Congressman Tom Cole talks DOGE, education, evolving political landscape in exclusive sit-down with News 4

Yahoo

22-03-2025

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — News 4 got Congressman Tom Cole on the record about where he stands on issues surrounding DOGE cuts affecting Oklahoma jobs, cuts to the U.S. Department of Education, and several other topics during an exclusive one-on-one interview Friday.
Congressman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) has represented Oklahoma's Fourth Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2003.
He serves as the chair of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee.
Federal budget and spending-related bills must pass through his committee in order to advance, making Cole one of the more powerful and influential members of Congress.
Cole: Some Oklahoma facilities including National Weather Center, spared from DOGE closings; others still have concerns
On Friday, News 4 spoke with Cole about issues News 4 viewers have been asking for answers about.
Among them, cuts by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which News 4 has reported have led to thousands of federal workers losing their jobs with little to no warning, including some in Oklahoma.
News 4 also asked Cole about an executive order President Trump signed this week, which largely dismantles the U.S. Department of Education, sending control over education policy to each individual state.
Cole will appear on News 4's FlashPoint this Sunday, March 23, where News 4 will be able to speak with him in even deeper detail.
Below is a transcript of News 4's entire Friday sit-down interview with Cole.
News 4:
'Congressman Cole, again, I appreciate you doing this.'
Cole:
'Sure!'
News 4:
What's the biggest thing that—people who are here in Oklahoma, they're watching what's going on in Washington right now—what's the biggest thing that you want to let people know that you're working on right now that maybe they don't realize is going on?'
Cole:
'Well, probably the most important thing for me—appropriations is keeping the government open and funded. And we've been able to do that twice.
In December, we did a continuing resolution—what's called a CR—to keep government open through March 14. And then we were able to do it again, in a very partisan and divided [Congress], through September 30.
I made some adjustments in spending. I would have much preferred to negotiate a deal with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. That really wasn't possible.
In the House, we got exactly one Democratic vote to keep the government open. Everybody else voted to shut it down, even though this was what's called a 'clean CR.' Nothing controversial, no effort to, for instance, cap your DOGE savings and put them in there. Things that we knew would be deliberately offensive to Democrats. We tried to avoid that. And I think for the most part, did.
And then, of course, once that bill got to the Senate, it's nice to see sanity prevail. And look, a negotiated deal's always best. But if we can't do that, then a continuing resolution to prevent a shutdown is next and the worst of the possible outcomes is a shutdown.
So we've avoided that twice, delivered a lot of disaster relief, and those bills delivered extra money to the FAA right here in Oklahoma City and provided the largest pay increase for junior enlisted personnel in over 40 years to help our young men and women that are sacrificing for us. So a lot of good things in the bill. And sorry more people couldn't join us.
But again, the Democrat just strung out the negotiations and the speaker said, 'I can't live every two weeks with a vote to keep the government open. So keep negotiating. But we're going to get to the point we need to pull the trigger.' And we did. And we were successful in that.'
News 4:
'When people hear the title 'House Appropriations Chair' and—maybe people who don't pay too much attention to what goes on in politics—they hear that maybe they don't even know what that means… describe, what is your role? And why is it—for Oklahomans here—why is it such a big deal for us that one of our members of Congress is in that role?'
Cole:
'Well, first, in terms of what the role is, there's 12 basic bills that fund the government. The big one, of course, is defense. That's about half of what the Appropriations Committee spend. But, you know, transportation, infrastructure, education, and you just go down the list. There's lots of different things. Our job is to write those 12 bills, get them out of committee, then get them across the floor, then negotiate with the Senate.
And obviously the president has to sign them. Almost any president can sustain almost any veto these days. So very seldom that one is going to be overridden. So that's the essence of the job, is the funding of the day-to-day operation of government.
We do not deal with Social Security. We do not deal with Medicare or Medicaid. Those things are matters of law. Those are actually bigger portions of the budget these days than what we do. That wasn't always the case, but it is today. But still, you know what most people think of as government, we fund.
In terms of why that's important here, Oklahoma is a federal-heavy state. We have five military installations here. They're all major employers of the civilian population. They also attract—I mean, just think of Tinker Air Force Base, right next to it, there's over 3000 Boeing employees— really good jobs in Oklahoma.
Pratt & Whitney just opened an 850,000 square foot engineering center immediately south of the base, over a thousand jobs there. So there's lots of jobs related to these facilities.
You go down to Lawton, you go to Elgin and there's a BAE facility. They do artillery. And so lots of contractors, lots of different places around the state.
And we have a large Indian population. There's a strong federal component there in terms of treaty obligations to tribes, Indian health facilities, what have you. That's federal money that passes through the Appropriations Committee.
The National Weather Center, Kerr Water Labs—which is the leading groundwater research areas in Ada, Oklahoma—again, we have a lot of jobs tied up in these things, a big part of our economy.
You can contrast that with other states that don't have anywhere near this size of military presence. A lot of states don't have a single military base, let alone five major bases. So, again, we have a big reason to be concerned about what the federal government does because it has an outsized footprint in Oklahoma.'
News 4:
'And on that note, being a federal-heavy state, when people see these headlines—especially out of DOGE—we're talking about major federal cuts. And a lot of federal employees in this state see that, and we've talked to them, and a lot of them are nervous. They're not confident that their job will still be there.
We've heard from one who was an employee at the FAA, who was a probationary employee, and said that they just received termination papers, that it was because of performance. But they hadn't even been there long enough to have a performance review.
When you hear those stories, and when you hear of people who say that they don't have an income to provide for their family now, what would you tell people who are nervous?'
Cole:
'Well, first of all, I understand that and I'm empathetic with that. And we try to work on individual cases. We try to protect facilities that we think provide important services.
Certainly, FAA is absolutely critical. If you don't have it operational, you're not training air traffic controllers, you're not doing other vital missions. They look out for all the radar, for NORAD, for instance, out of the facility in Oklahoma City. So these are critical national missions.
I would say the best defense we have in Oklahoma is the quality of the workforce and the importance of the missions. You know, there are some places the federal government can be cut. There's other places that's not likely to be cut.
Tinker Air Force Base keeps 50-year-old airplanes in combat conditions and flying in unfriendly skies. So, the workforce that it takes to do that is not something you can just replicate overnight or any place in the world. That's a generations-old workforce and tradition there that's done great work for the United States for over 80 years.
So, again, I think—we never lost a military base during BRAC. You're not going to lose something like the FAA. There's no comparable system. You're not going to lose something like the National Severe Storms Laboratory and Forecasting Center in Norman. So I think these things are mostly secure.
And I also point out two things. One, it's important to remember we are an enterprise, the United States government, losing $2 trillion a year now. So the idea that it can just keep going and business as usual, that's just not true. You have to make some tough decisions.
And I also would point out, like I'll just use my own district as an example. Last year, Michelin announced they were going to scale down, close down a facility in Ardmore, Oklahoma, had been there 50 years, employed over 2000 people in a town of 25,000. That's pretty shocking too. I didn't hear anywhere near the concerns.
We lost more people—jobs—in that single incident than we've lost through DOGE or are likely to lose through DOGE. I had a Dollar General distribution facility right outside Marietta, Oklahoma, last year, hit by a tornado. 600 jobs gone in a town of 2800. Not to mention the damage in the town. So, again, and we try to work and help on these things, but these things do happen.
You know, you like to have more warning. We've had some success in defending and expanding things in Oklahoma. People forget, you know, when I was in Congress early on, we were able to get the air defense artillery out of Texas up here. Boeing brought a thousand jobs from Riverside, California to Tinker Air Force Base, right outside it.
They brought another thousand from Wichita. That was probably pretty tough for the people in Riverside, California, and certainly Wichita, Kansas. It was a big boon for Oklahoma City. So there's always turmoil in the job market. We do what we can, again, to protect the jobs we have, to build and work with both our private and public employers to, you know, grow jobs and grow opportunities.
But, you know, every now and then, either business organizations need to make decisions they think are in their economic best interest and the government has to do, occasionally, the same thing.
Oklahoma over the years has been the beneficiary of that. I mean Tinker Air Force Base—in 1995, I remember it well, I was secretary of state—was in a competition with a comparable—well, there is no comparable air depot to Tinker—but another air depot in Texas. We won the competition. That one got closed. Tinker stayed open. It could have gone the other way.
So, fortunately, again, the workforce is good, the missions are important, and the public support for public missions in Oklahoma is overwhelming. A lot of people don't like to have military bases near them. A lot of people wonder about defense work. That's not true in Oklahoma, for the most part.
Again, it's a workforce that's anxious to do the work, and communities that are proud to host the American military. I think that's a great privilege. So that's helped us retain the facilities we have when other states have not been nearly as fortunate.'
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News 4:
'A couple weeks ago, you put out the news that that there were some facilities here in Oklahoma that you stepped in and helped get them off the chopping block, essentially.
And for people who, you know, maybe live in a different district, they don't get represented by you. They don't have you fighting for their specific district's needs, necessarily. Maybe their representative is new to Congress, or they just don't know their district as well as you know, yours. You know, if the National Weather Center were some other district, perhaps.
Is it fair to be putting the burden on people, like [Congress members], to put in all this over time to go through and try to figure out what's at risk in their districts?'
Cole:
'Well, look, it's fair. You have the right to ask your congressman or senator anything you care to ask them to do as long as it's legal. And there's nothing illegal about representing your district.
And I'd point out yesterday, you know, the White House announced 100 different facilities that had been on that list, that were taken off. They weren't all mine, there were three that I was focused on. So a lot of other members, Democrat and Republican, actually, the article I read this morning was talking about one of my former colleagues who's now in the Senate, a Democrat, having been very successful in getting something in New Mexico removed from the list. So, you know, that's appropriate advocacy for your district.
But the facts [have] got to back you up. Not every single federal job and not every single federal facility is worth keeping open. And as a rule, they're harder to close than any private entity is. I mean, some corporate boardroom can make a decision in a place that affects Ardmore, Oklahoma, and there's not much I can do about it. There's not much the people there can do about it. Whereas if it's a federal or state facility, we do have an opportunity to advocate and to punch whatever buttons we can to try and save the jobs if we think it's the appropriate thing to do.
So, you know, this is actually a pretty good system. Somebody is going to make these decisions. Not everything, once it's established, will stay exactly the way it is. There aren't any Pony Express stations anymore either. I mean, things will move on. Jobs will be lost.
There's not anywhere near the number of blacksmiths in the United States there was in 1900 either. But, you know, you've got to be willing to adjust and you got to know your district well enough, and its interests well enough, to protect them.
If you can't do your job up to the satisfaction of your electorate—believe me—there'll be somebody to replace you. Every two years, my job's on the line. And people in the fourth District decide whether or not they think I've done well enough to send me back.
If you don't think people get defeated, believe me, the average tenure in Congress now is less than eight years. The average tenure on the Republican side of the aisle is 5.8 years right now. So a lot of new members, a lot of people in Congress that weren't there when Donald Trump was president the last time. And that was, what, four years ago? So, yeah, they're shaking up people pretty rapidly these days in the American electorate.
And that's fine. That's what the job is when you ask for it and you go out and make your case. But people are allowed to exercise whatever judgment they want and, you know, they either keep you or fire you. It's pretty much up to them.'
News 4:
'You talk about, you know, we're not going to lose the FAA, we're not going to lose the National Weather Center, things like that.
There's one man we spoke to who worked in IRS office here in Oklahoma City, and he was laid off. He'd actually started the job beginning of January, hadn't even been there a month. He was fired. And he was given that same letter that said it was for performance reasons. And his concern is that that office was already about half-staffed. And his job was to go out there and make sure that businesses are not just holding on to the money they set aside for taxes, but that they're actually sending it to the government to be funded.
Is there any concern that with these cuts, that these agencies won't be able to operate as effectively?'
Cole:
'There is concern with that. And there's absolute outrage about saying you removed somebody for cause when you didn't.
You removed them because they were a provisional employee, and it's just easier to do that the first year or so that you're working for the federal government. That's unfair and that needs to be corrected. And I know other members that have complained about it, and I certainly have too.
You don't tell somebody, or put on their record, that they've done something wrong when they didn't do anything wrong. They just get caught in RIF. And I do worry about that.
Now, we haven't had too much of that. I was actually at Tinker yesterday. They've got, you know, not down provisional employees in any serious numbers at all. And that's good because that's—compare to the older workforce—you need a continuous pipeline of people coming in because people are retiring out. And you have to think of both ends of this as you bring people along.
So all I can tell you is, again, the federal government, you should think about it as a business that's losing an enormous amount of money and has been doing it for a long time. And it's got new management that wants to try and shake that up.
And unfortunately, as Mr. Musk said to me, 'We will make mistakes. Try to point them out to us and we'll try and fix them as we go.' I found that to be the case.
Today, Friday, there's actually a thousand or—excuse me—over 100 of these sites that were supposed to be terminated, they pulled off the list.
So I wasn't the only person busy working for his or her district and trying to make sure what we thought were valuable facilities were protected. Other members are doing the same thing or they're learning more as they go along. Or cabinet members are saying—now that they're in place for the most part—'You're not doing that here, here's why I think this is more important.' And obviously the president's listening to the people he put in charge of the cabinet.
So, again, you know, just bear with us. But new administrations pursue different policies. It has consequences. Sometimes in the private sector.
As I mentioned, you know, Joe Biden on day one terminated the Keystone Pipeline. I think that was a terrible decision in terms of the energy security and viability of the United States. It was very unfair to Canada, put 10,000 people at the snap of the fingers out of work. 10,000. They didn't get any warning. They're just out.
So, again, it strikes me that we ought to be as concerned with one group as we are with another.
And this does sometimes happen. We work hard to mitigate it. So far, Oklahoma's not been hit, you know, very hard, honestly. Not as hard as Ardmore, Oklahoma, was hit by itself when it lost the Michelin plant, or that Marietta, Oklahoma was hit when it lost its distribution center. I mean, you just try to work to get people to come back in and rehire, or to rebuild or to relocate.
And, you know, I've been working with the Oklahoma City and Chamber of Commerce very closely to bring a major business in here. I think we're going to have some success. Hasn't been announced yet. But the point is, you know, sometimes we gain at the expense of other places that lose.
We certainly have with Boeing moving jobs in here. They moved them from other places—where people were working—to here, because it made more sense business-wise. And I regret anybody lost their job in Kansas and California, but I'm pretty happy for the 2000-3000 plus jobs now that we have here with Boeing in Oklahoma City.'
News 4:
'The Department of Education has been a headline this week with the plans to move forward with—not doing away with it totally, I guess—but downsizing it significantly. And I know the President's been vocal about, 'this needs to go back to the states, the states need to be in control of education.'
Here in a state like Oklahoma, where depending on which ranking or metric you look at, we're nearly dead last among the states in education—whether it's per pupil funding or education quality—education has been a bit of a hot topic in this state.
With the person in charge of the Department of Education in Oklahoma right now, a lot of people don't trust him with the power he already has. Giving him more power—that scares some people even more.
Is Oklahoma equipped to handle this new task of taking over education?'
Cole:
'Well, it's not my place to comment on any particular official. But yeah, Oklahoma's equipped. We're more than capable of running our own affairs. And honestly, it puts the responsibility in the hands of the people who can elect the school boards and elect the state superintendent of education. It's a lot easier if the money and the authority is closer to the people, in my view.
So, you know, the president's order says nothing is to be done to interrupt the flow of money that flowing in the particular programs in school districts. Things like what's called IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, to help school districts fund, because if a kid has a disability, certainly has a right to an education, and that can be very expensive.
So that's a good place. Oklahoma gets a lot of what's called 'impact aid.' That's places like Tinker and Fort Sill don't pay local taxes, they're federal facilities. But they attract a big population and those people have kids and those kids are going to local schools, so we try to provide extra money. Or Indian land, which is not on the tax rolls. It's in federal trust.
So again, the federal government provides additional money. We work very hard on impact aid in my office and we've been able to increase it every single year. Not by as much as we would like, but it's gone up. It's kept pace, for the most part, with inflation, maybe a little bit better. So there are certainly functions there, but I'm never going to say, as a Republican and a conservative, it's a bad thing for things to go back to the States.
I think by and large, other than what you absolutely have to have—you can't run an army at the state level, but you can have National Guards that can be mobilized to help. But there's certain things that have to be done on a national schedule. But the states historically have taken care of their own education system.
And, you know, you made the argument about educational performance. Since we created the Department of Education in the late 1970s, performance in American schools have consistently gone down relative to other countries. So whatever mission it was supposed to accomplish, it certainly has not accomplished it. And I think the President's just saying let's try something different because what we're doing isn't working, but we're not going to take the resources away. Quite the opposite.
And it's pretty popular on my side of the aisle to talk about—just take the money and block grant it to the states. We'll have 50 different laboratories out there. Some will work, some won't work as well. People will figure it out and they'll move that way. But the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. is sluggish. It's difficult to deal with and it's expensive to maintain.
Why not take that money, send it back to places like Oklahoma, Topeka or Little Rock, and let state legislators make a local decision? We do that with a lot of things now. I mean, Medicare excuse me, Medicaid, is run by the states. We provide a lot of the money, over two-thirds of the money—well-over two-thirds in some states—but the authority and the actual operation of it is done primarily at the state level in cooperation with one coordinating agency in D.C.
So, again, the more power, you can localize, put in the hands of people, I think the better off you are. If only because, if the people get mad or upset, they can get to the decision makers in a hurry. They can change them if they don't like them. It's pretty hard to figure out who does what 2000 miles away in Washington, D.C., as opposed to, well, this person in Oklahoma City or this group of people, they're the ones that I need to persuade to do the right thing and whatever that is.
So again, that just empowers people to control their own destiny. And I think that's what we ought to be doing as free people.'
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News 4:
'It seems like just in the whole world right now—especially in this country—it seems like the past decade or so, or more even, both sides of the political aisle, there seems to be more vitriol, more rhetoric that each side hurls at each other. Things get personal, things get kind of testy.
What would you say to people out there who are just worried about the rhetoric?'
Cole:
'I think that's an appropriate thing to be worried about, although I would also tell you—as an old historian—go back and look at the rhetoric in the era of the founding fathers, in the opening 20 years of the republic. Or look at the 1850s and moving toward a civil war.
We go through cycles in this country. This is certainly a time of polarization and partisanship. But to think it hasn't happened in America before, and we got through it okay?
Hopefully I don't think there's a civil war waiting at the end of this for us. But we are in a period of intense political competition. That comes and goes. The late 19th century was a lot like that, with a lot of movement back and forth at the congressional level, in particular between Democrats and Republicans in the 1870s, 1880s.
So, you know, I would tell people just think, number one, about your friends and neighbors, because that's who the American people are. What do you think about them? And you probably think pretty highly of them, because America is a country full of decent, hardworking, honorable people. And they're pretty tough, too.
And then remember, the institutions of the country. We're relatively new country. We're not old like England or France, but we are an ancient democracy. We're the oldest democracy in the world. And the institutions that were laid out in our constitution have changed and developed over years, but they're still there and they work pretty well, and they've kept the country pretty well.
Look, the founders could come back today and see, you know, we're the most powerful country in the world or most populous in the world. We're certainly the freest in the world. We have the highest living standards in the world. We're freer today than they were in the 1780s and 90s because there is no slavery. You know, we're closer to the ideals—we're not nearly there—of genuine equality in the Constitution. This country has moved a long way in the right direction.
And I don't think it's a worse country than I grew up in. I think in many ways it's a better country. I grew up in the civil rights era, you know, where you can go to Oklahoma and the South and see signs like, 'no colored allowed' and things like that. You don't see those things anymore. That's not an ancient thing. That's because a generation of Americans in the sixties and seventies and eighties really up and decided, you know, we're not that people. We're not an apartheid society. We're not going to allow that. We're not gonna stand for it. Some of them risked their lives to do it, and God bless them for it because they made America better.
So, yeah, I just have a lot of faith in the American ideals of freedom, personal responsibility, individual liberty. And they've worked out well for us. And I have great confidence in the decency the American people. And I think our institutions have been tested about every way imaginable.
There's no Soviet Union anymore. There's still Russia—it's still kind of despondent. But they were supposed to bury us and leave us in the dustbin of history. Well, who's in the dustbin of history now? It's not the United States of America. It's the Soviet Union.
So, again, have a little faith in your fellow Americans, Have a little faith in our institutions. And, you know, maybe God does give us a special providence. He's certainly, I think, given us a special protection over the lifetime of this country.
What's the old saying? I think it's an old Churchill line, 'you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they've exhausted every other possibility.' Sometimes that's true. It takes us a while, but we generally get to the right place as a people and a country.
And I think people before they worry about our future should remember how far we've come in our past. And, you know, nobody immigrates to Russia. Nobody's trying to get into Russia. And the only people trying to get into China to live, live in North Korea, nobody else particularly wants to go.
This country—people are beating on the door to try and get here because they know it provides more opportunity, more security, more freedom than any other place on the planet.
Now, we want you to come legally and we're going to be tough on you if you try to come illegally. But we're a pretty powerful magnet. And the rest of the world knows I'd rather be an American than almost anything else on the planet.'
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