LIVE: Idaho Gov. Little, Florida Gov. DeSantis Hold Press Conference on Balanced Budget Amendment

Pretty good chunk of the Idaho legislature this morning had a robust discussion about what we're doing here in Idaho and he's on a road tour. This afternoon he's going to go to Montana and do the same road tour there. I'll let him talk about it but you know and actually Governor DeSantis and I were sitting together at one of those three or four White House events we've been at in the last month and and we talked about this and and he is he's very eloquent talking about it about the fact that out of total frustration with the lack of action at the federal level to the to the debt and if you look at Florida's economy their you know revenue and expenditures are about eight or nine times bigger than Idaho but both of us have balanced budgets, have rainy day funds, have balanced our budget, are making infrastructure investments, are given tax relief, significant tax relief, except I still got an in-kind tax so we're working on it. I gotta backfill something. We're working that way but the commonality between the two states is stark through just talking about the migration into Florida and the migration into Idaho. I'm a little closer to Oregon, Washington, California than Governor DeSantis is but those fundamentals that I know are important to the people of Idaho are the fundamentals that Governor DeSantis has. In fact, one of the things we Republican governors are all you know we've all been about government efficiency. Governor DeSantis has even got he's even working on a package to get donors down to the local level. We haven't done that here. Granted, we urge them and cajole them and try and get them to be more efficient. I'll be very interested to see that. So with that, Governor. Okay, thank you. Well, thanks Brad. It's great to be here in Idaho and I will just say as somebody that lives in the northern part of Florida now in Tallahassee, this weather's fine. This is not much different than what we've had in the morning. I was expecting colder so that's really really great to see and I would also just like to point out for the record, I've got a son in first grade who's a big prognosticator in terms of football predictions and for the record in the college football playoffs he picked, not successfully, but he picked Boise State to beat Penn State and he was rooting for Boise State to beat Penn State. But it was cool coming in being able to see the famed blue field as we were coming in and to be able to be here with a lot of like-minded folks. I used to say until someone corrected me that Florida since I became governor has led the nation in economic growth and a lot of it is because we're comparing New York, California, Illinois, some of those states and someone said actually Idaho has grown a little bit more than Florida over that. So Idaho has had the most GDP growth since 2019. Florida a close second and if you look at a lot of the policies that have been done in Idaho, there's a lot of commonality with Florida, universal school choice, they just enacted the death penalty for pedophiles which we did a couple years ago and we're eventually going to get the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a bad decision it made in Kennedy versus Louisiana. They've done great things in the legislature on medical freedom so I think that there's a lot of really good stuff happening in Idaho and what brings me here today is I've been a supporter of a long time to make some changes to how Congress operates particularly how they're spending our money and if you look at when the turn of the 21st century happened, the U.S. debt from 1789 when the constitution was ratified and the new government took hold until the year 2000, the U.S. accumulated 5.6 trillion dollars in debt and even at that time people were saying that that was a problem. Well fast forward 25 years, the national debt's now at 36 plus trillion dollars and as a proud conservative and as a proud Republican, I have no problem pointing out the truth that this is both parties in Washington that have created this mess. As much as I'd like to come up here and blame the Democrats, the fact of the matter is it's happened under both parties. The budget that was just passed in the U.S. House of Representatives by the Republicans forecasts the debt to be in the year 2035 56 trillion dollars. At what point is this just going to break our country? I think we all know there's a problem. I am convinced that you are not going to have Congress all of a sudden change its behavior for the long term. I think the reason we've gotten in this with respect to fiscal is because there are certain incentives for the people that are in Washington to behave the way they do and we need to change those incentives and that involves we the people in our states doing what the founding fathers put in the constitution to propose an amendment to provide some of those constraints on their behavior, in this case requiring a balanced budget for the U.S. government. Now I have to balance the budget in Florida, Idaho has to balance the budget. Don't tell me it can't be done. When I became governor in 2019, if you take all the debt in the history of Florida from the 1840s when we became a state that we've accumulated until I became governor, just in my tenure we've paid off 41 percent of the state's total debt. Now that's not just an annual surplus. We run that, but we're actually digging and taking our surplus, doing tax cuts and other things, but then paying down this debt. By the time my term expires, we will likely have paid down over half of the state's debt that was accumulated over 180 years ago. We had to make tough choices, but part of the reason we're able to do that is because there's never a question that we have to at least balance the budget. So it's either balanced or surplus. We don't have the option to do others, so people understand that and they're more willing to make really important decisions. So Idaho has an opportunity to certify this proposed amendment under Article 5 of the Constitution. There have been 27 states, including Florida, that have done it. As Governor Little mentioned, I'm going to be going to Montana and we're going to be meeting with those folks. If Idaho and Montana join the fight, that gets us to 29. There's a couple other states that are on the precipice as well. You need 34 states to trigger Article 5 where you would actually write an amendment and then eventually send to the states for ratification. I don't think it would even get that far. I think if you got to 33 states, I think Congress would see the writing on the wall and I think they would rush to write an amendment that they would then pass and then send to the states for ratification. Keep in mind, it requires three-quarters of the states to ratify any changes to the Constitution. I'm a small-c conservative. I'm a big believer that the Founding Fathers did better than anyone has ever done in devising a plan of government. It's not something that I would do lightly, asking for an amendment to the Constitution. But we can't keep doing the same things up there and all of a sudden just hoping that we're going to get different results. I think we know that this is hardwired to go in a certain direction. At some point, we the people have it within our power to choose a different course. That's what we're here to do, to be able to do. We had a great meeting with a lot of the legislators. Really great questions. I think people are thinking very deeply about the country's future. But we can sit here and say, oh, Idaho's economy's growing. They're doing this great legislation. Florida's doing all this stuff. That's great. When the Biden administration was in, we had to fight them on almost everything to be able to do that. But at some point, the states are not going to even be able to be successful if the federal government just completely goes off the rail with the fiscal. $56 trillion in 10 years? What's the interest on the debt going to look like at that point? I think it would be really, really problematic as you're seeing it. So we have an opportunity to do something. I think the Founding Fathers understood that wherever the seat of government was going to end up, and they didn't know it was going to be in the federal gut when they did the Constitution, they knew that there would be a danger where we just go off the rails. They knew they needed to empower the states to be able to take corrective action. That's really what a balanced budget amendment would do. It would force them to make better decisions and would ultimately avert our country from really having a fiscal collapse. The final point I'll make is this. The only time in modern history, the last 50 years, where there has been a balanced federal budget was in the late 1990s. Bill Clinton was a Democrat president. He came in. He wanted to spend a lot. The voters rejected that. They sent Republicans in in 1994. They ended up arriving at a balanced budget at that time. They also were pursuing a budget amendment that failed by one vote in the U.S. Senate. Can you imagine if the balanced budget requirement was enacted in the year 2000? How much different our country would be in terms of our fiscal solvency today versus then? How do we go from $5.6 trillion to $36 trillion? So we have an opportunity to act. I commend everyone here in Idaho for the great work they've done across the board. You guys are an example of a state that shows that conservative policies work. Common sense works. I think we're both in the same boat. When you do well and your neighboring states do poorly—not really neighboring from us because Georgia, some of those do well—but you've attracted people. There are some benefits to that. It can help with the economy. There are also challenges—schools, roads, all these things. Talking about Canadians are going to boycott coming to the United States. Not if you drive on the roads in Florida. That's not true. I see these license plates everywhere. We have a bunch of Canadians. We have other people moving. So it does create challenges. I'm not anyone that's begged people to move to Florida, and I don't know how Idaho approaches it because a lot of our constituents are like, there are so many people here. The reality is people in the United States have the right to vote with their feet, and they have voted with their feet over particularly these last five or six years. They have fled California, Oregon, and Washington, and they've chosen places like Idaho because they're seeking a better life, just as many people have chosen Florida from even California and Washington, but also New York and Illinois because we do it right. So the common sense policies work. We just need a little dose of common sense up in Washington, D.C. Okay, we're happy to take some questions. Yes? So here's what I'd say. I think what happens when you go into Washington, D.C., it's a culture that's developed over many decades, and there's a lot of people that have very good intentions. I know a lot of the people up there. I remember when they were running for the first time. They didn't want to be part of a swamp, but what happens is there's just a lot of inertia. This is the way we do business. For example, the way they budget. You can have an agency that gets $10 billion, whether it's successful or not. The next year, the budget starts off at $10 billion plus 7%. They don't even have baseline budgeting. I don't know how they do in Iowa. In Florida, no agency is entitled to anything. You have to justify every single year in the budget, and they don't do that. So it would just change the culture there. They obviously could work out a lot of different things about how to do. I mean, I would just say, you just look at how much money the government was spending prior to COVID. Look how much it's now. They did not even revert back to pre-COVID levels of spending. I think you could do that. I think there's a lot of things you could do, but one of the things it will do, if they have to balance the budget, look back to World War II. We had a massive debt after World War II, and rightfully so. I mean, it was an existential threat to humanity, and we did the right thing. Massive debt, and then within a couple decades, three, four decades, you had that lower. Why? Because the economy really boomed, and Congress focused on policies that would help our country advance and the economy to grow. In Florida, we just have to make decisions. You make decisions every year. There was one year, and when COVID hit, my legislature had already done the budget before things really got crazy, and so I waited and held the budget until the end before I acted on it, because we didn't know. There was a lot of uncertainty. People were canceling vacations, all these things happening, and I vetoed a lot of money. I said, listen, there's some of my priorities in here I'm vetoing, because we don't know. It turned out we did very well, because we were open, and the economy boomed, and all that. One year, I had to veto 3% of the entire budget, because it just wasn't the right thing to do for the state. Folks will be able to make those determinations. The people will be able to elect people on certain platforms to be able to work that out, but we have to say that Congress cannot just keep charging to the credit card indefinitely. We're spending more than $1 trillion a year, which is more than we spend on military, to just pay interest on the debt. Just think what happens if you have to refinance that at higher rates. That will balloon. You could be paying $2 trillion just on interest on the debt, so they need to change their behavior, and I don't think they will do it on their own. One, I don't believe that that's accurate. Just think, the Founding Fathers put Article 5 in for a reason. Why would they, one, have put a mechanism to undo what they worked so hard in Philadelphia to create? No, they understood that there'd be a time where the governing class was just insulated from the best interests of the country, and that you would need to have some constitutional reform that didn't require the people or the states to go through that same governing class. I would remind people, the Constitution was created by the states, and the federal government was created by the states, not the other way around. Second, I don't think it will actually come to that, because I really believe history has shown, once there's momentum behind this, Congress sees the writing on the wall, I do think they would write an amendment and send it to the states for ratification, because they want to be able to control that amendment. And I think states like Idaho and Florida, if it's a good amendment, will be happy to ratify it. If they play games with it, I'm not going to amend the Constitution lightly. So I think you're going to do that, and I fully expect it to happen. But let's just say you get 34 and you trigger it. I can tell you, in Florida, when we did our convention call for this amendment, we have limitations on what the delegates can do. I, as governor, can recall people. I mean, just think about it. If someone in one of our states got up for a balanced budget amendment convention and they said, whoa, we really want to look at reining in the Second Amendment, I would have those people on the plane to Tallahassee before they could even get those words out of their mouth. It would not happen. We've even put criminal penalties in for delegates that go wayward. So I don't think that there's a real risk of that, because you can take appropriate action to ensure that the subject matter at hand is what is debated. But even if somehow all that didn't work out, you need 38 states to ratify any changes to the Constitution. Is there anybody believing, with the majority of states in this country being red states, that you would see things like the Second Amendment or some of these things that would be whittled away? There is no way that can pass muster. The only reason I'm a supporter of a balanced budget amendment, I'm also a supporter of term limits through this route. But both of those have strong support from the public, because people understand that the trajectory is bad fiscally. They also understand Congress should be limited in terms. So there's different reasons to do it. But there's no way none of any of that stuff to get 38 states to ratify. So I don't think it will come to even going it. I do think Congress will pass one. Even if you did, there's plenty of ways where you can make sure that they're focusing on the task at hand. And keep in mind, when the founders did the original convention in 1787 in Philly, they did it in secret. They met to revise and extend the articles. They went, there was no media, there was no anything. Obviously, different era in terms of digital, there wasn't any of that. They didn't even have anybody who could write an article and put out a pamphlet. That would not fly nowadays. I mean, obviously, this would be publicly broadcast and everyone would be able to see. It's not like you're just going to go into some convention and burrow in there and no one know what you're doing. So I don't think it's a real risk. And I think the people that say somehow the whole thing would melt down, they're basically saying that the founding fathers were wrong to give the people in the states an ability to restrain the federal Congress. And I don't think they were wrong to do that. I think they understood Congress could be the problem. We met with the legislators earlier. And so you hear a lot of talk about the debt and the fiscal, obviously, as a big problem. You also hear a lot of talk, and I totally agree with this, and I know most of the people in Idaho do, about the growth of the bureaucracy and the administrative state. And how can a bureaucrat be spending tax dollars through USAID to do to promote transgenderism in Bangladesh? How is that something that could ever be thought of as appropriate? People say, even the courts, how judges are issuing these nationwide injunctions to restrain the president from doing really core Article II responsibilities, in this case, transporting illegal alien gang members back to their country of Oregon, or at least El Salvador's holding area. All of those problems, the root is the fecklessness of the modern Congress. Congress has the power of the purse. They don't have to do continuing resolutions that empower the bureaucracy. They could use the power of the purse to restrain the bureaucracy. They haven't been willing to do Congress can limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts. They have plenary authority to do that in the Constitution. They don't do that. I know that they'll complain about when courts do this, but they don't take the action necessary. And then, of course, they've chosen to pile on the debt. So I just think Congress, as an institution, particularly over the last 20 years, has really gone off the rails. And I think the founders understood there would be need for the states to step in and offer some reforms. To that point, all those concerns, I've been here for a while, got across my mind. But the absolute desperation and the magnitude of it, with minimal risk of what happens if it goes today, we don't even think it's going to get to 34 days. We think things are going to happen. There's all those sidebars, all those guardrails we can put on those. But then what's the alternative? Do we want our federal debt to go to $70 trillion and consume all of the capital and basically burden our children, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren? I think there is no other usable option that our forefathers put in the Constitution. And also, I made the point earlier, it's like, let's just say something popped out that was really, really bad. Literally, it would take us an afternoon. I could call Brad, I could call GN40, I could call Kemp. I can call these governors and say, this is bad. We put out a thing with our legislative leader saying no, and it would die. Immediately, we would be able to rally 13 states. I think the risk is so infinitesimally small compared to what Governor Little points out, the big risk of continuing on our current course and what that means for the country. I'm not sure about that, but I think the questions were excellent. These are clearly legislators that are thinking very deeply, not just about the issues confronting Idaho, but the future of the country. I think we're in similar boats, just like our states have had success. That's great. But we're also, we're all Americans here, and we want the country to succeed. I have a four-, six-, and an eight-year-old at home. I know most of the legislators have kids and grandkids. You start thinking about, what does that future look like 20 years from now? $75 trillion in debt? How do you square this circle? I just think people are really concerned about the future of the country. I think they asked all the right questions. I think they're thinking very deeply about it. I do think the fact, if you just had the balanced budget vote separately, seems like there would be probably more support than the package that wasn't able to get the votes the other day. Yes. Just for what he's referring to, during the Biden administration, we rejected federal funds on a variety of things because they had strings attached. Some of the road funding, we had to do all the DEI and woke policies, which are totally contrary to our state's policy. We had led the fight against that stuff. Now, it's more fashionable to be against it. When we were doing it, we were having an uphill battle. We did it. We told the Department of Transportation and the Biden administration, here's $350 million or however much it is. We're not using it. They're like, we don't know how to take it back. They literally did not know how to take back the money. Same thing on refugee money to send back, I believe, to HHS. They didn't do. I'm sitting on almost $900 million. We're not going to accept it because we're not going to change our behavior. Let's send it back and be part of the DOJ efforts. We went up and met with Elon on Friday in Washington. He had one of his lieutenants there. They were just like, you want to give back money? Yeah, we'll accept it. They got on the phone to Treasury. Within 30 minutes, we had a plan to do it. We have initiated that. What's the promise of DOJ generally? I think there's a lot of promise. I think when you see some of the spending that's happened, nobody justifies some of the grants that have been going out on some of these things. It was clearly taking taxpayer money and using it to push an ideological agenda. It was not about serving the interests of the country or what's in the public's interest. It was an ideological niche interest. Basically, these agencies have been taken captive by this viewpoint and use your money for that. I think it's been great to expose. Here, I think, is the challenge. We're here talking about a balanced budget amendment because Congress won't change its behavior. Elon, and they're using a lot of savvy tech and all this stuff, are showing how the government mismanages money, but also just substantively, should government spend it on this? People have voted to do this in Congress for many years. Why are they doing it? How do you justify it? You're running into the momentum that Elon has with DOJ with the fact that Congress has not been willing to change its behavior. The most recent continuing resolution that the Republicans passed in the House funds everything that Elon had pointed out. It didn't change any spending from the Biden. In fact, that's a continuation of Biden's last year as president, basically, to do this continuing resolution. What Elon will say is, well, they're not going to let these grants go out. I think that's true. Ultimately, if Congress is appropriating the money, at some point, it's going to come to a head. Maybe you don't have to do a certain grant, but can you just impound everything? That's going to end up in court. There's a law on that. The solution is, if Elon's doing this, Congress should codify the DOJ cuts in the law. There's no question Congress can do that. They have the power of the purse. But when you do continuing resolutions, that's just government on autopilot. Some people say, how could someone have said to do this? Fauci, I was very upset at some of the things Fauci was doing over the years, including these cruel experiments on these beagle puppies. How did that end up happening? I'm a dog owner. A lot of dog owners are looking like, are you kidding me? But it's because the bureaucrats have no accountability. It's an omnibus bill. It's a continuing resolution year after year, which is basically government on autopilot. If you don't have the prospect of having Congress rein you in by defunding your program because you behaved badly, you're going to induce bad behavior. That's just the nature of it. I think it's really a battle between DOJ and Elon, and then this institutional swamp. So far, I think that Elon's success has been limited to the executive branch. I have not seen Congress willing to step up and actually make these reforms permanent, which you're absolutely going to have to do. We were talking earlier about Congress could balance the budget tomorrow, hypothetically, let's say, but it doesn't mean the next Congress is going to abide by that. They'll say, oh, we just came up with a 10-year deal to balance the budget. No, you didn't. Because each Congress that gets elected, they don't have to abide by that deal. They can legislate with a clean slate. They can choose to increase spending. A constitutional balanced budget amendment, you can't legislate around that. That's the rules of the road, and Congress will be restrained from plundering us Yes. So having talked to President Trump about this, President Trump understands that as much as we have governments too big, as much as the bureaucracy has gotten out of control, he understands that there are certain functions that the federal government should be performing and performing well. For example, there was this dust up about the National Weather Service. President understands. He's dealt with these hurricanes like we do in Florida. He understood. So he's like, no, no, no, we need that. So I think it'll all work out, because I know President Trump's view is government's doing a lot of things it shouldn't do, and those are things that we should focus on. But some of the things that are core functions, well, we should do. Now, there's things that happen within those core functions. For example, the Department of Defense, I'm a big supporter of. I'm a veteran. But at the same time, that's a big bureaucracy, and there's a lot of tail bureaucracy and non-tooth, the tip of the sphere that has grown over the years. So paring back that actually frees up more money to be able to do more in terms of lethality. So I think the president totally gets all that. You're going to see different things that are going to happen here or there, but I think ultimately it will land in a spot that the American people are going to support. It's unfortunate, and this is working its way through the courts. And I personally think the president has Article II authority to hire and fire people within the executive branch. That's not how it's been viewed in the more, maybe the last 20, 30 years. But you end up in this kind of weird situation where probationary employees, even if they're really good, they can be laid off. But someone who's been there, who has tenure, whatever the protections, even if they're not good employees, it's much harder to get rid of them. I don't think that that makes sense, but I think they're working through a lot of this stuff in the courts. And I think you're going to end up seeing this land in a very, very good spot. There are things that, we have the lowest number of state employees per capita in America and Florida. And while we're proud of that, we also have invested strongly in disaster response and emergency management. We've invested strongly in law enforcement. We've invested strongly in education. We've invested strongly in conservation. And I'm doing the biggest environmental restoration in the world with the Everglades. So we've really focused on things that really matter. And I think that's President Trump's view as well. So some of the stuff, I know there's a blip here, a blip there. Some of the stuff I think, quite frankly, is not presented accurately by some of the outlets. But that being said, I do think it'll land in a really good spot. Yes. Yeah. So Florida, we have a few people on social security in Florida. You know, they'll do this. This is like some of the people, this is political rhetoric. They'll say Florida is not a donor state. They're a recipient state. And they count social security benefits. But you know, my seniors, if they move to Alabama, the checkbook, it's not like that money's going to the state government. It's just the fact that it's going to people who now live in Florida who earn those benefits. I feel very confident, certainly with President Trump, that they're going to be honoring the benefits that seniors have. Unfortunately, a lot of seniors live check to check, basically. We do have some wealthy seniors that don't need social security, but even a lot of our middle class seniors in this era of inflation, for them not to have social security checks, they may miss a payment. And in Florida, we're now having to go to the voters, most likely in 26, to reform our property taxes, which is done at the local level, not at the state level. We have elderly who bought a home in South Florida, let's say, for $200,000 30 years ago, and now it's being assessed at $1.5 million. Well, even though we have some protections against property tax, how are they going to come up with more and more money every year? So we're going to rein that in as well. So when you talk about elderly on fixed income, it's a really significant issue. I know the president very much is sympathetic to that. I don't think social security is as much of the problem as some of the other, particularly the discretionary, the way some of the medical is done, although we're going to do force Medicare for seniors, and Elon's going to get to this. There is a lot, I mean, when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments, I mean, that should not be happening. And I don't think it will happen once you have kind of doge get in there and do that. Same thing on unemployment insurance. Now, different states handle it differently, as you know. In Florida, we call it reemployment insurance. We're limited on it. We don't view it as a way of life. We view it as temporary. Our economy's been good, so people have the ability to get jobs. But if you look at the amount of fraud in unemployment insurance, it's been especially since COVID. So we volunteered with the doge team to kind of get them in our unemployment system. And even though we've worked hard to police it, and I think you'll much different in Florida compared to like California, where there were tens of billions in fraud. We know that there's issues there. Like for example, you are not allowed to have any of these benefits if you're in this country illegally, but are they using fake social security numbers? I know doge thinks that that's a big, big deal. So you're going to see, I think, some serious overhaul of how the unemployment insurance system is worked. Clearly, there's a role for that, but it's not for people to just dip in into abuse. And so finally, we're taking a look at all these things. And I think it's going to be really, really positive. But if you just go back to 2019 levels of just the discretionary budget, forget about social security, just the discretionary budget, pre-COVID, when we were still kind of spending a lot of money, if you just kept it there and froze it for five years, you would save massive amounts of money right there. And I think what really kills us is that you have amount of spending, and then that's the baseline that never goes below that, no matter how effective or ineffective these programs are. A balanced budget amendment or requirement, that's going to cause them to totally overhaul the way they do budgets. So I really appreciate being here. I want to thank the governor, lieutenant governor, thank the legislators for really leaning in on this. What we don't want is to wake up 10, 15 years from now, us being some major, major financial crash because of interest rates and the debt and everything, and say, man, you know, we could have done something in the states to avert this and we chose not to do it. No, we see the problem. We've seen the trend lines. We're not just going to sit back and just hope that Congress changes its behavior. We the people have it within our power to make Congress change its behavior. Thank you. All right.