Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he appreciated the transparency that Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk brought to the spending bill battle on Capitol Hill last week.
Hagerty said, “We have had our appropriations bills on the floor of the United States Senate since this past summer. Chuck Schumer has refused to bring them forward. This is a typical Washington process where we wind up with a work product that the American public can’t possibly understand. They dumped over 1500 pages on us, and Elon Musk, using the tool of Twitter, brought transparency to the entirety of it. The American public were shocked. We are always shocked when we see these types of monstrosities at the last minute that haven’t been properly vetted.”
He continued, “President Trump was able to bring his weight to the table and say, look, this has got to this has got to stop. This has got to be skinny down. This has got to change. My overarching goal coming into this was to make certain that the government didn’t shut down because President Trump, over the next 30 days, needs to be able to process his nominees. We need to be able to put in place to get to work on January 20 because three-quarters of the American public feel that the United States is on the wrong track right now.”
Hagerty concluded, “So I appreciate the fact that Elon Musk made this transparent and that we were able to actually improve this. We didn’t get everything we wanted. Certainly, I didn’t, but we’re in a better place now because we’re going to be in a position to make certain that President Trump is ready to go on day one.”
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