ap-- >> so not individual stocks. >> if you don't have wherewithal for spdr's, then get in this. >> a federal government employment hiring freeze? >> except for the military. except for the military. david: president trump putting a freeze on federal hiring as it's hemorrhaging. will this stop the bleeding? let's go on focus with mr. steve forbes, elizabeth macdonald, john tamney and bruce. is this a good start? >> the key thing is follow through by the cabinets secretaries and budget for

overseas spending for the federal government because you have congress subcommittees and with their pet spending. if you don't do that, this bloat will come back again. david: for those are concerned, steve hurt his shoulder and doing okay. he's recuperating and wish him well. john, is this how the starve the beast? >> i don't think so, i'm all for slowing the growth of the federal government. i think this is a symbolic distraction, it's going to give the citizenry a more efficient government? no, it's not. government is overbloated. if you want to give people a better government. greatly shrink federal head count. they're not doing that here. david: rich, there have been cases where entire agencies, bureaucracies have been destroyed purposely, at least one that we can think of. there was a guy named alfred c

khan. he designed this mechanism to destroy the civil aeronautics board and the airlines. when you did that, you got the cheap airlines and everything was better for everybody. why don't we do that? >> jimmy carter is underappreciated, the guy who deregulated. i understand the point that this is symbolism, but sometimes symbolism is where you have to start. the reagan revolution got going when he fired the air traffic contollers and that seemed like a huge statement. >> bruce, we're not talking about chump change here, executive branch workers talked about 267 billion dollars. that's just the executive branch workers and when you look at inefficiencies of public sector workers as opposed to private sector workers, $123,000 is how much we pay a federal government worker for the same duties

that costs $69,000 in the private sector. we're not getting our money's worth. >> well, i mean, the problem is with, you know, donald is talking about his executive order. it seems like executive orders by etch-a-sketch where he's changing all the time. i mean, he has a lot of caveats in there for defense and military personnel and policing and so forth and then he's talking about investigations into the election because he's going to probably have to hire, you know, a lot of grave diggers to find out-- find the 3 million people that voted for hillary and not him. he's all over the place with this. david: e-mack, we can focus clearly on the waste and fraud alone of this government, much of which happens with the hiring of this workers, we can cut hundreds of billions a year for that. >> tom coburn says it's 400 billion in waste and redundancy. this would be waste i see.

d.c. is blind to it, and d.c. is a boom town. in the united states government we are paying government union workers to work from their couches at home on government duties. that's the problem. david: be bill, on the other hand he wh you look at $20 trillion debt it's like chipping away with an iceberg with a little tool. that's a lot of money we have to pay off. >> i think this is a frivolous gesture that distracts us from what john is talking about. how about eliminate the department of education and return that power and that money to the states. that's a good place to start and i've got more departments to start with. david: and the good place to start, appointing john tamney to cut these details. steve, the next step. that's a good first step. what does he do after that step to show that he's serious about shrinking government? >> two things, the budgets of

the departments aren't getting the bloat up. most importtly, we've been discussing thisorning and that is reducing the size and scope of the federal government, those departments, education, housing and urban development. commerce and others can be sharply down-sized or eliminated. you eliminate those things as alfred khan did, that's how you do it. david: something happens when people go inside the beltway. i know trump is an outsider, talking how he's going to drain the swamps. when you go inside the beltway, the best laid plans of mice and men fall apart. >> they always do. we hear how government is going to be shrunk and that doesn't happen and i hope they say this is what the constitution allows. let's get rid of program that doesn't have to do with constitution constitutional governance. david: i'm sure you remember when rick perry was running

for the presidency, he famously said even though he forgot one of the agencies he was going to eliminate agencies, including the energy department. guess what he's the nominee for, to be the head of the energy department. >> which kind of proves your point once you're inside the beltway, things look different. we have to have a road map and the road map that really works is that the size of federal government as a percentage of overall gdp should be no more than 20%. it crept up into the low 20's and then the mid 20's, you know, under ronald reagan and bill clinton, the size of the government was more like 18% and the economy boomed. that's what you really have to keep an eye on. david: bruce, you have to admit government is too big, right? >> i do. i think with this president in particula we can start by eliminating a lot of the press secretaries and pr people and-- >> by the way, i should mention a lot of the

department heads, including betsy devos who we're going to talk about in education, are working for $1. >> that's a good start. there are things to do. if he's going to speak for every agency, they can start with the communications teams and get rid of some of the people. david: e-mack. >> your point is well taken and i hear what bruce is saying. remember, bill clinton and al gore were going to down size government and big stacks they were going to cut. i totally agree with rich historically where the size of government should be. however, when it comes to the energy department it does oversee our nuclear arsenal and the nuke deal. so there are people in there that are important. david: by consolidating a lot of these agencies we can get rid of a few of them. >> politicians say i'll check the waste and fraud and abuse. >> and i checked the budget and there's no line item that

says waste. >> to be the secretary of was waste. >> how about a secretary of waste, i would go for a waste czar. david: can donald trump deliver on his promises, drain the swamp? >> key thing, dave, is follow through. why is there a weather agency. privatize and let it compete like everyone else does. all of that overhead for the nuclear arms, put it back in the defense department where they took it out 40 years ago to create the energy department. let defense do that. >> why do we compromise all the time? even 18% is going to lead to bigger and bigger government and bureaucracy search for a purpose. cut programs altogether. david: that's right, bureaucracy search for a purpose. a great line. that's true. coming up, more spending on troubled schools did not work for the last president, so, is

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i'm elizabeth prann in washington d.c., now, back to forbes on fox. david: as president trump's education pick awaits confirmation, a new report showing what not to do coming from the last administration. it shows billions of your tax dollars were spent on troubled schools and fixed nothing. that's another reason why betsy devos the nominee to head the department said the following at her confirmation hearing. >> president-elect trump ap i know it won't be washington d.c. that unlocks our nation's potential nor a bigger bureaucracy, tougher mandates or a federal agency. david: rich, is she right? >> boy, she is absolutely right. one of the scandals that happened in american society is that social mobility, upward mobility we've always taken for granted for in the great united states is getting worse and worse and a lot of it has to do with these poor, not the good ones, but the

poor public schools. they need competition and the poor kids need it most of all. david: one thing that hasn't worked, bruce, i think it's fair to say, is all of these billions of dollars the feds have been spending on trying to improve educational standards. this report, by the way, which was done by the obama administration, give them credit to admitting what doesn't work. it's for something called school improvement grades and i'm going to quote here, overall across all grades, we found implementing any sig funded model had no significant impact on math or reading test scores, high school graduation or college enrollment. a big fat zero, bruce. >> yeah, but i mean high school graduation rates were up under the obama administration and i think that certainly that both sides would agree that there should be more done at the local level. i don't know if, you know, cutting spending is certainly an answer, but i don't know that-- >> i'd cut this spending, we wasted billions of dollars on a program that didn't work. >> listen, betsy devos i think

should come back for another hearing, other than that clip, some of the ideas that she had about guns in schools and crazy talk abou- >> now, now,now. she said that, she was asked, e-mack, she was asked if there should be guns in school. she said if you live in montana where there are grizzly bears. 11,000 per year per student, but numbers vary. in new york 20,000, and in north carolina, 8,900. if you could give parents that money they could do a better job educating their kids. >> julie: that's taxpayer money. to rich's point. why is it okay that weslalthy parents can pick the schools

where their children go to, and poor can't. and if they get grades, we support that. the public schools has not been good and the media has been in the bag. pell grants. we give to chrenning students and student loans to pick their public or private college. i don't see why that's care. david: keeping it on k through 12, the fact is our kids are not educated better now despite spending billions more money on them. >> we should all support as a matter of moral principle school choice by poor families. but betsy devos is looking at a miracle to transform the students to-- charter schools do better than public schools and crave an environment for learning. parents may have been

indifferent and kids indifferent in that kind of irment voo -- environment. by golly, they change, it's know the static, people change in a good way. >> julie: and my point about the pell grant, college age school vouchers and why don't we-- >> if it works for vouchers and-- >> i know that john tamney is not a fan of department of education. it's got to start somewhere. is this the place where the revolution in education could tart? >> i don't think so. why is it that conservatives want to then have the government centrally plan our way out of the education problem? i'm all for competition, i think it improves school, but i'm with bill and always have been with bill on this. bad schools are more than people want to admit a function of disinterested students and disinterested parents, if you don't fix that. david: if you give parents more power, they will become mo more. >> trace true.

>> they will, number one. number two, the silly credentialism that keeps people teaching. we have a shortage of male teachers. male students who are unmotivated are lacking role models. and we could fix this. david: i used to be a teacher k through 12. i dropped out. i think a lot of people might stay in as teachers if they see that their work is actually amounting to something. so this could affect both teachers and students and parents. thank you all. the cashin' in gang getting ready to roll at the bottom of the hour. eric, what have you got? >> president trump teaming up with private sector unions, will the new partnership get the job done? hollywood still reprimanding president trump for his behavior. but does this ad proof they need a lesson on manners. we'll see you at 11:30.

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i've spent my life planting a size-six, non-slip shoe into that door. on this side, i want my customers to relax and enjoy themselves. but these days it's phones before forks. they want wifi out here. but behind that door, i need a private connection for my business. wifi pro from comcast business. public wifi for your customers. private wifi for your business. strong and secure. good for a door. and a network. comcast business. built for security. built for business. >> facebook announcing this week, they're rebooting their trending topics again time to combat against so-called fake news stories. now, you remember back in may employees admitted to suppressing news stories in

that same section. and facebook is subjective. shouldn't they let it play out? >> david, other than pedophilia, that kind of content or overt calls for violence, they really should just let it roll. people can start to sort this thing out on their own, and when you get something false out there, there are plenty of people out there ready to pounce on it and facebook is a legal private company that can legally do whatever they want, but they have such influence on what sites succeed and don't succeed. a site gets rude like breitbart, they can do harm to them. let it roll. david: john, i don't have a lot of confidence that they're going to get it right on what is fake news and not fake news because we've seen so many different impressions of that. do you? >> that's the beauty of it. it's not that markets are perfect, they're failing all the time and we correct the failures. facebook is a private company, it should be allowed to fail in how it filters news. david: again, bruce, i think of a couple of fake news stories on both the left or

right. on the left they were talking about how the martin luther king bust had been taken out of the oval office. what we saw in an interview with donald trump the other night that in fact, it's still there. he put his hand on it. a lot of fake news out there. i don't know if they're going to hit the right fake news, but that's my opinion, right? >> well, they could be going down a slippery slope here because if they want to be more of a traditional news organization, fox, pick what to lead your show with, what not to use. that might be what people want. i check trending twitter topics and sometimes you get a laugh out of it when you find out it's somebody commenting. they could be less social media and they could lose people. david: bill, is this a slippery slope? >> you could call it censorship, but what i'm paying them to do, forbes magazine, a book publisher, you want them to weed out the

bad stuff. david: rich, what do you think? >> i kind of agree with bill on this one. look, facebook is a large publicly traded company, they want-- you know, their shareholders are going to want them to continually build value in the company and i think that will guide facebook to play it, you know, down the middle pretty well. david: steve, there was a managing editor of forbes magazine for many years who was a regular on this program before he passed away named jame michaels. a wonderful guy. jim was absolutely clear of getting all the proof that you could before it arrived in the magazine has that just gone by the wayside that editors demand proof before it goes in print? >> no, i think there's a huge market for that and i think why in terms of the whole web which commodityizes things relentlessly. quality will win out more than ever before. you need to reputation. david: john, quickly, do you agree? >> i totally agree. let the market sort this out. it's an economic decision for

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news channel. >> we just had probably the most incredible meeting of our careers with the president, the vice-president, and the senior staffs and we will work with him and his administration to implement his plans on infrastructure, trade, and energy policy so that we really do put america back to work in the middle class jobs that our members and all americans are demanding. eric: big labor giving big praise to president trump, for his inclusive jobs plans for all workers. but will working with unions be a win for america? hi, i'm eric bolling and our