Remarks Following a Cabinet Meeting and an Exchange With Reporters

The President. Thank you very much for being here. We had a very, very good Cabinet meeting.

We're on our way to some tremendous numbers. I think, first of all, many companies are now moving into the United States. They're coming back. Some of them left us from many years ago, decades ago, and they're all—it seems they're all coming back. We have probably identified maybe $4 trillion worth of companies moving back or going to move back, and many of them have announced. It's going to be tremendous jobs, high-paying jobs too.

And you probably know the chip business, not because of the CHIPS Act, which was a disaster. You gave billions of dollars to companies that already have many billions of dollars that just—they said, "Thank you very much." It was no incentive for them to use it.

But what is good is, the tariffs will make it so that they want to come back. That's why they're coming back. I think they're coming back because of the election that took place on November 5 and because of the fact that they have to come back because the tariffs are forcing them to come back. And remember, there are no tariffs if you build here, and that's a big factor.

So we have record numbers. Howard was just telling me the numbers that we're talking about are crazy, beyond anybody's wildest expectation. So they'll be doing a lot of building. All sorts of businesses, including the basics of automobiles.

We have—as you know, Indiana is—Honda is coming in with a massive plant to Indiana, but there are many plants that are happening. And literally, some are started already. General Motors is already redoing plants that were half abandoned, or they have plants that weren't being fully utilized. They're going to be—they and others are going to be making parts and other things in those plants so that it's one-stop shopping finally.

It's ridiculous. You had to go to Mexico. You had to go to Canada. You—a car went all over the place. It was like—I don't know how that would have worked, but that's the way it sort of ended up.

We had a deal—and we have a deal—it's fine—but people took advantage of the deal. They cheated. And when you cheat, the deals are unfortunate. But now what's happening is, the numbers are beyond our wildest expectations.

Now, having to do with cutting, we've done a lot of cutting—a lot of cutting from the people—ideally, the people that aren't doing the job. In many cases, people weren't attending jobs. In some cases—in many cases, people didn't exist. They had, on the Government rolls, people that don't even exist. But of the ones that did exist, as you know, many didn't come to work, many had no intention of coming to work, many were paid and working someplace else. There were lots of bad scenarios, but they're being weeded out. And I think we're probably ahead of schedule on that.

And to me, something that was just terrible is the contracts that we're finding—the fraudulent contracts that we're finding where millions and millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, in some cases, were given out.

And we'll—I think we'll start with that. I'd like to start with Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior. He told us about a couple of contracts that we have now found. When he got there, they saw this with Chris and everybody, and they couldn't believe it.

Doug, could you just relay what you told us a little while ago?

Secretary of the Interior Douglas J. Burgum. No, happy to, Mr. President. The—there was a Federal consulting group, which was a group inside of Interior, but it was managing contracts from many different agencies that flowed through here. One of those contracts was for—to do surveys of individuals: $830 million for surveys. And so part of the question was, "Hey, could we actually see the surveys?" And then the surveys came back, and it was—a survey was, like, an 8½ by 11 sheet of paper with 10 questions that anyone's, you know, child in junior high could have put together or AI could have done for free. Eight hundred and thirty million dollars. So that's one that we've stopped.

And that contract was going out after you were inaugurated, sir——

The President. Yes.

Secretary Burgum. ——so it was jumping——

The President. So it's a pure fraud.

Secretary Burgum. Yes.

The President. It's a fraud.

But we've had many fraudulent contracts that were caught by the work that Elon and his people are doing—and working with our people. It's been brought to light that the fraud—not just waste and abuse, the fraud has been incredible.

You mentioned one, Madam Secretary—

White House Senior Adviser Elon R. Musk. Well, it—I think——

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins. Well, yes, sir.

Senior Adviser Musk. I won't cut ahead. Sorry.

Secretary Rollins. Well, let me just add to that and thank you. We just had a wonderful Cabinet meeting. All aligned on, certainly, the effort to realign the Government.

But even at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we've canceled a $300,000 contract educating on food justice for queer and transgender farmers in San Francisco. A similar contract we canceled in New York, again, educating transgender and queer farmers on food justice and food equality. I'm not even sure what that means, but apparently, the last administration wanted to put our taxpayer dollars towards that.

We canceled a $600,000 contract in Louisiana—out of Louisiana that was studying the menstrual cycles of transgender men, a $600,000 contract.

We canceled another contract out of a university in the middle of the country that focused on getting more diversity, equity, and inclusion into our pest management industry.

Again, these are nonsensical. It makes zero sense to use taxpayer dollars to fund these. I know these are just a few examples of the hundreds and hundreds——

The President. It's fraud.

Secretary Rollins. ——that we have found.

The President. It's——

Senior Adviser Musk. Well, a case—a clear case of fraud was with the Small Business Administration, where they were handing out loans—$330 million worth of loans—to people under the age of 11. I think the youngest, Kelly, was a 9-month-year-old who got a $100,000 loan. That's a very precocious baby we're talking about here. [Laughter]

The President. Kelly, what about that?

Administrator of the Small Business Administration Kelly L. Loeffler. Well, we're tackling the fraud, waste, and abuse in the agency. We've seen, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud go unprosecuted, so we're taking that on. We have a zero-tolerance policy for fraud, and we continue to crack down on it and make sure people are held accountable.

The President. That's amazing. And you have a lot of that. You've found far too much of it. It's a pure fraud. We like to use the words "waste and abuse," because they make—they sort of sound good, but many of these things are pure fraud.

Now, there was a contract that you've heard about where Stacey Abrams got $2 billion just before we took over, and it was a rush to get her the money. And that was environmental, and nobody knows what she was doing. But $2 billion—if you got $2 million, that's a lot. If you got $200,000, that's a lot, but this was—$2 billion was given.

Lee, do you want to talk about that and the other one that was even worse?

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee M. Zeldin. EPA has now canceled over $22 billion worth of contracts. Two billion dollars going to this NGO that Stacey Abrams was tied to. They received only $100 in 2023, and then the Biden administration gave them $2 billion.

The director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund saw his former employer get $5 billion, so $20 billion went to just to just eight NGOs, and they're all pass-throughs. And then they were giving it to other entities, many of them were pass-throughs.

And what you have is all these extra middlemen, they're taking their cut, and the taxpayer ends up getting screwed. They're losing out on all this hard-earned money. They can't afford to have the Federal Government waste.

The partnership with DOGE and Elon Musk has been incredible at EPA. Their team is very talented. We wouldn't have been able to do it without them.

And of course, this mandate from President Trump to make sure that we identify every last penny. Whether we're saving $50,000, $5 million, or $22 billion, we will not rest until every last penny is saved.

Thank you, Mr. President, for the opportunity to do this for the American public.

The President. Thank you. Great job you're doing.

Secretary Rollins. Well said.

The President. So we have a lot of that. We're getting down to a point—we think, probably over the next 2 or 3 months, we'll be pretty much satisfied with the people that are working hard and want to be members of the administration and our country, really. And they're doing—a lot of good people. We have a lot of great people. We want to keep the—we want to keep the good ones, and we want to get rid of the ones that don't exist. And we want to get rid of the ones that do exist but don't work, and we have quite a few of them.

Would anybody else like to say something before we take some questions from the press?

Please——

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins. Yeah.

The President. ——Doug Collins.

Secretary Collins. Yes, Mr. President, I think one of the things that you've always told me is to take care of our veterans, and that's what we're doing at the VA. And one of the things, though, is you also have to know who your employees are. You have to know the—the very fact of who you are. We're 470,000, roughly, when we started this, larger than the Active Duty Army, when you think about that in the perspective.

The President. Yes.

Secretary Collins. But however, this is an interesting point: When I first got there and we started looking at this—you know, how you take care of people—we didn't have an HR system that could actually give us a rundown on who actually was working where. That—we've had to work with that, working with our—our VA employees, who are the DOGE liaisons, we've been able to put together an organizational chart, which we can start looking at that.

But the interesting part about it is about taking care of veterans. And what you've told me to do is, how do we get the people in the right places? And I think when we look at this, GAO has told us we were high risk for years. The previous administration put literally tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousand employees over the last 4 years, and we saw our statistics basically go—stay the same or go down. Backlogs went up.

You know, maybe the question is not money and employees anymore. Maybe it's the organization and how we effectively deliver for the American people, and that's what we're going to do.

The President. Okay.

Secretary Rollins. Well said.

The President. And you know, one thing I want to add to it, it is not necessarily a very popular thing to do. You know, you're talking about employment. You're talking about people and the lives of people. And yet I think the American public understands we're trying to save our country and make our country great again. I mean, you could say it, but we're trying to save our country from this extraordinary thing that was happening. What they were doing to our country was just a horrible thing, and I have no idea how it plays out in the public. I have—I guess you see poll numbers that are very good numbers, but I don't know what that means long term, but it's something that has to be done. If we don't do it, we're not going to have much of a country left, so we have to do it.

So we're doing things that, I think, a lot of Presidents wouldn't be inclined to do, but we're doing it to—really, I—you know, I don't want to use cliché. I don't want to say we're doing it to make America great again, because I say that on the campaign trail, but there's really no other words that could express it better than that. It's—we're doing it to help our country. And our country was—was riddled with fat like no country, probably anywhere in the world, and we're getting rid of the fat.

And at the same time, we're bringing in—we're going to be bringing in millions of very good, high-paying jobs, and we're going to be taking in a lot of money. Our country is going to be very strong.

We've been ripped off by every country in the world—friend and foe. We were taken advantage of like nobody's ever seen.

And you saw what happened today with Venezuela. We did something with Venezuela which is long in the making, and it's very substantial.

And we'll be announcing cars very shortly. And we already announced steel, as you know, and aluminum.

We'll be announcing pharmaceuticals at some point in the not-too-distant—because we have to have pharmaceuticals. We don't make pharmaceuticals anymore in our country, and if we have problems like wars or anything else, we need steel. We need pharmaceuticals. We need aluminum. We need a lot of these things that we sort of don't make anymore, and yet we're equipped to do it all.

So we'll be announcing some of these things in the very near future—not the long future, the very near future—and it'll brings—it'll bring in billions of dollars, billions and billions. And it will bring in, maybe more importantly, jobs. It will protect the jobs we have. And it's going to be really, really quite amazing.

Chris, did you have something to say?

Secretary of Energy Christopher A. Wright. Yes, Mr. President. I want to say, energy is the infrastructure that makes our country run and drives our national security. The Biden administration grew my department, the Department of Energy, by 20 percent and expenditure much more than that, all in an effort to reduce the production of energy in the United States——

The President. [Laughter] Yes.

Secretary Wright. ——and to make energy more expensive.

We are stewards of the American taxpayer dollars, right? That's the job of everyone around this table, led by you. We want to reverse that trajectory and care about every dollar an American taxpayer gives us and are we using it for the benefit of Americans.

Let me tell you one thing: huge growth in expenditures, huge growth in employee count. Puerto Rico, an American Territory, had its electricity grid destroyed. They had billions of dollars in the Department of Energy to help Puerto Rico, yet they didn't spend that money, because that money would have meant more energy, more jobs, more prosperity in Puerto Rico. They wanted to have them as a poster child of wind and solar. "This island should run on wind and solar." That just doesn't work.

But they cared about politics more than the American people, and they didn't treat the dollars like they were their dollars.

The President. Yes.

Secretary Wright. This table, the team you have assembled, we're treating the American dollars like they're our dollars.

The President. That's great. Thank you. You're doing a great job on energy, by the way. We have—we have things happening with energy that will knock your socks off. Really amazing, amazing job.

Howard, do you want to say a couple of words?

Secretary of Commerce Howard W. Lutnick. Well, what is so exciting is, April 2 is just around the corner, and that's American liberation day. That's the day when the rest of the world starts to treat America with respect, and your leadership—understanding how the rest of the world treats us and what balance and what fair trade finally is going to be—is going to take care of America. It's going to launch the External Revenue Service to start to build the power and prestige of America back. And I am honored to be helping you on that course.

The President. It's an interesting term, right? The External Revenue Service. [Laughter] We're going to take in a lot of money from the outside, and that's going to keep our taxes low and, I think, getting a lot lower. It's going to be a lot of money, and that will—the external will take care of the internal to a large extent. So I think it's a—it's going to be a beautiful transformation.

Linda, you might say a couple of words. You've done so amazingly. It's a 50-percent cut. And more importantly, we want to bring education into the States. We're at the bottom of the pack, but we're the most expensive per pupil. And we want to bring education back to the States, where they can teach the students lovingly with their parents and with the boards and everything else, and they'll be every bit as good as these other countries.

These States—these individual States will do a phenomenal job.

You want to say something?

Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon. Yes, sir. And if we think about education, if we don't address the issues in education now and start getting our scores up, what are we going to find in our next generation and the generation after that? Where are our engineers, our doctors, our lawyers, our scientists, our—our AI and technical experts going to come from? We will go farther and farther down. And with everything else we're doing within our country—building manufacturing, bringing all of that back—if we don't educate in the best way we can, we will be lost, and those generations will be lost.

It is, I think, the cornerstone of our culture and what we need to focus on. And so, by having education at the best place where it can be—which is at the States, the local levels, with governors—with best practices and tools, which I hope the Department of Education can help supply for them, we'll do it.

The President. And, Linda, as you know, the SBA is taking over her student loans, which is a lot of loans. It's a big job. And, Kelly, we appreciate that. You're going to do fantastically well.

Administrator Loeffler. Thank you.

The President. And Bobby is going to be taking over their various medical aspects and health aspects of the educational process. So—and he's going to do a fantastic job of it. So, thank you very much.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Thank you, Mr. President. I'd just say that I'm very grateful to you and very grateful for the partnership with DOGE and with Elon. We've identified extraordinary waste in my department—in HHS. The expenditures, the budget of HHS, during the Biden administration went up by 38 percent. The employees went up by 17 percent, and health care went down.

We have 40 comms departments. We have 40 procurement departments. We have 40 IT departments. And we—out of 40 procurement, HR, none of them talking to each other.

We are, with Elon's help, eliminating the redundancies. We are streamlining our department. We're going to go back to providing gold standard science. And we're going to get the money to the scientists and to the patients, other than to the administrators and to the bureaucrats. And we're going to restore gold standard science, and we're going to make America healthy again.

The President. Thank you very much. That's great.

If you might, Madam Secretary, say a little bit about what's happening and how well we've done at the border.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem. Sir, this last week I was in Arizona, California, Alaska, and Florida, and CBP literally has almost a hundred-percent operational control of the border, which means that our country is secure and that we know who's coming into this country and that they love our country and they want to help keep it great into the future.

We are—in the month of March, the last couple of weeks, increased our deportations by 50 percent, so we're now not even just getting the worst of the worst out. We're making sure that there's consequences for being here and committing crimes in our communities. And we're—the numbers are continuing to escalate and to go up, sir.

This next week, I'm headed—or this week I'm headed down to El Salvador. I'll be in the prison where we sent TDA members. I'll be meeting with the President, and also Colombia and Mexico, and talking about building these relationships so that we can continue to get people out of this country that don't belong here and take them home.

And also, you had talked to me about sending the message worldwide about the fact that people shouldn't be coming to this country, and they shouldn't be coming here illegally. So, we are in several other countries around the world with a message right now that's saying: If you are thinking about coming to America illegally and coming here, don't do it. You are not welcome. We have a legal process to becoming a United States citizen, and there are consequences if you come here illegally. And America has changed because we're putting Americans first.

So we've also—the Coast Guard has done phenomenal work. I don't know if you all have reported on it, but we have broken historic records in the amount of drug interdictions that they have brought in. We've repositioned the fleet to go after the fentanyl crisis and to go after the southern border and securing it, and they've done amazing work as far as that.

We were down in Florida. They brought in a half a billion dollars' worth of cocaine that they had done in 14 interdictions and had brought them in going right directly after the cartels. And doing great work there.

And we have a cutter that we have sped up the process, sir—the icebreaker. That will be hitting the waters here this summer, and we've got two more that will be coming.

But you know, Russia is using their cutters and icebreakers up in the Arctic to do surveillance on us, and we're going to reposition our fleet to continue to partner.

I want to thank the Secretary of Defense and the Navy for all of their help and partnership too. We—we do operations together because they're obvious-—Navy warships are in certain regions, but our cutters are faster and can work together in a partnership that's securing America.

So—and we're going to eliminate FEMA.

So we've got a lot—a lot to do, but it's all good, and—and we're working hard, and we're going to make sure that we're continuing to do exactly what you promised.

The President. That's great. Good job.

Yesterday—there was a plaza that you know well, where there'd be hundreds of thousands of people standing at that plaza, pouring into our country totally unchecked, many people from jails and prisons and mental institutions and gang members and—horrible. Horrible. And they just pour into our country. Yesterday I was speaking to somebody—I was checking on the border, and they said there was literally nobody in this massive plaza. You know, where we're talking?

Secretary Noem. Mm-hmm.

The President. A plaza that would hold hundreds of thousands of people. There was literally nobody there. There was one person sweeping it. There were no people. It's been amazing. It's been an amazing transformation very quickly. And we're getting the bad ones out first, and we're taking them out. And they—there's some really bad ones, really bad ones—murderers—murderers of more than one people. At least 50 percent murdered more than one person. This is the people they were letting in through their open border policy. It was terrible.

But I want to just congratulate you and Tom Homan on the job you've done.

Secretary Noem. Thank you.

The President. You've been in- —it's really——

Secretary Noem. Sir—sir, Boston——

The President. ——it's really——

Secretary Noem. Boston, this weekend, hundreds of dangerous criminals were removed, four killers taken out of the country——

The President. Yeah.

Secretary Noem. ——just by what they did in Boston this last few days.

The President. Yes. Yes. And these are killers that there's no reasoning. It's not like, "Oh, let's talk them out of it." These are stone-cold killers. They don't care. They don't even think about it. They kill somebody. They go to sleep. They wake up. They don't even remember they killed them. These are bad people that should have never been allowed into our country.

Pam is doing such a fantastic job. I thought maybe you could say a few words.

Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi. Thank you, President. As far as the—we are hearing a lot about fraud, waste, and abuse. A lot of waste and abuse, but there is a tremendous amount of fraud.

And, Elon, thank you for your partnership. Thank you for your team. You have uncovered so much fraud in our government.

And we will prosecute you. We have an internal Task Force now working with every agency sitting here at this table, and if you've committed fraud, we're coming after you.

Thank you, Elon, for that.

On the violent crime level, thanks to President Trump's directive, we are seeking the death penalty again. So all of these horrible violent criminals that you're hearing about around the country, they will face the death penalty federally within our country.

And the drug dealers need to get out of here, because we are coming after you. We're going to have 94 great U.S. attorneys around this country, and everyone will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The President. Thank you.

Attorney General Bondi. Thank you, President. It's at your directive.

The President. I couldn't have said that better. [Laughter] That's very good. That's very good. She is doing a fantastic job. Thanks, Pam.

Do you have any questions, please?

Q. Mr. President?

The President. Yes. Yes, please.

Department of Education/State Control of Education/Teachers

Q. Mr. President, what can States do now to implement your Department of Education Executive order?

The President. Well, I think what's going to happen is, we are cleaning out a lot of things, like the loans—the student loans, which will—will be handled very professionally by people that do that.

And then, as you know, RFK Jr. is going to do a fantastic job having to do with health and the other things and, frankly, better than the people at the Department of Education. You see the buildings all over DC.

And then the rest is—the States are going to start coming in and taking all of the information on all of their students. And I think a lot of that information is just going to be shipped to different States, like Iowa, like Indiana, like so many. They're so anxious to get—they're calling us, and they're so anxious to get it.

We'll be shipping the records of the children that they're taking care of—that they want to take care of, and the process will begin. And I think it won't be that long before the States will be really running the Department of Education.

Our teachers are going to be taken very well care of. And I said, you know, personally, I don't care—union, nonunion, it doesn't matter. Teachers are so important to this country and to me, and we're going to take great care of our teachers.

And I know it's very important to Linda.

Secretary McMahon. Yes, it is.

The President. So I think you're going to see a tremendous change very quickly having to do with education, and the process has already begun—very strongly begun.

I think we've done, you know, in—whatever it is—8 weeks—people are amazed at how much we've done in terms of the safety of the country.

In fact, I would like to ask maybe Marco to say a few words on what's happening with respect to, in particular, Russia-Ukraine, where we have some pretty good news, I think. We want to get it stopped. We're losing 2,500 young people, and these are Russian and Ukrainian people, largely. They're not American people, but on a human basis, we want to get it stopped. And we want to stop spending billions and billions of dollars to a country that we think it's time, and we're doing pretty well.

Marco, do you want to say something?

Secretary of State Marco A. Rubio. Yes. Mr. President, first of all, I think the American people should be proud that we have a president that's promoting peace and the end to conflict on this planet. This is a war that's gone on for 3 years, as you've pointed out—that, as you've rightly pointed out, would have never happened had you been President. But now we're—it's here, and it needs to be brought to an end. There is no military solution to this war. It has to end through negotiation.

And there's only one leader in the world that's capable of bringing the two sides to a table, and that's our President—the President of the United States, President Trump, and that's what he's done.

And so today, even as we speak, we have teams on the ground in Saudi Arabia meeting with the respective sides in the hopes of making progress towards this outcome that we all want to see.

And I think that the country owes you a great debt of gratitude—and the world, really—because, I mean, you're the only leader in the planet that can bring the two sides together to bring an end to this conflict, and that's what you've done. And you've done it despite, you know, impediments from other countries and others who maybe have different opinions about how this should go.

But ultimately, I think that the only chance we have for peace is through the President's leadership, and you've shown that. And we hope it will bear fruit. And today will, hopefully, be one step more in that direction.

The President. Thank you, Marco.

And on the Middle East—another hot spot that we didn't have a problem with. There was no problem in the Middle East when we left, and now there's a lot of problems in the Middle East, but we're working on that.

But I think we've seen significant progress, and I think you'll have start—we're going to start—we were talking with the Vice President a little while ago—and you're going to see countries start to fill up the Abraham Accords. More and more countries want to join.

That was a great success, tremendous success, and then Biden and his group did zero with it. That should have been filled up within a year of the election. It would have been filled up. So, countries are starting to want to get involved very much with the Abraham Accords again, so that will be great.

And, J.D., do you want—want to say something?

Vice President James D. "J.D." Vance. Yes, sure. Yes, sir. Just on that topic, when you think about what happened with the Abraham Accords, one of the great diplomatic breakthroughs under the first Trump administration—really, in the last 30 or 40 years of American history in the Middle East—and the Biden administration did absolutely nothing with it. Built on it not at all, added zero additional countries.

Purely out of political spite, the Biden administration, I think, hurt the United States and really hurt the project of world peace.

That has changed. Luckily, about 2 months ago, we got a new President, and that president has given us the task of building out the Abraham Accords, adding new countries to it. And really, what you see is, a lot of these countries that have historical ethnic or religious hatreds want to build. They want to build new artificial intelligence. They want to build new real estate projects. They want their citizens to become rich and prosperous and peaceful. And they're setting to the side some of those old hatreds under the leadership of President Trump.

So it's early, but we've made a lot of progress, and we'll keep on making progress, sir.

The President. One of the—thank you, J.D.

And one of the things that's very important, I think, to mention: I saw a show yesterday, and they had a Democrat Congressman on. It was on Fox. And he said, "Well, President Trump said prices would be coming down, and, instead, he's focused on other things." Well, we are focused on a lot of other things, like peace, like all of these companies that are moving in and jobs. But what he didn't say is that prices have come down very substantially.

And if you look at—when I came in, after 1 week, they were screaming at me about eggs. Eggs had nothing to do with me, but they were through the roof, and you couldn't get them. And now they're down about 35, 40 percent—maybe even more than that.

I'm going to let—Brooke, if you would just——

Secretary Rollins. Yes, sir.

The President. ——discuss that. And groceries generally, prices are coming down, and energy prices are coming down. And I hope the Fed lowers interest rates, and then you're going to see interest rates coming down.

And I'll have you speak about that in a second, Scott.

Brooke, go ahead.

Secretary Rollins. Well, sir, thank you. I think the first thing that's really remarkable to note is that the prices of eggs, under the 4 years of Joe Biden, increased 237 percent—237 percent in those 4 years—and yet it wasn't covered in the press at all. No one talked about the price of eggs in the summer of last year, for example, from the media.

So, of course, the President wins, and he is inaugurated, and the next day, everyone is yelping about——

The President. That's true. [Inaudible]

Secretary Rollins. ——why the price of eggs are so high. So it was certainly one of many, many issues we took on.

Under the 4 years of Joe Biden, we had the cost of input go up 30 percent for all of our agriculture products. At the same time, the trade deficit increased $49 billion. So it was zero under the first Trump administration, and then, under Joe Biden, we sold $49 billion less of our ag products around the world.

Then you combine that with the avian bird flu. And I know I've talked to a lot of you in the press on this over the last three or four weeks.

But listen, here's the deal. The President, under his vision and support, we released, about a month ago, a very significant plan on how to bring the price of eggs down. It included five prongs. I won't go into it now because I don't want to bore everyone.

But, since that day, since we released that plan regarding biosecurity, repopulation, importing eggs, research, and then deregulating—taking those onerous rules off of our farmers—our egg-laying farmers—since that time, the price of eggs—the wholesale price of eggs has come down 53 percent.

So we're going to keep working on it. Listen, it's not something you solve overnight—avian bird flu and some of the other animal diseases. We're working across the Government, several partners out in the Cabinet on that, especially my friend Secretary Kennedy over at HHS.

But we have a long-term solution. But at least for now, in the short term, thanks to President Trump and so many that have worked so hard, the price of eggs are coming down as well as the price of groceries.

So thank you, sir, for the opportunity to lead on that.

The President. And the number is 53 percent, and they're readily available. So that's—I think it's a fantastic job.

And overall, groceries are down too. So——

Secretary Rollins. That's right. They're coming down.

The President. So the consumer is finally seeing some good news, instead of year after year of prices going up because of grossly incompetent leadership.

Scott, do you want to talk about interest rates, where you see it all going?

Secretary of the Treasury Scott K.H. Bessent. Yes, sir. So we are—under your direction, we are reprivatizing the economy. We're bringing down Government spending. We're bringing down excess employment in the Government sector.

On the other side, we're going to releverage the banking system. We're going to have all the new manufacturing jobs, so everyone who is laid off the—from the Government will have an opportunity to go into the private sector, and that is going to lead to disinflation.

We're going to—inflation is under control. We're going to get the affordability crisis fixed. So lower energy, deregulation, more private sector jobs that will naturally get interest rates down—interest rates down. Mortgage rates are down almost every week since January 20. The energy costs are down about 15 percent. Crude oil is down about 15 percent.

And as we keep that going, interest rates are going to keep declining. It will be good for mortgages. It will be good for credit card debt. It will be great for auto loans.

The President. That's great. And you're doing a really, really good job.

I hope—I'd like to see the Fed lower interest rates—that's just my opinion—because things are coming down. We have inflation under control.

Tremendous amounts of money will be soon coming in from tariffs, which is about time that we were able to partake. We've been ripped off by every country on that—on that basis, and it's about time. But that will be, I think, very—and treated very fairly. We'll be very fair. But the money that we're talking about is rather astronomical, and it should be, because we put through—for years and years.

I was able in the first term—we had a great first term with the highest stock price increase ever. All the different things that we had. But one of the things, we took in a lot of money in tariffs, and I had just started that process, and we had to slow it down because of the COVID. We didn't—we didn't go forward. We had a—we did a very good job with COVID, but that was something that happened to the whole world. It was a shame. What a shame—all those people dead and all of the problems that it caused for countries. Far worse—I mean, some countries still haven't recovered economically. They haven't recovered.

But we were—we took in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs just starting the process. But this is a program that's going to be, I think, unbelievable for our country. And I think it's treating other countries very fairly—very, very fairly.

I'd like to ask, if I might, Sean Duffy to say a few words about the air traffic control situation. You know, there were some mishaps. One, in particular, the helicopter crashing into the plane.

We have a system that's 40 years old. They spent tens of billions of dollars trying to patch it up and, you know, make it work, but it doesn't work. And my pilot says they use different systems. They don't want to use our system. It's so obsolete. And it's an obsolete, horrible thing that happened with respect to it. And we were going to—I said, day one, if this happens, we're—if we are successful, we're going to have to get a brand-new, modern, top-of-the-line air traffic system.

And I think I can say that I've been working a little bit with Sean on it, but Sean has been working hard on it, and with his new person at FDA—who's going to be terrific, by the way. And maybe you want to talk to them about that, because we need safety in the air—total safety in the air. And this will give that to you.

Secretary of Transportation Sean P. Duffy. Sure. Thank you, Mr. President. We had a conversation on Friday. Again, our air traffic control system, as we talked about—maybe privately, or I don't know, publicly, with all of you—but we have decades of ideas and billions of dollars, and no progress is ever made on any of these initiatives. Air traffic control is the same thing.

And so we're having a conversation about building a state-of-the-art, brandnew, best technology, envy-of-the-world air traffic control system. And what's interesting from—from the DOGE team is they'll look and say: "Well, what is the problem? Why hasn't this been built? This is about safety. This is about people's lives. All of you fly. Your family flies. Why hasn't it been done?"

And the problem is, in Government, it takes way too long. So, technology changes and money changes and administrations change. We have to do this fast, which is why we need the partnership from the Congress to give us the money up front. The best ideas and the best technology available in the world, we're going to build in the system.

I think, Mr. President, we can do it in 3 years.

I think Trump Tower was built in 3½ years, and I think we could match the Trump Tower time frame.

The President. Two years. [Laughter]

Secretary Rollins. Two years. Good luck.

Secretary Duffy. Okay. Maybe not that good. But about—about——

The President. Actually, 18 months, to be exact. [Laughter]

Secretary Duffy. About 3 years. And, again, it's a—we have to choreograph, because, again, our towers are operational, keeping planes in the air. So, it's a—we got to choreograph this, but we can do it in short order.

If I can just make one other point, Mr. President. We're $36 trillion in debt. You have never had a DOGE. We've never come in and looked at our Government the way, Mr. President, you've looked at this government and said: "We—there's too many people. There's—there's contracts, fraud, waste, and abuse."

And so we've had a few bumps in the road as we've gone through this process, but if you look around this room, everybody has seen the—how the process has evolved, and everyone appreciates some of the insight and technical support that we've gotten to make this government more efficient, to make it more responsive to the American people.

And so, again, when you have a—a new system like this, you'll get some bumps. But things are rolling out. The last 3 weeks have been much, much better as our teams have integrated and we're working to deliver for the American people.

And I would say some of the press had made comments last time about what happened in the last meeting. We had a great conversation in the last meeting. Elon and I had a great call after—after the meeting. And so, sometimes the reporting can be a little bit off.

I love the analysis that you guys do when you're not in the room, but I would just note that we're working well together, Mr. President.

The President. That's great.

Secretary Duffy. And the whole team here is working well together.

The President. That's good. Well, actually, we decided to see you after the Cabinet meeting instead of before. [Laughter] And I think that's nice, but if you think about it, I guess never in history has anybody invited you to a Cabinet meeting. And we're very open and transparent, and we had a very good meeting today.

So I mean, you're standing here, you're seeing what the result of the meeting is. I think we're doing an amazing job. For essentially 8 weeks on the job, I think it's—there's never been anything like it.

Did you have a question, please?

Q. Two, actually, if you don't mind. Thank you for having us here.

The President. Thank you.

Q. We appreciate it. One, actually, to follow up on the Attorney General's comments, and then one for you. You said that you're now preparing to prosecute examples of fraud across Federal agencies that have been referred to you? Is that what you said?

Attorney General Bondi. We are working with a team. We have a team of attorneys in place working with Elon's incredible team, helping us, taking referrals from the Cabinet members. You know, this—these are your tax dollars, and a lot of it is just abuse, a lot of it's waste. But if it's fraud, we are investigating, and we're coming—

Q. So you've gotten referrals? You've gotten referrals from——

Attorney General Bondi. We are looking at multiple cases of fraud throughout the Federal Government.

Greenland

Q. One on—one for you, Mr. President. Greenland is confused about the Second Lady and the National Security Adviser visiting this week. They're concerned that this is further provocation of whatever it is you ultimately want for Greenland. Could you further explain why they're going? What is the ultimate end goal when it comes to Greenland?

The President. Yes. Well, not provocation. This is friendliness, not provocation. We're dealing with a lot of people from Greenland that would like to see something happen with respect to them being properly protected and properly taken care of. They're calling us. We're not calling them.

And we were invited over there, and I thought it would be a great—I have great respect for the wife of our first—of our great Vice President. I think she's doing a—she's a brilliant woman. She's a very nice woman, and she loves the concept of Greenland. And so she's going there, and I think Marco is going there, and some others are going there.

But we've been invited, and they really like the idea, because they have been somewhat abandoned, as you know. They haven't been taken well—good care of. And I think Greenland is going to be something that maybe is in our future.

I think it's important. It's important from the standpoint of international security. And if you look at the ships outside of Greenland, you have Russia, you have China, you have lots of different people and lots of different places.

And it cannot go on the way it is. It's not going to go on the way it is. I'll make a statement: It's not going to happen.

So they're going there, and that's purely friendship.

Q. Who's doing the inviting? You said "people." Greenland is inviting——

The President. A lot of people, yes. People—people from Greenland are asking us to go there. We have many, many requests from many, many people. Some officials too.

[At this point, several reporters began asking questions at once.]

National Economy

Q. Mr. President, may I ask you about economic forecasts? I saw one economic forecast coming out from the OECD this past week. They are forecasting stagflation for the United States, a downtick in terms of GDP growth. Do you agree with that forecast? What do you see over the course of 2025 for our country?

The President. Well, we inherited a very, very bad and perilous situation from a group of people—again, we just got here—from a group—and this takes a long time to develop—from a group of people that truly didn't know what they were doing.

And you see that with not only costs. You see that with all of these fake contracts that have been given out. So we inherited a bad situation, but I think we're going to have an economy that booms. I think when—when it all kicks in—it's not going to take very long, because some of these people that announce that they're going to spend billions of dollars—I mean, literally, Apple is spending $500 billion. They've never made anything close to that—to do that. They're building plants here instead of China, instead of other places.

When it all happens—and it's going to happen very soon. These are people that are already—many cases, they're already starting. They just announced. In some cases, they—literally, they announced, but they actually started before the announcement, as you know, because some were already building.

This is going to kick in, and I think it's going to be amazing.

So they're looking at—based on numbers that I was looking at 6 months ago, 7 months ago, I was very concerned about the economy. We're going to have something that's like nobody has ever seen before. We have numbers and we have job generation that I don't think we've ever seen before.

See how it works out, but I think the economy is going to go through the roof.

[Several reporters spoke at once.]

The President. Yes, please.

Ukraine/Russia

Q. Sir, about Ukraine. In an interview with TIME magazine published this morning, President Zelenskyy said he believes that some members of your team have been influenced by Russian information. Those were his words. What do you—what do you have to say to that?

The President. Well, probably they have been influenced to get this thing settled, because Ukraine wants to see it settled. I think they have to have it settled. And Russia wants to see it settled. And I think, if I weren't President, this would never happen.

Marco is doing a great job, and Steve Witkoff has been incredible. Michael Waltz. We have a great group of people working on it, and that takes a good part of their day, settling something that really—well, it affects us monetarily, because we've given so much money. And we're getting that done. In fact, Scott is telling me that the agreement on rare earths is just about completed. They'll sign it shortly.

So it's—as you know, Europe is in for a very small fraction of what we're in for. It affects them much more than it affects us. And again, they are in as a loan, which nobody knew until I came along. Europe is giving the money to Ukraine as a loan. We were just pouring money into Ukraine. It was a very unfair situation. So we made a deal on rare earths.

But, most importantly, we want to stop the killing that's going on. Two thousand five hundred, on average, mostly soldiers, a week are being killed. And they're Russian, and they're Ukrainian. And if we can stop it, that's a very important thing to me on a human basis.

Okay. Anybody else?

Ukraine/Critical Minerals Supply

Q. Sir, are you signing the rare earths deal today? Is that what you mean?

The President. No, we'll be signing it soon.

Q. Sir, on Ukraine——

Q. How soon?

The President. It will be signed very soon.

Q. China and——

Ukraine/Russia

Q. May I ask another question on Ukraine?

The President. Yes.

Q. You recently mentioned the fate of all the Ukrainian children abducted and transported to Russia.

The President. Right.

Q. So are you demanding that Russia return these kids to their families in Ukraine?

The President. Well, that's one of the things that we're talking about, I know that. No decision has been made. We're talking about territory right now. We're talking about lines of demarcation. We're talking about power plant ownership.

Some people are saying the United States should own the power plant and then work it that way, because we have the expertise to fix it up, et cetera, et cetera. It's okay. That would—something like that would be fine with me. But they are talking about ownership of the big nuclear power plant, in particular.

But all of these things will come up, and they have come up, and we—that has been discussed, yes.

Okay.

[Several reporters spoke at once.]

I want to thank everybody very much. This was a great meeting. These are phenomenal people. We're lucky to have them. I have to tell you, I want to thank you all.

And, Elon, I want to thank you. I know you've been through a lot with this horrible situation that happened.

Senior Adviser Musk. I mean, they are burning the cars, you know. It's rough.

Attorney General Bondi. That's right. Saving America. [Laughter]

The President. It's—no, it's very unfair. What he is, is a patriot. Here's a man that—I can tell you. He's a friend of mine. He's become a friend of mine. He supported me in the election. That's when I got to know him really. I knew him a little bit from the first term, but not much. But he's a patriot more than anything else.

He's never—think of it, he has never asked me for a thing. He could have. I always say, "I wonder if he's ever going to ask me for something." And that's always subject to change, and if it does change, I'll let you know about it. [Laughter] But Elon has never asked me for a thing.

I mean, I got rid of the electric car mandate. I have no idea how that affects him, but possibly not good. I don't know. But he's never asked me for a thing. And I think that's an amazing tribute.

I did get activated last week when I saw what they were doing. I said, "He makes an incredible product, and we're going to go out and tell people, 'You can't do that stuff' and support him." They've got to support him, because if he wasn't doing this, he wouldn't have any of these difficulties. And I think it's getting less and less.

Pam has done a great job with regard to all of the—I mean, I know the kind of investigations that are going on. If she finds them—which she will——

Attorney General Bondi. We will.

The President. She already found four of them.

Attorney General Bondi. We will.

The President. But I think they're going to suffer very grave consequences, because they're really terrorists, when you think about it. They're very—terrorists at a high level.

And I think the people that are financing them, they could very well be people I know, people that you write about. But those people are in big trouble, so they'd better cut it out.

But Elon is a patriot. And we want to thank you very much for the job you're doing.

Senior Adviser Musk. Thank you, Mr. President.

The President. Thank you very much.

Senior Adviser Musk. Thank you.

The President. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.

Q. Sir, how many more cuts do you expect to the Federal Government?

The President. Thank you, everybody, very much.

[Several reporters spoke at once.]

Q. Sir, how many more cuts do you expect to the Federal Government workforce?

[Several reporters spoke at once.]

The President. Thank you very much.

Senior Adviser Musk. I just want to also say thanks to all the DOGE team who are getting death threats on a daily basis just trying to do the right thing for the American taxpayer and for the American people. Just a thank you to the DOGE team, who are literally getting death threats and being accosted. And——

Vice President Vance. Hear! Hear!

Senior Adviser Musk. You know, and these—these are—a lot of them are just kids. You know, they're just trying to help out, and they're very talented. They could get jobs for millions of dollars a year. Instead, they come here, earn peanuts, and get death threats. So thanks to the DOGE team.

The President. Thank you.

Q. Can you say how many more cuts you expect in the workforce?

The President. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Q. Can you say how many more cuts you expect in the workforce?

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Out. Out. He said, "Out." Get out. [Laughter]