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4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.politix.fm

In just the past week, Donald Trump has illegally fired over a dozen federal anti-corruption watchdogs, installed Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, and then claimed the power to arbitrarily withhold congressional appropriation—an unconstitutional maneuver called “impoundment.”

In this episode, Matt and Brian discuss:

* What are inspectors general, and why does Trump want to fire them?

* How does his desire to avoid waste, fraud, and abuse oversight interact with his attempt to impound federal grant, loan, and aid spending?

* What Democrats can do to try to force Trump and the GOP back into compliance with the law before it’s too late.

Then, behind the paywall, are these just indiscriminate power grabs, or is there a method here? Why did Elon Musk, the country’s biggest defense contractor and political donor, take a special interest in getting a lightweight like Pete Hegseth confirmed as defense secretary, at a department that suddenly has no watchdog? Did the fact that Trump had limited success abusing and corrupting the civil service in his first term trick people into letting their guard down?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Transcript

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0:00.0	maybe Democrats were trying to have a normal appropriations negotiation with Republicans so they could get more money spent so that it had inflationary pressure on prices so that eggs got more expensive so that they could really stick it to Donald Trump on the eggs question.
0:17.0	And the impoundment order is Trump's answer.
0:27.8	His way of saying, no, no, no, I'm just going to depress the economy by not spending this money, bringing the price of eggs back down.
0:29.1	Checkmate lives.
0:36.5	Hey, everyone, you're listening to a free preview of the politics podcast.
0:43.6	This week will cover a blitz of lawless actions Donald Trump has taken since last episode.
0:48.9	We'll talk about who's behind it and whether there's any coherent method to it.
0:55.7	We're going to fold in the news that Republicans kind of just barely confirmed Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. And who benefits when huge government departments like
1:02.0	the Pentagon with massive budgets have no internal watchdogs and Donald Trump steals the power
1:09.2	of the purse from Congress.
1:14.7	So if you want to hear all of that, you can upgrade your subscription to paid at politics.fm.
1:20.5	Hey, everyone.
1:21.2	Welcome to the politics podcast.
1:22.4	I'm Brian Boiler.
1:23.5	I'm Matthew Glacios.
1:25.1	Okay.
1:25.4	So to take listeners behind the scenes for a second, Matt and I had planned this
1:29.8	episode to follow a pretty simple arc.
1:32.4	Starting on Friday night, Donald Trump conducted a purge, an illegal purge of over a dozen
1:40.1	inspectors general from major departments and agencies in the government. So these are basically
1:45.6	anti-corruption watchdogs, and Trump wants them gone. Also on Friday night, 50 Senate Republicans
1:53.0	and Vice President J.D. Vance confirmed Pete Hegseth to run the Defense Department. So with zero votes to spare, Matt and I kind of think
	...

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