Mitch Landrieu: The Last Thing You Want Is to Put an Unelected Billionaire Bureaucrat in Charge of Cutting Waste

EXCERPT:

LANDRIEU: “When I became mayor of New Orleans, three weeks after the BP oil spill hit, we had been through Katrina, Rita, Ike, Gustav, the national recession, and the BP oil spill. My government was $100 million in the hole out of a $460 million budget. I had to cut 20 percent out of a budget in six months. I don't know anybody else in the country that's ever done that. But what I found is you better not cut stupid. You got to cut smart, and you got to cut thoughtful. The American public can understand this. Joe, you look like a pretty fit guy. You know, if I told you that you needed to lose 30 percent of your body weight, and I did it by cutting off --“
SCARBOROUGH: “Yeah.”
LANDRIEU: “-- your leg, you'd bleed to death, essentially. So the last thing you want to do is put an unaccountable billionaire bureaucrat in charge, where there's no transparency, and have them just cut in a chaotic way that's going to affect the lives, the real lives of people.”