the annual g-20 conference. after which, h presidentu and i were able to me privately. we had an extraordinarily frank and wide ranging discussion on a variety of topics from traprock -- practices to currency devaluation to fair labor standards to global climate change. i left convinced that relations between the united states and china remain strong and will only grow stronger. h presidentu. >> thank you, president obama. president obama is absolutely correct in our meeting, we spoke candidly about a wide an array of issues everything under the sun. no topic was off-limits. you name it, we covered that. in fact, correct me if i am wrong, the only thing we did not talk about is the matter of your

country owing to a great deal of money. [laughter] about $800 billion, actually. strangely, that is the one subject we did not discuss. >> the united states is well aware of its debt to china up. >> i kept waiting for you to bring [laughter] . when you didn't, i thought to myself," did they already pay us bac and i forgot? " or perhaps the money arrived after i left for this conference. [laughter] i checked with my office and they have not received it. [laughter] >> as h presidentu will recall -- as president hu will recall, we discussed this last year. >> did you bring the chad [laughter] ? >> i promise you you will get

your money host: . saturdayast night's night live." will continue the conversation tomorrow morning on "washington journal" tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. congress gets back to work this week for a lame duck session. there will be two new members of the new congress. you'll meet the new senator from utah and a democrat from michigan joining us tomorrow morning. that is it for this sunday. enjoy the rest of your weekend and have a great week ahead. ♪ [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010]

. he is accused of 13 violations including failing to disclose up to $600,000 assets and income. that is live at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span 3. >> welcome to news makers. our guest is greg walled in. he was -- walden. he is chosen as the chairman of the transition team. we are interested it talking to him as the freshman class assembles. thanks for being with us. guest: good to join you. host: our questioning reporters from the associated president with the a.p. and jake sherman of politico. julie, we will start with you. >> you have this huge crop of incoming freshmen who have just campaigned on shrinking

government and getting away from the typical washington power game. now your job in the next couple of weeks is to try to make some very nitty-gritty transitions to make it go smoothly like doling out committee assignments and very business as usual things. how do you balance those things of ensuring a movement transition but not co-opting this group. >> we are not trying to co-on the them. we are trying to -- owe on them. we are trying to harness their energy. we are excited and frankly in some of my other roles i was out there helping them get elected as was the others. so it is not like we don't recognize them. we helped them get elected because we want to change washington. part of what i'm doing as

chairman of the g.o.p. transition team is we have involved four of the incoming freshmen on our 22-member committee and we are really looking at how you can modernize congress and reform it and open up congress, make it more transparent and accountable so that the public's business can be done in public and the public can participate and so can the press and legislators who in the past congress the huge bills were shoved out and you had virtually no time to get them printed let alone read them. and members of both parties have done this over time and rank and file members of both parties get tired of it. so we are under leader boehner's initiative going to change how the house operates. that is our primary charge to work on during this transition period. >> every speaker incoming in the past two decades has come in with a reform agenda vowing to

make the house more open and it always runs in the reality of the legislative grind or needing to find coalitions. why will this be any different? >> because if we don't keep our word and don't implement the pledge, we will get the next shellacking. we know we were in the wilderness. we got thrown out because we didn't run the house properly before the republicans were in charge. it only got worse the last couple of years and americans are fed up. our approval rating is about 17%. i don't know what you do in negative territory. it is unfortunate it doesn't have to be that way and leader boehner the presumptive speaker has made it clear he will run the house different than it has been in the past and open it up to make it more transparent and accountable to get on to the mission of implementing the pledge which is to get away from wasteful washington spending and getting back to work and harness

everybody's brain. tuesday nights when you park the partisan weaponry at the door. wednesday is when you start to work on solving the problems. that is what americans want. not always easy to do. but these are big challenges we face and mr. boehner, when he was chair of the education and workforce committee a couple of years ago, ran a pretty open process, was not afraid to have his bills come to the floor after the committee had been allowed to do its work in a bipartisan way, have them come to the floor under very open circumstances and you fight it out on the floor. there wasn't a single bill that was allowed to come to the house floor in this last congress that came to the floor under an open rule. that set the historical mark for how not to legislate, never been done in the house that we have found in modern history. >> talking about changes, you are already hard at work in the basement of the capitol getting the transition going in a beautiful room that you have from the speaker.

i know you are looking for areas of savings. you talk frequently about your small business background and how everything is on the table. what does greg walden think should be done? where do you personally see areas you can save money and congress can savemoney? >> there are a lot of them. i got my transition notebook here somewhere and the first thing is give us the power point presentation. that alone is more expensive than copying them in black and white. i sent the staff out to one of -- i won't name names but to a stationery supply store and found 99 cent notebooks. my wife volunteered three days as we opened the transition office. there are ways to run this thing if you start with the principle that every dollar matters and it is not your money. it i the taxpayers' money. so when you look at the broad

scope of things, for example, legislation today has to be converted three different times in three different formats before the rules committee can print it out. now, who would put up with that in their own business? so, i thinking there are things we can change. there are things to open up the process. my degree is in journalism from the university of oregon. i was in the radio business 22 years. i actually believe the best s openness. the rules committee has been wired for cameras a couple of years but were not allowed to be installed. already our rules committee chairman has asked the architect to get the cameras in there. so i think there are things we can do to open up the process and cut the cost. i'm writing there should be the question should be out by tomorrow, monday that every scheduler, office manager and

chief of staff regardless of party to say how can we improve the way you function in your job? because i hear it from my staff why do we do it this way? we could save so much money and gain so much efficiency. if you just had a set time in advance when the house would rise and members could go back to their districts we wouldn't have our staff scrambling trying to figure out which flight to be on and which event you can make or not make. there are things you can do to bring calmness and certainty to the legislative floor schedule that will improve the quality of the hearings by not having them interrupted by votes on the floor, improve the ability to schedule and that will bring efficiency and cut costs. that is my mantra, the public's business, the public's money and we are entrusted with it and it is time to get it right. >> just to go back to the savings briefly, you are cutting

employees in the capitol. are you willing to cut the workforce it the capitol? >> absolutely. if that -- i will give you an example. i asked the chair of near 94 to come in and i wanted to learn the lessons learned, what should you do. i have done the same thing with the mac capuano. one thing they took charge, the republicans sent pink slips to every person on the hill. he said he got a call from the librarian of congress saying guys, i got your pink slip but i'm actually appointed by the president so you don't have the authority to fire me. so, we need to be thoughtful about it and realize our limitations. but they also sat down with i think it feels the door keeper at the time and said what do you do all day because we have not been in the majority. never could get a straight

answer. eliminated the position and nobody noticed. i go back to my small business principles. i'm not going to look at an arbitrary number in dollars or numbers of people and say that is the target because i look at it in terms of how do you gain efficiency and cut cost by managing better, by asking the people who workday to day how they think we can manage better, then we will see what it tallies up to. that should be the goal, not an arbitrary throw a number at the dart board. i never operated my business that way and i don't think we should in the congress but there will be ways to get efficiency and savings. and some of it may actually require investment in capital. so, in our business not long after we bought it i discovered we were leasing the phones and i could get a cost recovery in about two years if i bought the system and i wouldn't have to pay the phone company any more to rent it. there are things we can look at at rates of return where some

investments up front achieve permanent long-term savings down the road. so, i'm going to bring business principles and so is our team. we are excited about that opportunity. it is our chance and our responsibility to get if right. >> you mentioned scheduling changes and how that can have a cost effect and quality of life effect for members of congress and leaders and rank and file. we have heard reports about possibly having a -- three weeks on, one week off. do you have a preference of how this should work? if you could, just talk about either whether the transition team has discussed this in any detail and what you think should happen. >> we had a terrific presentation from the soon to be majority leader eric cantor's staff. they went back to the beginning days of congress and they were able to lay out for us

historically what has happened and some alternatives. what i have tried to do is create a transition team environment where we can bounce the most -- all kinds of ideas and not have somebody just shoot them down are, which you know in this business an idea leaks out and somebody shoots it. i'm trying to maintain the business attitude of let's throw everything out there. and some will sound crazy but it may lead to something that is better. here is what is important. i don't know of a rank and file member who is satisfied with the existing house schedule, not in terms of their perform quality of life but how absurd it operates. you never have certainty. one principle has to be get certainty. two, let's improve the operation of the house so you get certainty in the hearings. it is rude and nearly reprehensible that we invite very talented people to testify before our committees and let them sit there for a couple of

hours while we give opening statements. they are just political posturing statements and then we get called away for votes to name post offices on the floor and they are sitting there three hours later. let's structure this so you get the input you want and make the hearings process valuable for members and the witnesses. those are two things. the third is structuring so we stay in touch with the american people. you know this freshman close, the 80-plus republicans, a dozen or so democrats that are coming in. you heard a pretty clear message that washington is out of touch and we want to make sure there is quality time to go home to your district and work with the people in your district who sent you to washington to make sure you are still in touch and you have not strayed. every district is different but every member needs to stay in touch with the voters. those are the principals we are working at. and throughout that this overarching nature can we get efficiency and cut cost and

improve access, which leads to the reason for this, which is can we get better policy out pu and focus on reduce waste and create jobs so we can move forward on the initiatives that really matter. >> if we could turn to committee chairmanships, one thing that people elected, the electorate said is they didn't like the career politicians and in your house republican rules there are term limits for chairman sheufps by there is --ships but there is a way to circumvent them. do you believe the republican leadership should issue waivers and why or why not in >> first of all, that will be a decision that is made by the conference because we will adopt our conference rules this coming week. so, i don't want to prejudge what the conference is going to do, and i'm trying to be careful about prejudging what the transition team will come

forward with before we have all the listening sessions and invite the other side of the aisle to help us with their ideas. i'm trying to stay out of making firm statements in some of these regards. i would say personally we have a six-year term limit for committee chairs and it would take a chang in the -- a change in the conference rules to alter that. i also have the notion that your time in the minority is not nearly as powerful as the time in the majority and looking forward we need to have that discussion about if you are in the minority does being the ranking member of a committee have the same value as being the chairman of the committee. i think that is a valid discussion we should have looking forward. but the rules of the conference everybody knew what they were at this point and i would be surprised if the conference votes to change those rules. >> let me pick up on the of the minority scheme. by dent of having been here and seeing a few transitions in

congress it seals that what -- it seals that what goes around comes around and every frustrated minority leads to the majority where there are rules changes. what is your philosophy of respecting the rights of the minority knowing some day you may be in it? >> i invited the chair of the transition in 1994 and he gave as you couple of really good points, i thaought. one is sweat the small stuff. at the ends of the day that is what matters most because we now own the operation of the house, we are responsible for it and we will be held accountable for it. so, how the house functions is our responsibility. it is like taking over a business, you are now in charge, you get the good and bad so you better get it right and the little things will bite you because folks in the press will wraeut about it. the second -- will write about it.

then he told because how he fought as the republican majority transition leader to make sure that the minority member of the budget committee had adequate office space and staff space. that became, by the way, that was john spratt at the time and he had to fight republicans at times because we have been in the wilderness 40 years, why be kind to these people who were not kind to us. ironically, that office space he fought and got for the then minority is the office space paul ryan has today. and if you operate under a pretty simple prim that we all -- principle which is treat each other the way you want to be treated we would be a better institution. so i'm not in this for recrimination but rebuilding trust in the institution. and, by the way, for helping try to bring people together to solve problems. these petty things that both parties engage in at times anyones our ability to focus on what matters most and that is

solving these problems. it doesn't mean -- i'm not into the kupl pwaobuy. in but -- kumbaya process but let's have a process where you can put your ideas on the table and not get into recrimination stuff. we spend too much time on that and it degrades the institution and diminishes our ability to legislate effectively and thoughtfully and our country has never needed a different focus more than it does today. we have this rare opportunity to get it right and enormous freshman influx who can help us break through some things and do the right thing for the institution of congress. then if we are really, really successful we will begin to see those negative numbers turn around and faith restored in the american people. >> since you bring up potential compromises on the big issues, you have been focused on the transition and operation of the house itself but i want to ask you about one big policy issue that will come up next week when

you are back for the end of the congressional session, tax cuts. republicans have made it pretty clear you talked on the campaign trail about wanting to extend all of the bush era tax cuts and we have seen in the recent few days president obama and his advisors seeming to open the door a little bit to an agreement that would let you do that. what kind of room do you think there is in the next week or two for a conpotential compromise? >> i think one reason we ended up out of power in 2006 is we didn't do what we said we would do. so i think clearly the pledge to america is a document saying we would support extension of the current tax code because we believe it will help bring stability to the economy and allow investors and businesses to have certainty so they can grow and produce jobs. i was a small business owner nearly 22 years with my wife and

i get how it operates. i have signed payroll collection and i know how -- payroll checks and i know how you create jobs. so whatever the decisions are they should be predicateded on -- predicated on will it help jobs or create certainty in the market. and we will keep our word. it is in the pledge. this is what we ran on and in an unprecedented historic level americans said we are with you, we don't want this other direction. the white house, i phaoemean it reminds me a bit of the jimmy carter days with the mixed message i messaging, where are these guys headed at the white house. you get one message out of, appears to be at least out of mr. axelrod then the president halfway around the world has to issue a clarification. they seem to be negotiating with themselves in public with the

pre press. we will stand by what we said we would stand by and i think you will see a pretty resilient force. now, remember, we are not in charge until january. >> does that mean knno comprome on the length of time extending the tax rates? if there was a deal where the wealthiest packs pairs get their cuts extended which the white house has been unwilling to consider up to now? >> the president talked about decoupling but i think you have seen strong statements from our leaders that they don't support that. why not just extend the code for a couple of years, give certainty in the marketplace and move forward. the focus often is on the wealt wealthy. the real issue is how it affects small business income because that is part of this. it is not all of it, i understand it. but you also have a problem with getting capital in the marketplace, money into businesses, and this is where a

lot of the money is and there is so much uncertainty. i think let's catch our breath, extend in a couple of years. we have big budget issues ahead of us in other things and continue. but beyond that it is what we said we would do a week or two after the election. we are not going back on a prim and pledge we made to americans. they elected to us do what we said we are going to do and i kaepcan't imagine backtracking. >> you are on the energy and commerce committee where there is a tough battle for chairmanship. i want your take on that battle. furthermore, you have signalled or people have signalled that you might be interested in the subcommittee chair on the telecommunications subcommittee. is that something you are interested in? >> let me back up because i stepped off the energy and commerce committee earlier this year. i hope to get back on. that will be a decision by the steering committee. i think i will get back on. i spent 22 years in the broadcast business and i enjoy

telecommunations work. i was the ranking republican on the oversight and investigation subcommittee and judy that work. the -- i enjoyed that. i'm one of the few members from the northwest so energy issues matter greatly to us. they are unique because of our hyd hydro system. there is not a bad subcommittee there. i also know i will have other responsibilities to attend to. we have to sort it out and see who the chaian is, the steering committee will make those decisions and the conference will make a decision on whether or not there is a waiver on the six-year term limit. so i guess what i'm saying is i don't know and i'm kind of dodging that for no >> you just mentioned briefly that you will have some other responsibilities. what might those other responsibilities be in republican leadership? >> well, good question. i was not anticipating being named g.o.p. transition chair n chairman, so i don't know what the leadership may have in mind. i have been at the leadership

table the hrlast, now, about a year and a half and enjoyed the work and i think i have accomplished the tasks that were given to me in a successful way and i look forward to staying involved at the leadership table. i'm not running for any of the leadership offices. my personal hope is i could stay on as chairman of the g.o.p. leadership but that will be a decision made by the speaker to be, john boehner, and i will leave that up to him to major the decision -- make the decision. i guess the issue is i better perform well as transition team chairman if i expect to continue on and i'm trying to do that for now. >> looking forward to next your again, congressman, could you talk about the spending cuts that republicans hope to im ppo? you talked about $100 billion or more around that is a big number. if history is any guide, efforts like that can sometimes run into or turn into a showdown with the white house over shutting down the government. do you think republicans are willing to have that fight and take that action?

and you think voters want to see that? >> it is sort of like going to a demolition derby. everybody packs the stands to watch the crash. we are not in that. we are into governing and into responsible oversight and into looking at how we can make government more efficient. the congress under both parties has not done adequate oversight over a got the that continues to expand. we talked about how many employees we should have in the capitol. we need to talk about how many we should have federal government wide. what can we afford. i know our position is roll back to the 2008 levels, prebailout and pretarp and start there. i'm going to tell you and make it clear, there is not an agency in the federal government that is not deserving of oversight to figure out how to run it more efficiently or cut waste, fraud and abuse. i realize that doesn't get you a balanced budget soon. there are structural things that need to be dealt with.

but i don't know that i look at this as one thing at a time. we will look at the scope of government and i think you will see a regular drum beat of, as we do oversight and identify waste, fraud, abuse, we will bring those to the floor on a regular basis because we are going to put -- we are going to turn the system on its head and put the effort, make it easier to cut spending than increase it. that is part of our mission in changing the rules the extent we are allowed in terms of what we can do in the rules versus how we will govern, which is the committee process and doing the oversight and bringing changes to the floor. we will do both and maximize the opportunity to put the taxpayers first and spenders last. >> that is it our our time. thank you for being with us from oregon. we will see you back in washington next week. >> thank you. >> i will turn to our group after talking with mr. walden, next week willn