1-25-25 The Weekend Hour 3: FEMA & Trump. Eliminate It?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good night. Michael Brown joins me here the former FEMA director.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie, no, Brownie, You're doing
a heck of a job the Weekend with Michael Brown.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hey, welcome to the Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to
have you with me. I appreciate you tuning in. So
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(00:29):
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(00:51):
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everybody needs. Let's talk about FEMA for a moment for

(01:12):
those of you that are new to the program. In
two thousand, I was after the two thousand election, I
was nominated by President Trump to be the General Council
at FEMA, and so in January of one, after the inauguration,

(01:32):
I assumed that position and quickly became the Deputy director
of FEMA, confirmed by the Senate by the way unanimously,
and then ultimately in US it would have been early
two thousand and three, became the first Undersecretary of Homeland Security,
So you could say that I kind of started in

(01:53):
the mail room and worked my way up. After the
attacks of September eleventh, Congress decided to create the Department
of Homeland Security, which it was kind of interesting. By
the way, you can read about this. I wrote a
book in twenty eleven called Deadly Indifference. Deadly Indifference. It's

(02:15):
available in Amazon. I think it's available in hardback paperback,
and I think you can get an ebook also anyway,
if you'd like to read the history of that. It's
a book called Deadly Indifference and obviously I'm the author,
so go buy that. Give me some lunch money, go
buy the book. And after the attacks, Congress felt like

(02:38):
it needed to do something. Here we go, we got
to be seen doing something. Can I get a call
one day and I was asked to come over to
the Oval Office and I was asking a very simple question.
Congress is thinking about creating a Department of Homeland Security
and combining these twenty two different departments and agencies into one.

(03:05):
What do you think of that? And my answer was
very simple. I think is the stupidest thing I've ever
heard of. But let me explain why. That's why I
thought it was a stupid idea, and that gets to FEMA. FEMA,
created in nineteen seventy nine by Jimmy Carter, was originally

(03:28):
conceived as a consolidation of all the old civil defense
agencies and it was a place to house all of
the black ops operations Continuity of Government continuity of operations,
which are top secret programs that maintain a functioning government
in case that the government becomes incapacitated, a thermonuclear laydown,

(03:55):
an invasion by the Chinese Communist Party, I mean any
number of things. You know, A catastrophic natural disaster that
you know, a meteor hits, you know, hits the earth,
and all comms and communications and transportation everything goes out. Well,
how do we keep the government functioning so that the
commander in chief can direct the military and the agencies,

(04:17):
and how do people continue to get their Social Security checks?
How do we keep all that operating? So FEMA was
and still is to this day, in charge of those programs.
That's why I always jokingly refer to my home in
New Mexico, our second home in New Mexico, as that's
my undisclosed location. So I ended up being in charge

(04:37):
of all of those programs. Congress decided that, Well, let
me go back up. The reason I thought it was
a stupid idea to create the Department of Homeland Security
was because FEMA was already like a giant orchestra conductor.

(04:57):
Now this is pre DHS, not talking about post DHS,
which I will do in just a minute, but pre
Department of Homeland Security, whenever there was, for example, not
let's just use nine to eleven, because that's pre DHS.
That's the that's the last major disaster before DHS. I
think it would be the well, the last huge, the

(05:19):
one everyone's familiar with. So on nine to eleven, femus
steps up and is what I would describe as this
orchestra conductor. Because you have federal, state, and local involved
in responding to nine to eleven, responding in a typical

(05:43):
way that you would for any disaster, say the buildings
collapsed on their own, that there was a that there
was an earthquake in Lower Manhattan and it caused the
buildings to collapse. Well, the New York Police Department, the
New York Fire Department, the New York Office of Emergency Management,
the Port Authority of New York, the State of New York,

(06:05):
and actually the states of New Jersey and New York
and Connecticut would all be responding. Well. Nine to eleven
is a major disaster that affected all of the country.
You may remember all the planes came down, we shut
down the airports, we shut down the airlines, We did

(06:26):
all sorts of things. So now you've got the federal
government involved, and it's not just FEMA, but it's the FBI,
it's the CIA, it's the Department of Housing and Urban Development,
it's the Department of Commerce, it's the State Department. Every
possible facet of the federal government is involved also, so

(06:47):
how do you coordinate all of that. That's what the
FEMA director does under the Stafford Act. Prior to DHS,
I had a direct line of communication, direct access to
the President I had. I had the ability to just
walk into the West Wing. I had the ability to

(07:08):
pick up the phone talk to the President. He had
the ability anytime he wanted to, often did call me
at all hours, middle of dinner. Presidents of the line
was to talk to you. Yes, yes, ma'am, I'll be
right there. And I describe it as a great orchestra
conductor because we were the clearing house for everything so

(07:31):
that if and in fact, we had an op center
and operation center that was comprised of what were called
the emergency support functions. So you had the Pentagon, you
had the State Department. You had a representative of state governments,
local governments, you had a representative of the White House.
You had representative of everything, so all around a gigant

(07:54):
in a gigantic operation center, you had all of those
different functions, include the NGOs including private businesses. And then
you had these giant television screens in which people that
you also needed to talk to and all of which
was secure so that you could have top secret conversations
with the President or the White House Situation Room or

(08:16):
whenever you needed. And the purpose was to deconflict policy
problems or to coordinate action items about what people should
be doing. What DD they need something? Okay, well, what
does DD need? Let's get that done taken care of.
DD might be in conflict with the State Department. On

(08:37):
nine to eleven, for example, the State Department was flooded
with different countries offering to help. Well, we had to,
you know, make a decision what countries would we accept
help from and what countries could we not accept help from,
And that had to be deconflicted. And all of that
was done in that op center. Then you had the

(08:59):
New York Fire Department, the New York Police Department, Office
Emergency Management, all the port Authority had all of those,
so those would be represented at different times so that
we could ask them, what do you need, what's working,
what's not working? You know, how can we help? What
do we do? It was just this great operation and
that was the true best function of FEMA, and it

(09:21):
worked well, worked very well, which is why well let
me take a break here, But which is why I'm
in the middle of authoring a second book about the
creation of the Department of pue Land Security and how
that turned into the best way to describe that as
a cluster. You know what, Text the word Mike or

(09:42):
Michael to this number three three one zero three. Tell
me anything, ask me anything. Just start your message with
the word Mike or Michael. Be sure and follow me
on X. It's at Michael Brown USA. I'll be right back. Hey,
So weekend with Michael Brown and your list, and I
appreciate it. Be here and follow me on X. It's

(10:04):
at Michael Brown USA. Go do that right now, Follow
me on X at Michael Brown USA. So we're talking
about Trump and his comment, which I'll get to in
just a minute, about FEMA. But I wanted you. I
wanted you to have a really solid background about FEMA
pre DHS because pre DHS, FEMA was I think functional.

(10:26):
It did its job fairly efficiently. It's like any other
government agency. It's not the most efficient organization in the world,
but it fulfilled its mission, and it fulfilled its mission
I think for a tiny government agency in the grand
scheme of things, did it very well. It was collaborative,

(10:48):
it worked well. I worked with governors of all stripes, Democrats, Republicans, independents,
senators of all stripes. It was it was nonpartisan. It
was I should say it was bipartisan, but it was
nonpartisan also. And we looked at every disaster as how
can we best help that state and local government and

(11:11):
how can we best help the people affected by that disaster.
And in fact, in the book that I described earlier,
Deadly Indifference, the book that I talk about FEMA and Katrina,
I made it a point that my staff, and this
is the difference between leadership and management, My leadership style
was that if if we need to do something that

(11:34):
is right, that is going to make this response to
a disaster better and is going to help people, then
we need to do that. And then if it somehow
is close to or maybe even goes against a particular
rule or regulation, then my leadership style was you do it.

(11:55):
I take responsibility for it, because I'm the one that
will get a ass and did get his ass hauled
before Congress to answer for why did you do this?
And oftentimes why didn't you do that? THEMA was always
FEMA was in a position that no matter what it did,
it would be criticized by somebody. It never failed. Well,

(12:20):
you could have done this, well, here's why we didn't.
Well you didn't do this. Well, here's why we did
do this. Here's what I mean. It was just it
was constant, always constant. But the one thing that made
FEMA effective was that the FEMA Director, under the Stafford Act,
was directly responsible to the President. That's why Bill Clinton

(12:44):
actually made the FEMA Director an official member of the cabinet,
whereas I was an unofficial member of the cabinet, but
nonetheless direct access, which meant when I asked for something,
when I did it. We talked at the very beginning
of this program program about mission assignments. When I would

(13:04):
do a mission assignment assignment and let's use Department of
Defense as an example, when I would mission assign the
Pentagon to, you know, send five black Hawk helicopters to Mississippi,
or say to western North Carolina. They would adhere to
that mission assignment instantly without question because they knew it

(13:28):
was coming from the THEEMA Director who was acting on
behalf of the President of the United States of America.
And they also knew that they didn't have to worry
about the deployment of those five black Hawk helicopters to
a disaster. They didn't have to worry about it affecting
their budget because when I mission assign DD for those

(13:53):
black Hawk helicopters, I paid for it. So it worked
quite well. And that's why I say it was a
great orchestra conductor. That's all pre Department of pue Land Security.
And then I get a call sometime in two thousand
and two from Clay Johnson, who was the Deputy director

(14:16):
of the Office of Management Budget College roommate of President Bush,
and said, we're putting a transition team together despite our objection,
and the administration did object to the creation of the
Department of Phone Landsecurity. Despite our objectant objection, Congress is
going ahead and they're going to pass legislation to create

(14:36):
the department. So we want to be ahead of it.
So we're going to put together a transition team, and
you're going to be one of the five members, the
five leaders of the transition team. Oh okay, So now
I have two jobs, two big ass jobs. I have
to run FEMA and at the same time I've got

(14:56):
to put together this enormous department, along with for other
people and Clay Johnson. So we started doing that. And
the reason I want to write this second book about
the creation of the Department of Homeland Security is that
we made certain that FEMA retained that sort of orchestra

(15:17):
conductor position so that we could coordinate within this new
department and continue to do business the way we had
done business before DHS was created. And then everything went
to feces. Tom Ridge, former Governor of Pennsylvania, who was

(15:38):
at the time a Homeland Security advisor to the President,
was going to be nominated to be the Secretary of
Homeland Security. And they'll get me wrong. I love Tom Ridge.
He's a great guy. He's a great, great American, and
he gave me the leeway to design my part of
the department the way I wanted it. But then on

(16:01):
March three, two thousand and three, the Department officially became
a branch, not a branch of government, a department of
the executive branch. March three, two thousand and three, and
on that day I sent Tom Ridge a memo that said,
in essence, your staff and the way they are now

(16:26):
implementing everything goes against everything we presented to the president
is the opposite of what we described. You're centralizing everything,
you're marginalizing FEMA. You're doing all these horrible things, or
your staff is he wasn't himself that all these things
are being done, and it's creating a military style organization
and that's not the way FEMA operates. And you're taking

(16:49):
away the direct responsibility for the FEMA director to the president,
which means you're going to create a bureaucracy between me
and the president. And that's going to cause FEMA a thing.
And it did because now post DHS, if I wanted
to mission assign those five black Hawk helicopters, I talked about, Oh,

(17:13):
I could sign the mission assignment, but it would first
go to a budget person, not at the disaster site,
but it would go to a budget person in DC
who would start questioning, why do you need five? Well,
if you only need three, do you need six? But
more likely it was always you don't need five, you

(17:35):
only need three. I'd have to have that argument, and
I'm in the middle of a disaster. I don't have
time to mess with that bull crap. I'll tell you
more about that next be sure and follow me on
X at Michael Brown USA. I'll be right back tonight.

(17:55):
Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA director of.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
Talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie, Brownie, You're doing a
heck of a job the weekend with Michael Brown.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Hey, so begin with Michael Brown. And that's what you're
listening to, and I appreciate it. You want to send
me a text message the number three three one zero three.
Start a message with one of two words, Mike or Michael.
I read them all the time. I read every single one.
I don't respond to all of them. I read every
one of them. And be sure and follow me on X.
It's at Michael Brown USA. That's the social media platform

(18:24):
that I'm probably most active on. But I'm also on
Facebook and all the others, and you can find those
at a website. Michael says, go here dot com. Michael says,
go here dot com. So let's go back to the
helicopters I was talking about so pre Department of Homeland Security. Now,
remember in a disaster, minutes count. You know, you have

(18:45):
to do in one minute what on a regular day
you might do in thirty minutes or an hour. So
minutes count so I mission a sign the Pentagon for
five black Hawk helicopters because my ex I'm in the
field too, I'm in the disaster area, and my experts
in my logistics people in the area have told me,

(19:08):
you need five black Haw helicopters. So I do a
mission assignment for five Blackhawks. It goes to dd Prior
to DHS, they would just immediately send me five black
Hawk helicopters. Post DHS, I make that same request for
five black Haw helicopters. Now it doesn't go directly to DHS.

(19:28):
It now I mean to d D Instead, it goes
to DHS where a budget with where a green shaded
you know, bemie weenie bureaucrat looks at it and argues
with me, are you sure you need five? Can you
get by with three? I don't have time to argue
with you. I need five. It's in my budget. Approve it.

(19:50):
But these people have no clue what's going on because
they're sitting in an office in DC. They don't know.
They don't know Squad about a disaster, they don't know
Squad about the suffering. They don't Squad about anything. They
want to argue with me about three black hawks versus
five black hawks. Why don't you listen to the freaking
people that are there in the disaster. Now, once I

(20:11):
get through that budget person, it now goes to a
budget person in DoD At. Well, I take that back.
Before it goes to dd it then has to go
to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Now Tom Ridge, bless
his heart, would always just sign off on them because
as a former governor, he knew that seconds and minutes counted,

(20:32):
so he always gave me what I needed. But nonetheless,
it then went from him, not directly to the Secretary
of Defense. It went to a budget person in the
Pentagon who had the same argument. So what I could
have normally gotten done in literally five minutes is now
taking me five hours. And they're arguing with me about
do you need five or can you get by with three? Well,

(20:54):
if I if I could get by with three, I
would have asked for three. But what do you care?
I'm paying for it any So that's post DHS. And
I warned them on March third, two thousand and three,
in a memo which will be part of the book
about this is what happened. This is why today FEMA

(21:15):
is so ineffective. This is why the President, while he
was in North Carolina said.

Speaker 2 (21:24):
I'll also be signed in executive order to begin the
process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting
rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA is not good.
I think when you have a problem like this, I
think you want to go and whether it's a Democrat
or Republican governor, you want to use your state to
fix it and not waste time calling FEMA. And then

(21:46):
FEMA gets here and they don't know the area, they've
never been to the area, and they want to give
you rules that you've never heard about. They want to
bring people that aren't as good as the people you
already have. And FEMA's turned out to be a disaster
it and you could go back a long way. You
could go back to Louisiana, you could go back to
some of the things that took place in Texas. It

(22:07):
turns out to be the state that ends up doing
the work. It just complicates that. I think we're going
to recommend that FEMA go away, and we paid directly,
We pay a percentage to the state, but the state
should fix this is if the state did this from
the beginning. It would have been a lot better situation.
I think you guys agree with that.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
Right, Well, let's think about this for a moment. Well,
the president is proposing makes a lot of sense politically.
Can he get it done. I doubt it because FEMA
has been so abused by presidents that it's it's amazing

(22:49):
because when you have a twenty thirty to fifty sixty
billion dollar disaster relief fund that is seen by politicians
as a big slush fund to get things done that
we shouldn't be doing. And I used to fight that
all the time. So you's gonna have to fight Congress
on it, and it's gonna have to be an admission because,

(23:10):
as I've proposed for literally the past twenty years, if
you're not going to abolish FEMA, at least pull it
out of DHS and make it once again independent and
responsible to the president, directly responsible to the president. Get
the bureaucracy off the top of FEMA. The Cato Institute

(23:32):
has made the same recommendation. I think, don't hold me
to this, but I think the Heritage Foundation has made
the same recommendation. There are a few members of Congress
who agree with that, but FEMA becomes a source of money.
It just has a big ass checkbook. So let's think

(23:54):
about how you could actually do what the president's talking about.
Because I think it can be done. Who is and
before I tell you how or why I think it
can be done. Another problem that I think exists that
nobody ever addresses is this when let's take the California

(24:14):
fires for example, California really screwed that up big time.
They diverted resources to stupid programs like you know, saving
that smelt or you know, not rapidly, you know, fixing
a reservoir and leaving a reservoir empty, taking two years
to fix it instead of getting it done in six months.

(24:37):
So when the proverbial feces hits the fan and now
you've got a fire going on, well what happens? Well,
because California has wasted money on other resources or or
another programs instead of using that money on fire prevention,
fire mitigation, fire departments, fire personnel, fire equipment, all of that.

(24:58):
Because they know, you have to be a freaking idiot
not to know that they're going to be fires in
California at some point. At many points, the Santa Ana
winds are going to kick up and you're going to
have fires. I dealt with that myself in California back
in two thousand and three. So it's going to happen.
Guess what. There are going to be earthquakes, there are

(25:20):
going to be hurricanes, They're going to be tornadoes. They're
going to be natural disasters all the time. So every
time FEMA steps in, or anytime that FEMA gives a
grant to help, you know, buy additional fire trucks or
fire additional firemen, what do state and local governments do?
They take that windfall. They take that and apply it

(25:43):
to a fire department budget, take their own money out
of the fire department budget and use it for something
stupid like DEI or saving the smelt. So the state
and local governments, in terms of their emergency response actually
become weaker over time and become more dependent upon the

(26:03):
federal government. It's feeding the stray cat. Every time you
feed the stray cat, which is state and local government
federal money, they realize, oh I don't have to go
hunt for food. Oh I can just wait till something
bad happens, and they'll throw money at me. So you
have feer fireman. You have few cops, you have fewer

(26:25):
emergency personnel, you have fewer resources to respond to a
natural disaster because you just assume theme is going to
show up, and nobody ever recognizes that. Nobody ever talks
about that. We have there's a program. There's a program
called fire grants, and these fire grants their competitive and

(26:45):
state and local governments get these grants based on their
need and FEMA steps in and gives them money to
buy fire equipment. Well, once you get that fire equipment,
which you should have been paying for yourselves, but they
rely on all tax payers all over the country to
pay for a fire truck in Podunk, Ohio. No, that's
not right because that makes Podunk, Ohio less capable and

(27:11):
more dependent on the FEDS. You see it happening everywhere
all the time. And it's it's an easy fix on paper,
it's a difficult fix politically. So how could you do it?
You could do it by keeping the Disaster Relief Fund

(27:31):
in place, but say to the states, listen, we'll help
you pay for some of these things. But in terms
of the logistics, the personnel, the equipment, you have to
learn to budget for that yourself, which means that if
you need more money, you need to go to your

(27:51):
citizens and say, look, if you want a bigger, better
fire department, here's what it's going to cost. And then
those people in that state or that locality can vote
for or against those things, and they can make their
own choices. And then when something really bad happens that
is beyond their capacity, let me make sure you understand this.

(28:14):
When it's beyond their capacity and they're on their own,
then the President could just step in and within the
Office Management budget say we'll grant you some money to
help you pay some of those costs. I think the
President's spot on now. Of course, the devil's in the
details because you have to really work out exactly how

(28:35):
that's going to work, and you'll need some staff to
do that. You'll need some office within the White House
to handle those things. So you can't be I mean,
you can get rid of FEMA technically, but you'll still
need some administrator director. You'll still need some secretary of
some sort that's accountable to the President that would dole

(28:57):
out those moneies to the state, but at the same
time making sure that the states are doing what they
need to prepare themselves. It's you know what we call
it in the private sector. It's a paradigm shift, and
we need a paradigm shift in how we deal with
disasters in this country. It's the Weekend with Michael Brown.

(29:18):
Be sure and follow me on exit's at Michael Brown USA.
You want to send me a text message to you
have comments about what I just said. The numbers three three,
one zero three. Just start your message with Mike or Michael.
Tell me anything, ask me anything. I'll be right back. Hey,
welcome back to the Weekend with Michael Brown. I really

(29:39):
do appreciate you tuning in. I never want to do
this program without telling you how much I appreciate this audience.
And you're taking time out on a weekend or whenever
you listen to the program to listen to it, I
sincerely appreciate it. So for those of you who probably
haven't heard a lot, haven't heard me talk a lot
about Hurricane Katrina and what a no pun intended, what

(29:59):
a disaster that was. And I'm honestly not trying to
sell books, but if you want to buy the book,
if the name of the book in which I talked
about everything that I've just kind of described is called
Deadly Indifference. Deadly Indifference, And obviously I'm the author, and
you can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold,

(30:20):
and I think it's available in ebooks, So if you
want to get if you don't want to spend the
money on a hardbacker, whatever, you can get an ebook.
But I would encourage you if this topic interests you
and you're curious about why FEMA has many of the
problems it has. It started in two thousand and three
with the creation of the Department of f on Mandsecurity,

(30:42):
which to this day I think is a mistake. Explain
to me why the Secret Service needs to be in DHS.
You know, prior to the creation of that stupid department,
secret Service, which has still has counterfeiting responsibilities, was within
the Treasury Department, which is where it should have been.

(31:04):
If did we have a problem with the Secret Service
prior to DHS, No, we did not. So you have
to ask yourself, is there a causal link between u
Secret Service suddenly being inside DHS. I think there is.
I absolutely believe that there is too much bureaucracy. Think

(31:25):
about this, How many of you love the Transportation Security Administration? Oh,
look at all of those hands going up. Oh, but
they're all showing their middle finger. Huh, that's fascinating. Yes,
TSA exists because of the Department of Home Landsecurity, because
that part of the department at the time over some

(31:46):
of us objecting said oh, let's let's take away the
private security because it's all their fault that nine to
eleven occurred. Really, I seriously doubt that, because my my
argument always was who has the strongest vested interest in

(32:09):
making sure that no one hijacks a plane, flies it
into a building, or blows it up. Oh yeah, the airlines,
the airlines themselves. Private security is much more effective and
much and just better. There are a few places around
the country. I think there may be five at the

(32:30):
most that still have private security. San Francisco International SFO
is one. The argument that we were told was that
TSA would never be overblown. They have no legal authority,
they have no law enforcement authority whatsoever, and they would
never unionize and they would never go on strike. Well,

(32:53):
they've certainly unionized, they haven't gone on to strike because well,
I think like Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers,
I think Trump would step in and fire them in
a heartbeat. So DHS just had this kind of snowball
effect of problems, Customs and Border Patrol, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,

(33:15):
Secret Service, FEMA. I mean, there were just twenty two
different departments and agencies all thrown together, and of course
we were told by Congress, we're not going to give
any extra money. You have to do a reorganization within
your existing budget. So of course all those different departments
and agencies lost money when they were folded into this behemoth.

(33:41):
And now they want to build a giant edifice on
the site where Saint Elizabeth's Mental Hospital existed, just across
the river of DC. So it's just another bureaucracy. When
I was there, one hundred eighty six thousand employees, I

(34:03):
think the budget, the budget we had to deal with
was I don't know, sixty billion or eighty billion. It's
hundreds of billions of dollars now. So just like every
other government program, it just grew and grew and grew,
got larger and larger and larger, it got more bureaucritic,
more bureaucratic, and it just got less effective and less effective.

(34:23):
And now with things like the Patriot Act that Congress
passed you have you have all of this loss of privacy,
you've got redundancy in terms of intel. I mean, DHS
has its own I don't use the word spies, but
they have their own intelligence operation. Well, why we got

(34:46):
the FBI fixed? The FBI, it's just Congress felt like
they needed to be seen doing something. So Congress did
what it did best, and that was the Well, let's
create a government program. I think it ought to be dismantled.
But I'm also realistic to know that in DC you

(35:07):
never admit your mistakes. No, you would never. Congress would
never admit that creating DHS was a mistake. So maybe
pulling FEMA out, revamping FEMA, or perhaps turning FEMA into
what I imagine Trump imagines, and that is we'll step in
when it's just you know, we'll let you, the state
and local governments you need to be responsible for this,

(35:28):
and we'll just help you out financially when it's beyond
your capacity. So I would just suggest to all of
you that when the President says something like this, don't
have a knee jerk reaction, because there's a lot more
going on behind the scenes than you can possibly imagine

(35:49):
that makes FEMA ineffective and to bureaucratic, and part of
it is the Department of Homelandsecurity. I'd leave you with
one other question. Now that we have DHS, do you
feel safer? Do you do you feel like they're you know,
protecting the nation because I don't not at all, because

(36:12):
the bureaucracy that I just described is true with all
of those, including the Secret Service. Again, thanks for tuning
in to the Weekend with Michael Brown. Don't forget you
can text me anytime, go follow me on x at
Michael Brown USA. Everybody have a great weekend. I'll see
you next Saturday.