do more.

[00:13:18] So we had a phrase. We had a saying. When the paychecks got handed out, thank you. You earned your paycheck. And those people knew. They earned their paycheck. The others, they got their paycheck gift-wrapped. And that's the same thing that I feel is happening with the efficiency and our government, et cetera. These things are, the word gift, of course, is wrong, but super unearned. And, you know, I'm so glad to see that we are cutting back

[00:13:45] and handling things like we would handle our own finances at home. So I love that. Dave, I'm so glad you brought up that last point about your own finances. I talk about this a lot on my Nick Craig Show podcast. This idea, I mean, every single day, Dave, you and I and everybody else listening makes decisions about how we're going to handle our personal finances from are we going to buy a $7 cup of coffee out or are we going to make one at home for, you know, $0.18 or however much it costs to make coffee at home with filters

[00:14:15] and a little bit of ground coffee. We make those decisions each and every day. The problem is, yeah, the problem is, Nick, people don't know how to say no. They think everything is yes, yes, yes, yes, more, more, more, more. And there's a guy I used to listen to decades ago, every day before work. His name was Dr. Robert King. He was the dean of King's College, Christian. And he would say, as a boy growing up, there was too much month left at the end of the money.

[00:14:41] And so many people don't know that, that that's real. There's too much month left at the end of the month. Same thing with our government. You know, I can go on and on. I'm South Carolina. You know, I'm very fortunate. We have a balanced budget here in South Carolina. Now, I had another friend, just to share this with you. He was in government in a local city nearby, very, very close. To you. And he would have to go to seminars throughout the country. Well, he met other people in his seminars with his same position from other parts of the country.

[00:15:12] That their buildings, they were ejected from their buildings. Or maybe that's the wrong word. Because they couldn't pay their bills because they didn't have a balanced budget. And it wasn't theirs. They couldn't pay the rent, et cetera. They were, that's the word, evicted. And this is government facilities. Wow. So, you know, there's a time and a point where people have to say no. No is the answer. And that's really tough as you look at what's going on right now, Dave. Thanks for the call.

[00:15:42] Great stories this afternoon at 704-570-1110. When you look at the no that you're talking about, this has never happened before in government. Government has never been told no. And let me make sure I'm clear with this. The fault is not the employees. The individuals that are attempting to do their work. Going back to the story I relayed in the last segment, the fault is not with the guy that wants to do his job.

[00:16:10] The fault is the apparatus that is government, that has told these individuals, that has created the environment where there is, in fact, not only no incentive to get the work done, but they actively work against getting the work done in a quick and efficient manner. It's the overall government system as a whole.

[00:16:33] There are so many great individuals, hardworking individuals, that have to try and play this game within state, federal, and local governments day in and day out. They're not bad people. They're not bad workers. It's the system as a whole that is broken, that encourages this kind of activity to take place. Plain and simple. It is a system issue, and it is being turned upside down on its head right now at the national level.

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[00:18:00] Mail orders are accepted too. Get all the details at createavideo.com. I want to get into this interview last night. Brett Baer did a 30 or 35-minute sit-down with Elon Musk and the boys over at Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. It was a very eye-opening interview. We've heard from Elon, and we've seen a lot of him in media. He's done plenty of interviews with people like Sean Hannity and other folks on Fox.

[00:18:26] He's done Joe Rogan and a couple of other podcasts over the last few months. And we've got some insight into what's going on in Doge, what's going on within the Department of Government Efficiency. This interview by Brett Baer yesterday was really, really well done. And I'm just going to take it right from the top. Starts asking Elon some questions, and we'll just take it from there. Jump in a little bit here and there. And, of course, your calls as well at 704-570-1110. Here's last night's interview with Brett Baer and the Elon Musk and Doge team.

[00:18:55] Thanks for having us and doing this. I know there's a lot of interest in this. First, let me start with you, Elon. What are the budgetary savings goals, and how much do you think you've achieved so far? Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So from a nominal deficit of $2 trillion to try to cut the deficit in half to $1 trillion, or looked at it in total federal spending to drop the federal spending from $7 trillion to $6 trillion.

[00:19:24] We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and food, reduce the spending by 15%, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not efficient, and there's a lot of waste and fraud. So we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services. Isn't that remarkable? I'm just going to stop it right there.

[00:19:51] Elon Musk, over what he's learned in the last couple of months, believes that he can do a 15% cut to the government and essentially have no impact on what the government does. None of the services they provide. Nothing. A 15% cut. And you heard from him there at the top. The current deficit's about $2 trillion a year. They're not even talking about reverting that back completely. They're trying to just cut it in half.

[00:20:19] A trillion dollars in savings. It's a remarkable amount. More from the interview. In fact, if not making it better. I'm going to talk to all the guys here about the specifics, but for you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process? The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It's mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually.

[00:20:46] For example, the simple survey that was literally a 10-question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey cost you about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that. For just the survey? A billion dollars for a simple online survey. Do you like the national park? And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go into nothing. It was like insane. You technically are a special... It was just insane. So hold on a second here.

[00:21:16] The federal government was spending a billion dollars on a survey about parks? A national park survey? They spent a billion... Somebody who's charging them a billion dollars to conduct that survey? I don't... How do you even begin to wrap your head around how that's even possible? I mean, you can go on Google... You have a free Gmail account.

[00:21:44] And you can go on Google and create a Google form for free and collect feedback. Let's say you needed a higher level service than the free Google form. Okay, I'll give you that. You spend a couple thousand dollars on a subscription to some online survey company and get it done. But no. That's not good enough for the federal government. We've got to spend a billion dollars getting a survey on national parks. It's absurd.

[00:22:14] And it's all over the government at every single level of not only the feds, but locally and in the states. This is the status quo for government. There's never been any incentive to cut costs. There's never been any incentive to do things, quote unquote, on the cheap. So, yeah, if it costs a billion dollars to collect what kind of tree somebody likes in a national forest, who cares? Not our money, right?

[00:22:42] We can just continue to spend it. Nobody's the wiser. Go government employee. And you're supposed to be 130 days. Are you going to continue past that? Or do you think that's what you're going to do? Well, I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame. So in that time frame, 130 days. And the process is a report at some point, at 100 days? Not really a report. We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time.

[00:23:12] So every day that passes. Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far we are succeeding. And we're going to talk of the specifics, but there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. Obviously lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. And they characterize the approach as this. Fire, ready, and then aim. And how do you approach that?

[00:23:41] How do you respond to that? Well, I do agree that we actually want to be careful in the cuts. So we want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once. And actually that is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that. Which does not say that we don't make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying someone in baseball has got to bat a thousand.

[00:24:11] That's impossible. So when we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly. And we move on. You know, that right there is, I'm glad Elon Musk characterized it the way that he said. Use the word thrice, which you don't hear very often measure. Not once, twice, but thrice. If you believe the characterization of this from the left, you even heard our own governor, Josh Stein, make the joke during his State of the State address

[00:24:38] that Elon Musk's taking a chainsaw to the federal government. He's just in there willy-nilly waving around a chainsaw, cutting anything and everything that has a pulse. Well, let's see. Who do I believe? The governor of North Carolina who's getting his talking points from left-wing hack media outlets or the guy that's actually doing it? And the team that is, you know, if you watch this interview last night, I know we're on an audio platform right now,

[00:25:06] but if you watch this interview last night, who do I believe? The guy that's doing it and the team that's sitting behind him or a bunch of left-wing hacks on MSNBC? I think I'm going to have to say I believe Elon Musk in this case. He even says, yeah, we've made mistakes. We're going to continue to make mistakes. When we make those, we're going to correct it. How refreshing is that to hear? I mean, you don't need any smoke blown at you or anything. We're going to make mistakes. When we do, we'll do our best to fix them.

[00:25:34] That is so refreshing to hear. I'm not sure that has ever been said in relation to the federal government. Not once. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place.

[00:26:03] So you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news.com. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news.com.

[00:26:32] Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. So I want to go back to some more of this interview. Brett Baer, Elon Musk, the Doge team talking about some of the issues last night on Fox News. They're his exclusive interview. Take a listen. Some people say this shouldn't take a rocket scientist.

[00:27:00] Steve Davis, you are a rocket scientist. Used to be. Now essentially you're the chief operating officer of Doge. Day to day operations. Fair to say? Yeah, part of the Doge team. So how did you end up here? What's the biggest challenge you see? The reason I'm here, which is probably for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the taxpayers in the country would agree that in order to have the country going bankrupt

[00:27:29] would be a very bad thing. And therefore the country going not bankrupt is a good thing. That all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do. I think the thing that's special right now is we actually believe there's a chance to succeed. That there's an administration that's supportive and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome. And I think that's given the inspiring mission and given the non-zero chance of success, it was worth doing.

[00:27:58] I just like to sort of reemphasize that point. The success of Doge is only possible with President Trump and with the outstanding cabinet that he selected. It would be impossible without the support of the president and the cabinet. But you're finding the money. I mean, it's big numbers, right? Yeah. Like Elon said, the minimum impulse bid is often a billion dollars. So for example, the $830 million, which was the online survey, that's an enormous amount of money. Oh, this is that forest service.

[00:28:26] $830 million for a survey? For the forest service? What is the survey? Does everybody that filled it out get a free gold bar or something? I mean, how is that even possible? I don't know how you could even spend that kind of money for an online survey dealing with national parks? That's absurd. That wouldn't have been found if the Doge wasn't working with it, in that case, the Department of Interior.

[00:28:53] But then taking it one step further, Doge then publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency. So now the general public, it would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now anyone can just log into doge.gov anytime and see these payments. They're not yet in real time. They're close. But they'll probably be in real time within the next few weeks. But the process still involves Congress, right? At some level? We try to keep Congress as informed as possible.

[00:29:18] But the law does say that money needs to be spent correctly. It should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully. It's not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud. It is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress. And we've seen actually great support, at least from the Republican side of the House, and occasionally some Democrats too. You know, it's nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while.

[00:29:47] But usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. So they'll say what we're doing is somehow unconstitutional or legal or whatever. We're like, well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with? And they can't point to any. And we list them all on Doge.gov and the Doge handle on X. And you'll see just outrageous things, one outrageous thing after another. Joe Gabby. That's exactly the case.

[00:30:14] And Elon Musk is absolutely, he mentioned earlier, batting 1,000. He's batting 1,000 with that. And it harpens in perfectly to what we were talking about earlier. If you are against this, well, first of all, why are you against this? But if you are against it, what is the reason why? What do you do and what do you believe is going to be the fruits of your labor as a taxpayer, as an individual that is funding the government?

[00:30:44] Why are you okay with the waste? Why are you okay with the fraud? Why are you okay with the National Park Service spending $800 million on a survey? $800 million. What do you believe that you are getting? What is the ROI, the return on investment on an $800 million survey, 10-question survey,

[00:31:12] from the National Park Service? I don't care what the ROI is. It's not worth $800 plus million. This is a survey that could have been conducted literally for free using tools readily available. Or if not, maybe a couple hundred, a couple thousand dollars at the absolute most. But no, federal government's involved.

[00:31:37] All these bids and contracts and everybody enriching themselves, everybody lining their pockets with cash from U.S. taxpayers. No, sounds like that survey needs a cost in the ballpark of $800 million or so. Just a drop in the bucket. It's like you're dropping a quarter on the side of the street. That's what it's like for the federal government. $800 million on a survey. It's absolutely remarkable. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:32:06] I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendarshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone.