Democrats are angry about the efforts being made by the Department of Government Efficiency to cut the nation's spending, but the plan that's being used is from their own playbook, Rep. Riley Moore insisted on Newsmax Thursday.
He said it dates back to the work former President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich did to balance the budget.
"Bill Clinton laid off 377,000 federal workers, worked with the Republican Congress, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and produced a balanced budget," the West Virginia Republican told Newsmax's "Newsline." "This is not new.
"There is a playbook out there. There's a blueprint for doing this. And that's what DOGE is doing."
But as with "anybody who's trying to do the right thing, it's never a straight path," Moore added.
"It's always difficult, and there are always going to be people complaining; but this is the right thing to do for the American people and the taxpayers of this country."
Moore said that when he was West Virginia's state treasurer, he was the first elected official in the United States to divest from the financial firm BlackRock.
"We ultimately ended up banning them and several other financial institutions from even operating with financial contracts with the state government of West Virginia," said Moore. "We ended up being a lot better off for it.
"We ended up actually making more money. Our money market fund that we had in West Virginia was beating BlackRock's money market fund."
But that move also came with pushback, he said.
"I had people calling me saying, 'Riley, you're an idiot, why are you doing this?'" he said. "Then here we are now, and everyone knows the threat and how terrible it is for the American people."
Moore is now working on a bill to ban further student visas from going to people coming into the United States from China.
"I have a shocking number for you," Moore said. "There are 300,000 Chinese nationals in our country right now on student visas.
"And I've written an op-ed, and I'm looking at legislation introduced right now to ban any further visas, stop the student visa program with China.
"They're stealing our secrets. They're stealing our IT, and they're spying on our military bases."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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