POLICY COUNSEL
FEBRUARY 2025 POLICY COUNSEL SPEECHES
Dr. Jackie Deal
President and CEO
Long Term Strategy Group
Hello everyone, it is an honor to follow our Border Czar. I also wanted to say I’m here actually on behalf of a relatively new organization called State Armor, which is a nonprofit that was formed a little over a year ago to help Americans counter transnational threats at the state level. The reason I got involved is because of what I’m about to discuss with regard to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army, and their progress in threatening us.
As was mentioned, my name is Jackie Deal, and I have been researching the Chinese military for a little over two decades now, and I have some bad news. Whatever you believe about the state of China’s military buildup and preparations for war with us, I am afraid it’s worse than you think. But I would not be here if I did not believe and know that we can prevail, that we can save this country and the American experiment and freedom. And nothing less is at stake.
In the time of doing my work, we’ve gone from—and this the early 2000s with people generally being contemptuous of the Chinese military…back then, it was barely even mechanized and people doubted whether it could ever pose a threat to Taiwan—to more recently thinking that it might almost be without hope in several areas of advanced capabilities like hypersonics or hypersonic missiles that can evade our defenses, or fractional orbital bombardment systems that can pose a challenge for our defenses and threaten our nuclear forces and our homeland. Some people are saying, “You know what, let’s find a way to get to yes with the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party because their capabilities are too daunting.”
That is not an American response to a challenge or a threat. So, I think we need to talk more about what we’re up against and how to win. I am on an Action panel after this, so we are going to talk more about solutions then but let me just explain what I have seen over the last couple of decades.
Back in the early 2000s, the Chinese Communist Party was not as far along in its military build-up, but its ambitions were there. Some people will tell you that Xi Jinping is our problem. He came to power in 2012. Some people say, if only he had not acceded to the general secretaryship of the Chinese Communist Party, we would be on a better path. Unfortunately, I doubt it, because even in the early 2000s, the ambition was visible.
In 2006, the Chinese Communist Party put out what they called their “mid to long-term scientific and technology development plan,” which was a 15-year plan where they basically said, “We’ve become the factory of the world through our accession to the WTO. But that’s not enough, because we’re basically only doing minimal value-added things. We want to be in a position where we are blockade proof, where we are making the technology that the world relies upon, not just doing the finishing touches and then exporting things because we have cheap labor here. Rather, we want to dominate the high value parts of the supply chain. We must focus on everything from agriculture and raw materials, so food and minerals to information technology to defense capabilities.”
Fast forward to 2020, we saw Xi Jinping give a secret speech that later got leaked during the height of the COVID pandemic where he said, “Our goal as the CCP, now that we’ve indigenized and acquired and absorbed a lot of foreign technology, is to build production and supply chains that we independently control and tighten the rest of the world’s dependence on our production and use that as leverage.” He said, “We can counter-coerce other countries.” In other words, defend against being coerced. But of course, if you deconstruct what he meant, it’s that he will be in the driver’s seat. “We will be able to threaten Taiwan, or the Philippines, or other claimants in the South China Sea, or whoever. We will be able to put the Americans on the back foot, because we will have won the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We will command the raw materials and the finished goods on which the world depends.”
I’m sorry to say that, while the pandemic was a huge wake-up call and changed our way of life, we are more dependent—not as dependent, more dependent—now than we were back then on Chinese pharmaceuticals and PPE. Unfortunately, under the Biden administration, some exceptions to our obligation under the WTO—not to favor domestic production that the Trump administration, because of COVID, waived to try to get us on top of this problem—got rolled back in April 2021. So, we are now more dependent on our number one geopolitical rival and a peer adversary military for everything from contrast agents for hospitals, to chemotherapy drugs to aspirin. I mean, it’s very scary.
Almost every week we read about another way in which our dependence on their products is threatening us inside this country. The latest major headline of which you’re probably aware is the Salt Typhoon hack where, because of our reliance in part on Chinese-made routers or modems that they have gotten access to, they were basically inside our major telecommunications networks. Everything from Verizon and AT&T to Lumen penetrated, and I don’t think we know for sure that we’ve evicted them. But even before that, we know that through the Volt Typhoon hack, they had penetrated our critical infrastructure across the country, to the point where you had National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan under the Biden administration, writing with the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to every governor saying, “Your water supply is under threat of cyber-attack from China.” It’s crazy because people don’t even know about this. There are so many things happening, and I understand we have a lot of problems, but as the Border Czar just noted, one of the main ones is our kids and our military-aged youths being poisoned by fentanyl.
So, a lot of the problems go back to China. We know from the good work of the House Select Committee on the Competition with the CCP that the fentanyl problem goes back to Beijing. They have screenshots of the pages on the Chinese government websites where they give rebates on the Value Added Tax to the manufacturers of the fentanyl precursors that then get shipped to Mexico. When the Chinese government says, “This is your problem, it’s your demand that’s causing it, you fix it,” while secretly, they are incentivizing the production of this poison and enabling it to go to Mexico and having their banks turn a blind eye to the laundering of the proceeds. This is not just our problem.
Let me turn back to the military threat, because I wish more people were talking about what has been happening lately. As we speak, China is exercising, rehearsing, preparing to take Taiwan. Xi Jinping has upped the ante, rhetorically. He has stated that the “Taiwan problem,” as he would call it, cannot be pushed to the side indefinitely. In other words, the time is coming when we have to address it. He told President Biden at a November 2023 summit in San Francisco, “We not only expect you not to encourage the Taiwanese to declare independence or do anything destabilizing, now we expect the United States to help us recover Taiwan,” in their words. Of course, it is not theirs to recover. That would be conquest. This is very stark, five alarm, red lights blinking language, and they are backing it up, unfortunately, with military operations. They have conducted at least five huge exercises where they are firing missiles over Taiwan, sometimes into Japanese waters. They are encircling the island and showing that they can, or prepare to, blockade it.
They are constantly interfering with Taiwan’s connectivity. Just this week, a Chinese-owned vessel cut one of the undersea cables linking Taiwan, and this is the seventh major episode in the last six months. I may be getting those numbers slightly wrong, but there has been a dramatic escalation in this regard. They are showing in all sorts of ways with words and deeds that they mean business vis-a-vis Taiwan.
Unfortunately, it goes beyond Taiwan. In 2013, the Chinese military, at one of their elite academies for mid to senior level officers, the Academy of Military Science in Beijing, put out a textbook. It was a big moment for PLA nerds like me, because this is a textbook that comes out every so often. Prior editions never had any language like the language that was in the 2013 edition. In fact, back in 2001, which was the previous version, the Chinese military was still worried about some sort of invasion threat from Japan. Unfortunately, that fear was gone. By 2013, they said, “Not only do we not have to worry about our neighborhood, but we have also sufficiently positioned the United States that we don’t even have to worry about the US. They are caught. They do not really understand. They cannot discriminate whether we’re an ally or an enemy. So, we don’t have to worry about tensions with them. And really, we can get to work with the business of expanding our strategic space.”
Those are the words that they used. “We need more strategic space.” When I read that, smoke started coming out of my head and alarm bells started ringing because, back in 1987, a then-colonel who became a general wrote a piece in PLA Daily that you can’t forget once you’ve read it said, “I’m going to explain the difference between big countries and small countries and their borders. Small countries are those that can’t even defend their sovereignty out to their legal borders. Big countries are those that exert influence well beyond their legal borders, so they are like what we used to call empires. We, China, will need to become an empire effectively, because we are going to need resources and access to markets well beyond the mainland.” Of course, he put it, “The bounteous resources of the mainland, while amazing and incredible, will not be sufficient, so we’re going to have to become a maritime power.”
I was asked to write an article in a journal from Hoover about whether they would favor missiles over aircraft. It turns out they have done both. I would estimate that the dollar value of their aircraft, manned aircraft, and this is not even getting into unmanned systems, likely exceeds the dollar value of our aircraft production today, last year, and the year before. Yet, they also have a tremendous inventory of missiles, and they’re rapidly boosting their nuclear arsenal, so just the changes have been eye-watering or head-snapping, and we have a tremendous amount of work to do.
I know we have other challenges and priorities, and of course they’re all important, but if we don’t get this right, it’s going to be very difficult to deal with any of the others. Thank you very much.
Mr. Tom Homan
Border Czar
Trump Administration
Thank you for the invitation. I’m happy to be here. I love my job.
When President Trump called me, I was out having dinner with my wife. I got a phone call, and it said “POTUS.” So, I told my wife, “Okay, this may be the call.” I walked outside, and President Trump was on the phone. He said, “Okay, you’ve been bitching about it for four years. You want to come fix it?” How do you say no to that? He gave me three things to do. He said, “I want you to secure the border. I want you to run a huge deportation operation. I want you to find these missing children.”
I looked at the numbers this morning and border crossings are down 97%. That’s a game changer. That’s better than the first four years. I looked at the total encounters on the border, and they were 206 compared at 17,000 a day under Joe Biden. 17,000 to 206. Actually, it was 211. Think about that. I haven’t seen 211 in my career, and I started as a border patrol agent in 1984. I’ve never seen numbers like that. I’ll be happy when that number is zero.
You see all these newspaper reporters saying, “Tom Homan is mad about the numbers.” I’m not mad, well a little bit, but I’m happy with the numbers. But I won’t be satisfied until we have total operational control of the southern border. That needs to be zero, right? That’s what it needs to be. God bless the men and women of the Border Patrol. They’re working hard down there, and God bless DoD. You’ve got Pete Hegseth, shoulder to shoulder with me, and the DoD down there is meaningful. The most exciting day of my life was when I saw a DoD airplane filling up with illegal aliens to send them to Guantanamo Bay. That was an exciting morning.
Regardless of your like or love, President Trump is one bad-ass president, and he proves it every day. He’s giving us all the resources we need. Even the first administration, they gave us all the resources we needed, but we never had the whole of government focused on this national security mission of the border. This is amazing.
Like I said, I started in 1984 as a border patrol agent. God bless those men and women every day. The morale’s high, sky high, unlike it was a year ago. Border Patrol was suffering massive resignations and massive retirements. The morale was in the tank. They weren’t upholding the oath they took. They weren’t enforcing the law. They were acting as Uber drivers and tourist agents. But now, the men and women down there, God bless them. They’re working hard every day, and to see that number down to 200 is just amazing. Just wait until we get it to zero, and we’ll celebrate then.
The second issue the President gave me was the interior enforcement operations. The arrests right now, compared to the Biden administration, are up 600%. If you look at month by month numbers a year ago, we’re up double the amount of criminal arrests, double the amount of gang arrests, double the amount of illegal alien arrests. You probably see in the media, “Homan is not happy,” and I’m not. Double what Biden did—what is that? Right, so I’m happy that men and women are out there working hard, but we need a lot more than that. We’re putting more teams out there. We brought some more contracts in for targeting and creating more target packages, so we know where to go.
At the same time, we got sanctuary cities pushing back against us, but thank God, Pam Bondi’s now in position. She will take the sanctuary cities on for me. That’s going to be a great help. We got Kash Patel ready to kick some ass. You’ve got one hell of a team out there in the wild. I’m happy to be with them. Sanctuary cities are sanctuary for criminals. I mean, you probably saw last week, I said I was going to Boston, and the governor and mayor said I’m not welcome in Boston. Well, guess where I’m going next week? I’m going to Boston.
If I offend anybody here today, I don’t care. I know I irritate them, I see these hit pieces coming out: “Homan’s vulgar, Homan’s racist.” That means I’m over the target. That means I’m making a difference. That means we’re making headway. We’re going to every sanctuary city, and we’re going to double the manpower. We’re going to increase work site enforcement. We’re going to show them that they cannot bully us, they cannot intimidate us, they cannot stop us from doing what we’re doing.
President Trump’s been clear. We’re going to focus on public safety threats and national security threats. I just got back from Texas. We hit the Colonial Ridge, which is a cartel stronghold. As of a couple of days ago, it’s no longer a cartel stronghold. I meant what I said about Boston. I don’t want to attack any police commissioners, except that one. When you double down that you do not want anything to do with ICE? I don’t know where that line got crossed. When you are a police commissioner, your number one responsibility is protection of the communities. We made it clear we’re looking for public safety threats, and I can’t understand why any elected mayor, any elected governor, any elected council person does not want public safety threats out of their community. If you don’t want to help us, get out of the way. We’re going to come and do it ourselves. But why wouldn’t you team with us?
I will be in New York next week meeting with Mayor Adams. He’s going to sign an Executive Order letting us back in to Rikers Island. Because he’s doing that, because he wants to be a law-and-order mayor, and because he wants to get us back into Rikers Island, you’ve got Governor Hochul in New York ready to remove him from office. She needs to be removed from office, not him. I am a native New Yorker. I still own a home on the Canadian border, and that’s always been home to me. Mayor Adams, I called him out for three years when I worked for Fox News. He stopped being a cop, became a politician, but then he finally came to the table, and he wants to get us into Rikers Island. He wants to help us look for the worst of the worst, and he wants to help me find these missing kids. They want to remove him for that! The whole world is upside down.
Cops should be the good guys. Now the ones who enforce the law, they’re the bad guys. The one who breaks the law are the victims. Well, we’re going to change that around and get back to what we’re supposed to be doing. Cops are the good guys, and we’re going to make sure they understand that. I’ll be up in New York to do a press conference next week, and we’ll call the governor out. She stood on national TV after police officers were assaulted by illegal aliens. After a young woman was burned alive, she stood on national TV and said, “I agree, criminal aliens should be deported.” Then, she wants to fire the mayor who will get me into Rikers Island.
Here’s how bad it is in New York. If you’re a border patrol agent or an ICE agent, you can’t run a New York state license plate. You don’t know who you’re pulling over. They don’t have access to the New York State DMV. The job’s already dangerous. Now they’re pulling cars over, and they don’t know if the car is stolen, they don’t know who’s in that car, they don’t know anything about that vehicle. As some of you, if you’re cops in here, you run the DMV data and get all kinds of other information. There’s six or seven other things you get from that. When you pull the car over, you have a pretty good idea who that is. We have cars coming from Canada every day with New York State licenses, but we don’t know who they are.
If Governor Hochul truly believes criminal aliens should be removed from New York State then she needs to change a couple of things and we’re going to talk about that next week. I want to hold her accountable, but we’ll see what she does, because it makes the job more dangerous. We just lost a border patrol agent in Vermont who pulled a car over and was killed. The job’s already dangerous. In New York State, you’ve got border patrol agents and ICE agents enforcing the law while pulling cars over every day. They don’t know who they’re pulling over, especially if they’re coming from the border. You know, within 100 miles of border, that’s reasonable suspicion to pull any car over. And these men and women, she’s making their job dangerous. So, I’m going to Albany next week and call her out. And she’s out there, she’s anti-Homan. I’m okay with that. I’m anti-Hochul.
The mayor of Chicago didn’t want me in Chicago. First place I went to was Chicago, and here’s what we did. I was there for the first day of the operation. We took 11 TDAs off the street. We took six child predators, child rapists off the street. We took two illegal aliens that were convicted of murder and released from state prison. We made Chicago safer. With the crime in Chicago, you would think the mayor would want us. Not every criminal in Chicago is an illegal alien, but some are. So, when crime in Chicago is sky high, why would you not want to partner with us? I don’t understand it, but we’re not going away, and Pam Bondi is going to sue the hell out of all of them. I think we’re going to win and finally have some law and order in sanctuary cities. We’re going to get those numbers up, I promise you. The story is true. I’m not happy with the numbers. I will keep pushing on the numbers. Twice as many Biden is not good. We need 20 times more than Biden, because he wasn’t doing squat.
Finally, the kids. The kids are the most difficult part of my mission, and here’s why. Half a million kids were trafficked in this country under Joe Biden. Over half a million. It think it was 517,000. They can’t find just under 300,000. The sponsors aren’t responding. They don’t know where these kids are. I can tell you, based on 40 years of doing this job, some of these children are in forced labor, some are in forced sex trafficking. Some are in pornographic movies. Some are dead. But we have got to find those children. Some of these children, many are probably with family members who are perfectly fine. But I guarantee you some of these children are living a life of hell every day. We’ve got to find and rescue these children. We’ll do the immigration consequences later, but as a father, we’ve got to find these kids and rescue them.
People that want to say that President Trump’s a racist and bigot and all this other stuff, this was what he asked of me. I didn’t have to ask him. He wanted this done. He brought it to me. For those people that want to hate on the president, he wants to find these kids more than anybody, and we’ve already found some. ICE and HSI have found some kids in forced labor, working in a meat packing plant, cleaning up entrails in the midnight shift. We found them on chicken farms. They’re not going to school. These little kids are working off their smuggling fees in forced labor. Some of these kids are being abused every day. We know that. We’ve found some living with predators. What Biden did to CHNV—the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans—he would fly them into the airports. When they announced it, I said, “You’re going to see more trafficking because all you have got to do is find someone here to sponsor you.” There are going to be sponsors. There are going to be pedophiles. They’ll sponsor a child. I knew this would cause huge human trafficking.
They shut down the CHNV at one point. You know why? Because there’s so much fraud. Let me give you an example. From my contacts who ran that program: there was one man who sponsored over 1,600 people, and he was dead for six years. Where are these people? We’re going to find out. We’re going to find them. I will tell you something else. We’re going to hold all these people accountable. If you’re an NGO that got billions of dollars, we want to find out how you got those billions of dollars. United Nations, what was your role in funding this international migration crisis? People are going to be held accountable, so investigations start now. We’ll find out and hold people accountable.
Other than that, God bless the men and women of ICE. They’re out there doing the job every day. Now we’ve got people out there doxing them, putting their pictures up on telephone poles, and giving home addresses out. I talked to Pam Bondi this morning. She wants the details of these incidents. Hopefully, we’ll put a few of those people in prison. Looking forward to it. We’re going to make an announcement next week. I want to educate the illegal alien population myself. A lot of people say they’re all educating on constitutional rights. Well, I’m going to do some education next week. I’m going to hold you in suspense. We’ll make a couple of announcements next week. I’m going to educate a few of them and tell them what’s going to happen.
You can choose not to answer that door. You can hide, but there’s going to be consequences. We’re not playing games anymore. You’ve got congressional representatives “educating these people on constitutional rights.” Well, AOC is about as far away from a constitutional scholar as you can find. I can’t think of anybody dumber that has ever elected to Congress. The newspapers say, “Tom Homan insults AOC.” It’s not an insult if it’s true. So, we’re going to educate people. It’s not OK for any congressional representative—it’s not OK for anybody—to educate people on how to evade ICE law enforcement.
I’ll say it again. We’re prioritizing public safety threats. These people are in the country illegally. They committed a crime against a U.S. citizen. They were ordered removed by a federal judge after due process at great taxpayer expense. We simply want to remove them. For any Congressperson to say, “Here’s how you evade law enforcement, you don’t answer the door, you don’t answer questions, you do this, you do that….” I just can’t believe that any member of Congress does not want the laws enacted by Congress enforced. Because if that’s their business, they need to get out of Congress because they’re wasting their time. Don’t enact laws you don’t want enforced. ICE isn’t making this up. We’re enforcing laws enacted by Congress, and we’re going to keep doing it without apology. Stand in the way all you want, we’ll hold you accountable, too. We’re going to enforce the law without apology. We’re going to make this country safe again. I will not rest.
People ask, “When’s the mission accomplished, Tom?” I get that question all the time. Mission is accomplished when every public safety threat, every illegal alien criminal, every illegal gang member, is eradicated from the United States. Then I’ll be happy. I’ll smile then. Then we’ve got 1.4 million fugitive aliens who had due process at great taxpayer expense. They were ordered removed by a federal judge. They need to leave. And here’s why there needs to be a mass deportation operation. That’s a question I get all the time. “It’s a racist thing. It’s something we shouldn’t be doing. A massive deportation operation, it is just a bad thing all the way around. You can’t justify it.” That’s bullshit, because let me tell you something. They brought more than eight million people into this country illegally demanding due process. I have a right to see a judge. I have a right to due process. I have a right to claim asylum. Okay, and we made that possible. But at the end of due process, 91% will end up with an order for removal. We have to remove them, because if we don’t, what the hell are we doing? Just shut down immigration court, it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Take the border, throw out the border, there’s no consequences. You can’t demand due process and ignore the final decisions of the court. Then, due process means nothing.
We will give them their day in court, but at the end, you get an order to be removed, you have got to go. Because if we do not, we send a message to the whole world. Come to the United States illegally, which is a crime, have due process at great taxpayer expense, ignore a court order and become a fugitive and you’re safe. If that is the message we’re sending to the whole world, we are never going to fix the southern border. When the next four years come and we get a Democrat president, he will undo everything again. Then we’ve got another massive illegal immigration crisis. The past administration did it on purpose, not by mismanagement, not by incompetence, by design.
You overwhelm the border patrol, and that innocent illegal migration they keep claiming—the innocent illegal immigration caused a 600% increase in sex trafficking on young women and children; a record number of suspected terrorists coming across (under Trump, 14 in four years, under Biden, just under 400); enough fentanyl to kill a quarter million Americans—that’s what happens with this illegal immigration. That’s why President Trump’s committed to stopping it. The border will be secured. We’re going to have the biggest deportation operation. It’s going to take time because of sanctuary cities, but we’re not going away. We will keep coming. Finally, we’re going to find some of those kids and save their lives. That’s what President Trump is all about. A secure border saves lives. I can’t think of a better man in the White House than this guy. He’s the greatest president of my lifetime, and he proves it every day.
The Honorable Lee Zeldin
Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
It is great to be with you all again and welcome to Washington, DC! Hopefully, this trip for you into Washington might feel a little bit different than your travels in the past few years. It is a new day. As the president says, across America, this is a golden age of success that we are entering. It is one that we are not going to take four years to achieve. The president’s goal is not to hit them in four years, but to get them done in days and weeks and months, and he has hit the ground running.
This cabinet is filled with so many amazing men and women I am so honored to serve with. It is a different approach. I was always a fan of the Team of Rivals approach. I had that book in my office, and it was a school of thought on how to approach the presidency, bringing people together who would debate, and they might disagree. From that there would be more ideas and more productivity. But here is a whole different model. President Trump put together a team where there is amazing chemistry. Everyone works well together. We are challenging each other and challenging ourselves to make you proud every single day that we are here. That is what keeps us up at night. Tomorrow morning, when I wake up and I head into the office, my goal is to do everything in my power to make you proud, to make you proud of President Trump and this administration. I believe that there is a possibility that what we might be witnessing is the greatest four-year term of any presidency, not just in the history of our lifetimes, but in the history of our country.
We have to make every minute, every moment, every opportunity count. Who knows what the voters of this country will decide in four years, the next time there is a presidential election. We can be hopeful and optimistic in talking about it, but the moment is now. Too often there are people in this town who only think about that next election. Their actions are motivated by getting past that next election, because they want to have a title, or power, or perks. But as one of your guests at the meeting this week, Jim Jordan, always reminded us in the House Republican Caucus about keeping your commitment.
I remember being in Israel the day that the embassy was opening and the front page of the paper in Israel said, “Promises made, promises kept.” It takes a lot to go to people and tell them to support a cause or a candidate that you care about. You want to be able to go back to that person and say, “I told you so!” You put your neck out there, and you tapped into that trust, that faith that the person in your life has in you, and you want to offer them good advice. We all want to be able to go back to the American public and tell them, “I told you so.” We would keep our commitment. This would be a term filled with promises made, promises kept.
It is important for us to ensure that we are good stewards of tax dollars, and that we are not wasting a penny of American tax dollars. We need to ensure that those who are in charge of agencies are spending money as if it were their own money, out of their own pocket. Actually, that they would be protecting this money even more than if it was their own money. As I was going through this nomination process, I saw a video that was put out by Project Veritas that showed a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were tossing gold bars off the Titanic. He said it about four or five times in the video, talking about how they were giving out money with an eye towards getting themselves jobs at the recipient NGOs.
I was meeting all these senators after it. We were talking about the videos. They were asking me to commit. If confirmed, would I make it the highest priority to ensure that we were getting to the bottom of it, that we would go out and find where these gold bars had been tossed? I was maybe a little surprised at how quickly we were able to find so many gold bars. There was a lot.
This was the scheme. They were going through 2024, and they had to get out tens of billions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act spending. They could not get the money themselves. The government of the United States determined that they were unqualified to spend $20 billion. The problem was that if they didn’t get rid of the money, that money would still be there for the next administration. Those people may not spend it the way that they wanted it to be spent. So, they created this setup where they parked $20 billion in an outside financial institution. They gave all $20 billion to eight primary recipients. Eight primary recipients, including people and organizations that not only have all sorts of self-dealing and conflicts of interest, but also no qualifications. A Stacey Abrams-linked organization, NGO, which was brand new, it received $100 in 2023, received $2 billion in 2024. You open the grant agreement and on page one, it gives them 21 days to get out this money. On page seven of the grant agreement, it gives them 90 days to complete a training called how to develop a budget. Now, if you are an entity that does not know how to put a budget together, you probably shouldn’t be getting a grant at all.
The person who is the director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for the Biden administration gave his recent former employer $5 billion—all eight entities are pass-throughs. They gave it to other entities, many of those entities were pass-throughs, too. Many of those grantees who were receiving it had their own conflicts of interest in self-dealing, including one organization. It was a story in the Free Beacon yesterday, talking about how this woman who’s the CEO of the entity was part of the White House Environmental Justice Council, and her organization received $20 million. Every day we turn over rocks and under every rock are more developments that make us only wonder how much more waste and abuse is out there.
They built the financial agent agreement, they built the account of control agreement, to limit EPA oversight as much as possible. The EPA said, “Tie our hands behind our back. Give us less control.” The EPA isn’t even a party to the account control agreements with any of the subgrantees. You say, well Lee, why don’t you reestablish it, don’t you have the power as administrator of EPA to tell Citibank that you’re taking back control of the money? Yes, it’s called a notice of exclusive control but get this. If I give the bank a notice of exclusive control, the grantee gets additional powers. They can then respond by telling the bank, “Now I want you to move my money to this other bank.” Every one of these primary recipients and sub-grantees can tell the bank that they want their money to go in maybe 29 different directions. This is one example.
I canceled a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance. They say that climate justice runs through Gaza. It runs through a Free Palestine. That was canceled. Working with DOGE, I canceled about 30 grants that were going towards DEI and environmental justice, saving the American taxpayer $120 million. President Trump came in, he wasted no time, and he said DEI needs to go, so our office was closed. Environmental justice, a term that by the way, just like climate change, are words that are defined in a way that build broad, bipartisan support all across the entire country. “Environmental justice.” There is a community in this city that has been dealing with an environmental issue, and they have been left behind for way too long. So, we need to do our part to make sure that those people get help, because every American should have access to clean air, land, and water. Okay, that sounds good. How about in the name of environmental justice, instead of spending $120 million dollars remediating that environmental issue, how about we spend the $120 million dollars on our left-wing activist friends instead? In the name of climate change, scaring the American public into thinking that the world was within 12 years of ceasing to exist, that the planet was about to end, there should be a willingness to bankrupt our country. There should be a willingness, they say, to accept the pain for the people in this country who can least afford it, to be hammered with electricity bills that are skyrocketing, and losing out on their choice to get a gas-powered vehicle.
This is a moment where President Trump says we’re entering a golden age of success, not for one particular class or one particular race or one particular religion, he says all Americans, regardless of race, gender, background, it does not matter. For all Americans throughout this country, we are entering a golden age of success, and he is wasting no time to accomplish it.
Now some of you, as we heard, are from California. In California, you do some things a little differently than many other states all across this entire country. And I know, I come from this state on the other side called New York, and there’s this race to the bottom between New York and California. Which state is going to lead the nation in outmigration? That is not a race that a state should aspire to win. But in California, just like New York, there are a whole lot of people who are leaving. And they’re leaving permanently. They’re not just putting California and New York in time out and saying, “We’ll give you a shot. Maybe we’ll come back in six months.” No, they are leaving and saying that they’re not going to come back. Well, California has been receiving waivers from the EPA to allow them to put all different kinds of tailpipe emissions on vehicles with all sorts of states adopting those standards to create this federal government versus United States of California standard. What I decided was that this is a rule that should be sent to Congress for their review. Pursuant to the Congressional Review Act, if they so choose, the United States Congress can vote to override that waiver, to get rid of that waiver, and to have one federal standard that makes sense for all Americans.
We believe in choice. We believe that if you want to go out and get an electric vehicle, go get an electric vehicle. If you want to have a gas-powered vehicle, go get a gas-powered vehicle. We respect each other’s choices in this particular country. The National Governors Association was here this past weekend, and it was pleasantly surprising to speak to some Democratic governors who, unlike the governor of the state that I come from, was talking about “all of the above” energy and actually meaning “all of the above” energy. Too many people who talk about how they believe in “all of the above,” they look at wind and solar as the new baseload power for this country. It is intermittent. It is unreliable. And we need more baseload power. We need to make America the AI capital of the world. That is going to require data centers to be built. We need to bring back American auto jobs. We need permitting reform in this country. We need to unleash energy dominance. All pillars of this EPA.
There is a core mission. Clean air, land, and water: a core mission of protecting human health in the environment. We are very proud of the mission that we just completed in L.A. President Trump came in he said you had 30 days to remove the hazardous materials on the ground for over 13,000 properties. At first, the reaction was one of shock. There is no way that we are going to be able to do this anywhere close to 30 days. And then you sleep on it, and you realize, you know what? We are going to get it done. We must get it done, because the president ordered it, and the people are counting on us. And I do not know what level of bureaucracy and red tape and excuses there are at other levels of government, but if you are a Trump EPA, or if you are in the Trump Department of Energy or Agriculture or Interior or whatever. For us as the heads of the agencies, when the president puts that order out, we are going to make sure that we do it on time, and less than time when possible, and under budget wherever possible. We completed our mission in less than a month. Over 13,000 properties. We’re proud of that.
But here is the thing, every agency has our core mission, but we can’t lose touch with what the American public said last November 5th. They care about being able to afford to survive. They want an agency that is fighting for them, agencies across the board, that respect energy choice, which are helping Americans pursue the American dream. The Trump administration is going to be different, even from the first Trump administration, with a team committed to doing everything all day every day to make you proud. It is an honor for me to be back with CNP. It is an honor to be able to spend this time with each and every one of you, and I am grateful for your passion and your patriotism for this country. I know that Tom and I are about to answer some questions for all of you and that might be a little bit of a different type of dialogue, but I just want to say this.
Thank you for believing in America. Thank you for stepping up. because there’s so many people who come with excuses. They wake up the day after an election and they didn’t vote, but they have a lot to complain about. But you all put your money where your mouth is, and I’m talking about with your vote, with your voice, with your activism, because you love this flag, you love this nation, and you fought harder than anyone. CNP at the tip of the spear, all across this country from coast to coast, to make sure that our voices were heard, that we had the right people in power, that we have people there who can be responsible with our tax dollars, who respect the rule of law, who fight for a safer border, and yes, to allow America to enter this golden age of success. Thank you to CNP. Thank you for the invite. Thank you for your friendship and mentorship.