Congressman Michael Cloud represents the 27th District of Texas and sits on the House Committee on Agriculture and House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Before entering public office he was a small business owner.
The following has been edited for context and clarity.
Federal Newswire:
How has your perception of the job changed from when you were running for office and originally seeking...
Michael Cloud:
I never wanted this as a career. It was totally grassroots. I was asked to run with us and our family. Initially said no, we prayed about it, felt like it was something we were supposed to do. It's kind of like you talk about helping the country all the time doing what we need to do. But one of the first lines we said was Washington was broken.
And then you get here and find out, we were right. It's this transition from this idea that the government is meant to serve the people the glory of the American Revolution wasn't a new government, it was a free people. And the free people realized in order to maintain a healthy society, you have to have some structure of government. So let's create a government, let's put restraints on it that keep it in check and keep us away from the abuses that we've seen throughout history. And that was the model. And we've drifted a bit from that over time.
Federal Newswire:
You spent some time close to Colonial Williamsburg growing up. Did that have any impact on your development, your formation of these kinds of ideas?
Michael Cloud:
I'm sure it did. You can point to a lot of signals throughout your life. Obviously my parents are pro American people, not really politically involved. I don't remember. I mean, they would be involved, but I don't remember a political sign in my yard or campaigning or those kind of things. Loved our country. My dad built submarines and so we were in the shadow of military bases. My grandparents were veterans.
Federal Newswire:
The preamble to the Constitution is an aspirational sentiment in order to form a more perfect union.
Michael Cloud:
Exactly. And something we're continuing to work toward every single generation. This idea that that rights were embedded in people and that they were a gift from God and that government was put there to protect those rights as opposed to being a grant from a benevolent governor or government or king or monarch or something along those lines. And so it was an amazing thought and an idea. And this experiment and liberty, they would call it understanding. It's kind of like doctors who they'll say they're practicing and they've been practicing for 30 years in a sense. It's something we have to continue to be vigilant about.
Federal Newswire:
Is the problem that we move away from practicing and being amateurs to becoming professionals?
Michael Cloud:
In a sense you have people who come to DC and then forget who we're working for in a sense. And we have a professional bureaucracy who now will out weigh elected officials and the respect for what that's supposed to mean. So I realize one day I'm not going to be there.
As long as I'm here, I want to do everything I can to honor the responsibility that's been given to us. And we need to see that out of our bureaucracy in these agencies that have in large, since gone rogue and kind of have a will on their own. And it doesn't matter really what happens in an election.
Federal Newswire:
Talk about the oversight work that you've been doing. You talked to agency heads or agency representatives. What is their attitude towards all this?
Michael Cloud:
I remember so many hearings. We had somebody who had worked in the State Department, and this was during the Trump administration. They were upset and they were trying to produce this narrative, okay, there's the Trump foreign policy and then there's the official foreign policy.
I remember asking in the committee who sets the foreign policy in the United States? They're like, well, that's kind of complicated question. I really don't think it's a complicated question. This is what most elementary students can answer. And this is a bipartisan issue.
It's like you're temporary, you're elected, we'll out wait you and kind of continue, or we'll drag our feet if we don't like the policy. One of the issues we've been dealing with lately is stock trades and members of Congress and those kind of things. And we should have scrutiny on elected officials doing that, but then you also have the bureaucracy who has no accountability whatsoever.
Federal Newswire:
They call it regulatory capture.
Michael Cloud:
you end up having almost a different class. This bureaucracy that's not accountable to anyone.
You've got to remember, when you're in public service you're here to serve the public. And right now, that paradigm's just completely backwards.
Federal Newswire:
You sent the letter in August to the IRS asking for greater accountability. What was that about?
Michael Cloud:
Recently we had legislation that included, hiring 87,000 new employees, but we also found out the IRS has been accumulating firearms and ammunition. And most of us are thinking accountants and calculators and that kind of thing. And it's troubling. So you have an ad by the IRS saying, okay, we're looking for new IRS agents, and among all the skills you need to be able to be proficient with a firearm and be willing to shoot to kill if necessary. And I can tell you, I've traveled the district, I've traveled the nation a bit. I've yet had one person come to me and say, of the problems really facing our nation, if we just had a few more IRS agents, I think that's going to help us out.
Federal Newswire:
And the other side has pushed back and said, well, we need these agents to go after the big time tax cheatsBut then this video surfaced a couple of days later showing the training. And it was folks going after a small lawn operator.
Michael Cloud:
Exactly. And it wasn't that long ago that we saw the IRS politically motivated. And there was really no accountability for that. And when there's no accountability, it only involves the wrong doing.
And so now we're going to hire a new army of IRS agents, give them authority to potentially shoot and kill, and we're collecting ammo, buying firearms for IRS agents. So it's one of those things where what we need to be doing is not putting extra scrutiny on the American people who are doing their best, we need to be putting extra scrutiny on the bureaucracy and getting them up to par.
Federal Newswire:
It's not just the IRS, but other areas as well.
Michael Cloud:
Where we have FISA warrant abuse and we had the FBI continually now very overtly targeting political opponents. And the key issue comes back to, nobody trusts the FBI now.
And so even if what they're saying is true, their credibility is shot. And who do you go to when the law enforcement branch has been corrupted? And that becomes very troubling. And we have to remember that our whole foundation of our government is the trust of the American people. And when we lose trust, which we certainly have, it becomes very troubling to deal with. And this is all about our issue, the work that we're trying to do with the bureaucracy from an oversight perspective. But what needs to be done with the FBI is really all about just simply restoring the people's trust in their government. But again, I mean, if you talk about a rogue agency who's forgotten who they serve, FBI's a prime example of that.
Federal Newswire:
But talk a little bit about the immigration issue, the impact on Texas.
Michael Cloud:
The southern end of our district is two hours south of the southern border, and my wife is also a naturalized citizen for Mexico. So we have a little bit of experience going through the immigration process. And I think it's important to recognize that immigration is different than border security. Obviously they're related. Border security is something that should not be a partisan issue. I mean, we have militarized cartels on the southern border that control everything that's coming across.
And so by now, anybody who's been following this understand the human trafficking issue that's horrific that's propelled by the cartels. There's fentanyl pouring across our border along with all the other illicit drugs and we're talking 100,000 people killed in our country. A lot of these chemicals coming from China, they're paying the cartels to distribute them into the United States.
How that is not considered an act of war, I don't know. And so our entire border there is no operational control.
Now it's the armed coyote coming across telling our guys, "Hey, I'm going to be bringing over a load. Can you get them to the station for processing?" In which case then our taxpayer dollars are used to transport them all over the country. In which case the cartels as many times take up the rest of that relationship because either they still owe the cartel money and so they're going to go into some sort of work program where they're still beholden to the cartels or they're in some sort of sex trafficking or trade. And the cartels are profiting hundreds of million dollars a month off of this.
And yet we have a border czar who says, we have operational control. We do not have operational control at all.
