WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations, Banking, and Foreign Relations Committees and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, today joined Mornings With Maria on Fox Business to discuss the incoming Trump Administration’s legislative agenda for reconciliation, tariffs, and executive orders to put the United States back on the right track.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the reconciliation bill procedure: “I’m confident we’ll do it. It was a great interview that you did with Speaker [Mike] Johnson this weekend, and the best thing that I heard is the pace of play. I’m not particularly hung up on the process, whether it’s a one-step or two-step process, my concern is that it be done quickly. And to hear Speaker Johnson say that he’s got this targeted for early April, within the first 70, 80 days, I think that’s exactly the pace that we need to be moving. As was stated earlier, certainly President Trump can do a number of things with executive orders to begin moving in the right direction. Clearly, another priority for us, Maria, is to get President Trump’s cabinet in place. We’re going to see, right now, whether the Democrats are going to work with us or not. We’ve got threats all around the world facing us right now, certainly even here on our own soil. We need to be getting the cabinet in place. We need to be working on the negotiations for this package. Whether it comes in one or two pieces, I’m happy to do it in one big piece. I’d like to see us get this done, though, as quickly as possible. And the American public needs it. Our economy needs it. The market is expecting it.”
Hagerty on completing reconciliation in one comprehensive bill: “It’s certainly frustrating to people who have very specific issues. For example, on the SALT tax, I’m from Tennessee, a low tax state. I think it’s very difficult for a lot of folks to say, look, we should be subsidizing high tax-and-spend states like California, New York, etc. But that’s part of the package that has to come together. We have to come together and unify as a nation. President Trump did a magnificent job of that in the election, bringing everyone together, getting the mandate that he has. It’s our turn now to act on that. And I’ve been frustrated with the size of the bills up here, Maria, since I arrived in Washington, 4,000 page bills. The fact is, we do this, and we need to figure out how to get as much as we possibly can accomplished. Again, I’m coming back to the beginning, as quickly as possible. The American people need it. Our economy needs it. Our national security needs it.”
Hagerty on the need for leadership changes at the Pentagon: “The most important thing to me, with respect to our Pentagon and military, is to get new leadership there. Pete Hegseth is working his way through the process right now. I’ve been supporting him all along the way. We have got to get new leadership at the Pentagon, focused again on lethality and competence, away from DEI and pronouns. There’s a huge problem in terms of retention recruitment. Again, the men and women that serve in the Pentagon are doing this to protect our nation. They’re not here for the many reasons that the Biden Administration has completely covered them with, with respect to DEI initiatives. We’ve got to get back to the basics. That’s going to be the most important aspect of our lethality. Then I think we need to take a very critical look at the entire procurement process, Maria. The inefficiencies there are enormous. The fact that Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are going to take a hard look at this through the DOGE initiative, I think is way overdue. We’ve got tremendous technology here in the United States. We need to figure out how to deploy that rapidly here, at the most important time, I think, that we face as a nation, from a national security standpoint. There’s a lot of process work that needs to happen here that should go along with a look at our overall budget needs.”
Hagerty on Trump’s implementation of tariffs: “Maria, you and I both know that President Trump is an expert negotiator. I’ll say this: he’s the president that has imposed tariffs. He did it in his first Administration, the [Section] 232 [and] 301 tariffs. President Trump is not hesitant to support tariffs where appropriate. I’m not going to get ahead of him because he’s going to do the negotiation in terms of where he feels the most important strategic application of these tariffs should be. But let’s face it, we’ve got a huge issue, in terms of our trading partners. So many of them have better deals than we do. We go back in history, right back to World War II, we made very advantageous trade deals with countries whose economies have been devastated in Europe [and] Japan. But we should have time limited those. We should have put some sort of GDP per capita limit. Instead, they still enjoy much more advantageous trade terms than we do. We need to get to reciprocity. That’s what President Trump has always said. He will be strategic in this process. Again, I’m not going to get ahead of him, in terms of exactly how he’s going to do it. But I’ll say this: he has done it. He will do it, and he’s going to use this to America’s advantage.”
Hagerty on Trump’s plan for executive orders on day one: “There are a number of them in the hopper right now. They’re going to be implemented at a very rapid pace. The damage that the Biden Administration has done over the past four years is beyond anything I could have imagined, in terms of what it’s done to our economy, our national security, frankly, the psyche of this nation. So, President Trump will be putting forward executive orders, I’m sure at a dramatic pace. But the other fact of this is the results have already begun to happen. You saw Masayoshi Son commit to a hundred billion dollars of investment here in the United States before President Trump has even taken office. On a national security front, you see our partners overseas stepping up their national security expenditures. The UK is stepping up to two and a half percent of its GDP on defense. You see the EU saying, now maybe we should buy U.S. LNG and supplant Russian LNG. These things are happening already. So, before President Trump has even come into office, we’re seeing the results.”
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