The following is the full transcript of an interview with Vice President JD Vance on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Jan. 26, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mr. Vice President, if you’re ready, we’ll dive right in.
VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: Ready to go.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, both defense secretaries from President Trump’s last term were confirmed overwhelmingly, 90 percent of the vote. Pete Hegseth, it was a tie, bipartisan opposition, smallest margin since the job was created. You had to break that tie. If the nominee can’t unite your party, how is he going to lead three million people?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Well, look, I think Pete is a disrupter, and a lot of people don’t like that disruption, but Margaret that disruption is incredibly necessary. If you think about all of those bipartisan, massive votes, we have to ask ourselves, what did they get us? They got us a country where we fought many wars over the last 40 years, but haven’t won a war about as long as I’ve been alive. They’ve got us a military with a major recruitment crisis, a procurement price crisis that’s totally dysfunctional, where we buy airplanes for billions and billions of dollars, terrible cost overruns, the delivery dates are always delayed. So we need a big change. Now, admittedly, there are people who don’t like that big change, but it is necessary, and it’s explicitly what Donald J. Trump ran on and I think part of the reason why the American people elected him their 47th president.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, the main objective is changing all of that? That it’s going to be Pete Hegseth alone?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: I’d say the main problem is- or excuse me, the main thing that we want Pete Hegseth to do is to fix the problems at the Department of Defense and unfortunately, there are many. We’ve gotten into way too many wars that we don’t have a plan for winning. We’ve gotten into way too many misadventures that we shouldn’t have got into in the very first place, and our procurement process, Margaret, is incredibly broken. We’re in an era–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Those are policy decisions.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –Well, of course, they’re policy decisions, but they’re also logistical and implementation decisions. If you look at where we are with the rise of artificial intelligence, with the rise of drone technology and drone warfare, we have to really, top to bottom, change the way that we fund the procurement of weapons, the way that we arm our troops. This is a major period of disruption, and we think Pete Hegseth is the guy to lead the job. Now there’s another element to this Margaret too, which is we believe that military morale, at least until the election of President Trump, was historically low. You had the Army missing recruitment goals by tens of thousands of soldiers, and already recruitment is starting to pick up because Pete Hegseth is fundamentally a war fighter’s leader at the Department of Defense. He is a guy who sees, not through the perspective of the generals or the bureaucrats, he looks at things through the perspective of the men and women that we send off to fight in our wars.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Let me ask you about other nominees. Both the Wall Street Journal and the National Review, conservative publications, as you know, have been critical of Tulsi Gabbard. The Review called her “an atrocious nominee who deserves to be defeated.” They compared her defense of Edward Snowden, the fugitive to- who stole U.S. secrets, to an attorney general who thinks the mob gets a bad rap. Her refusal to accept U.S. intelligence findings that Assad gassed his own people, they said was “like a nominee for OMB Director not being able to count.” Does any of this give you pause putting her in charge of the U.S. intelligence community? Yes or no?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: No, Margaret look, these are publications that attacked Donald J. Trump obsessively, but those publications don’t determine who the president is, the American people do–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –And ultimately supported him.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –and Donald J. Trump is the person who determines who his cabinet is, not these publications that I think, frankly, have lost relevance. Here’s–
MARGARET BRENNAN: The Senate will–
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Here’s Tulsi Gabbard’s–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –ultimately decide.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Well, the Senate will provide advice and consent, as is its constitutional obligation, but I feel confident that Tulsi Gabbard will ultimately get through. Two things that are important to know about Tulsi. First of all, she is a career military servant who’s had a classification at the highest levels for nearly two decades. She has impeccable character, impeccable record of service, and she also is a person who I think is going to bring some trust back to the intelligence services. The bureaucrats at our intelligence services have gotten completely out of control. They’ve been part of the weaponization of our political system, the weaponization of our justice system. We need to have good intelligence services who keep us safe, but part of that is restoring trust in those services, and we think Tulsi is the right person to do it. That’s why the president–
MARGARET BRENNAN: She doesn’t trust those intelligence services.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: She recognizes the bureaucrats have gotten out of control, and we need somebody there who’s going to rein them in and return those services to their core mission of identifying information that’s going to keep us safe.
MARGARET BRENNAN: A lot has happened in the past week.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Yes, it has.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You campaigned on lowering prices for consumers. We’ve seen all of these executive orders. Which one lowers prices?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Well, first of all, we have done a lot, and there have been a number of executive orders that have caused, already, jobs to start coming back into our country, which is a core part of lowering prices. More capital investment, more job creation in our economy, is one of the things that’s going to drive down prices for all consumers, but also raise wages so that people can afford to buy the things that they need. If you look at our slate of executive orders–
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, grocery prices aren’t going to come down?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: No, Margaret, prices are going to come down, but it’s going to take a little bit of time, right? The president has been president for all of five days. I think that in those five days, he’s accomplished more than Joe Biden did in four years. It’s been an incredible breakneck pace of activity. We’re going to work with Congress. We’re of course going to have more executive orders, and we’re going to try- the way that you- you lower prices is that you encourage more capital investment into our country, and you asked specifically what executive order is going to help lower prices. All of the stuff that we’ve done on energy, to explore more energy reserves, to develop more energy resources in the United States of America. One of the main drivers of increased prices under the Biden Administration is that we had a massive increase in energy prices. Donald Trump has already taken multiple executive actions that are going to lower energy prices, and I do believe that means consumers are going to see lower prices at the pump and at the grocery store, but it’s going to take a little bit of time. Rome wasn’t built in a day–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE –and while we’ve done a whole lot, we can’t undo all of the damage of Joe Biden’s presidency in four days–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, there were a lot of things that contributed to higher energy prices and there was record oil and gas production–
(CROSSTALK)
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –Yes, Joe Biden did many–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –But the price of eggs–
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –many terrible things–
MARGARET BRENNAN: — the things that people see–
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –to lead to an increase in prices. I agree, Margaret.
(END CROSSTALK)
MARGARET BRENNAN: No, but all the things you experience at the grocery store are what people touch and feel. That’s what- you were talking about bacon on the campaign trail.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Of course, of course.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Those things- when do consumers actually get to touch and feel a difference in their lives?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Well, but Margaret, how does bacon get to the grocery store? It comes on trucks that are fueled by diesel fuel. If the diesel is way too expensive, the bacon is going to become more expensive. How do we grow the bacon? Our farmers need energy to produce it. So if we lower energy prices, we are going to see lower prices for consumers, and that is what we’re trying to fight for.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the flurry of executive orders, most of them weren’t about the economy. Many of them–
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Many of them were, though, Margaret. We had- I think we’ve taken over–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –You had a promise of tariffs by February 1.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –We’ve taken over 200 executive actions, some executive orders, other executive actions. Again, this is in less than a week, and a lot of them were focused on the economy, bringing investment into our country and lowering energy prices. We’ve also focused on safety, restoring public safety, ending weaponization of the Department of Justice. We’ve done a lot, and I think the president is to be commended for actually coming in and doing something with this incredible mandate the American people gave him. He’s not sitting in the Oval Office doing nothing. He’s doing the American people’s business, and I think they’re going to see a lot of good effects from it.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, a lot of these announcements have yet to take effect.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Sure.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The president did say he wants to do something with an executive order in relation to federal emergency response. He said he may reform or eliminate FEMA instead of sending emergency responders, he may start to send a percentage of money to states to take care of themselves. But you know, FEMA has specialized expertise that some of these states just don’t have–
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Oh, Margaret, I–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –and in their arsenal, and–
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –I wish that they–
MARGARET BRENNAN: — how will states who are- who are lower income states, the Mississippis, the Kentuckys, the Alabamas, be able to do this for themselves without federal help?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Well, the president, to be clear, is not saying we’re going to leave anybody behind. He’s saying that in- the way that we administer these resources, some of which is coming from the federal level, some of which is coming from the state level, we’ve got to get the bureaucrats out of the way and get the aid to the people who need it most–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –But these are the first responders–
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: –Let’s be honest, Margaret. You talk about the expertise from FEMA. FEMA in North Carolina, in California, in Florida with some of the hurricanes, has often been a disaster. And it’s not because we don’t have good people at FEMA. It’s because bureaucratic red tape and garbage prevents the rapid deployment of resources to people who need it the most.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But the states are now going to have to do this themselves?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: The president is trying to encourage us to reform the way that we deliver emergency response in a way that gets resources to people who need it–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –So don’t take him literally, is what you’re saying?
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: No- we should take the president at his word that FEMA needs desperate reform, because it does. Margaret, when I went to North Carolina as VP-elect, but before we were sworn in, people would talk about how FEMA would…
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