Reopening the economy
Below is an excerpt of remarks by the president to his Cabinet at a White House meeting held Tuesday.
Thank you very much, everybody. Please. So, welcome to our Cabinet meeting. And every member of my Cabinet is working tirelessly to defeat the invisible enemy.
But we’re going to safely reopen our country and our economy, and it’s happening very rapidly. And it’s happening, interestingly, where numbers are actually going down …
In our drive to crush the virus, the U.S. has completed nearly 12 million tests. And that test — that number today is almost 14 million. Nobody is close. Germany would be second with approximately 10 million less than us …
What has been done with testing, what’s been done with ventilators, what’s been done with the distribution of product has been incredible.
Vaccines are moving quickly into phase one and phase two trials, and trials of dozens of therapies and cures are underway. And we’re making tremendous strides with therapies, cures and vaccines. I think we’re way ahead of schedule.
And you probably heard: Logistically, we have our military engaged. And as soon as we have whatever it is that we’re going to have, whether it’s therapeutic or vaccine, it will be distributed very rapidly. Our military is ready to go. They can deploy hundreds of thousands of men and women a day. And now what they’re going to be doing is they’re going to be doing the vaccine, which we are geared up for even before we have it. But the chances of us having it are extraordinary.
To protect our people and defeat the virus, we must also defend the health of our nation’s economy.
The pandemic has shown once again the vital importance of economic independence and bringing supply chains back from China and other countries. I probably got elected — one of the primary reasons was that. “Make America Great Again,” “America First” — call it whatever you want. But we went way out of bounds; we build a car and we go to 12 countries to build a car. I want to build a car from one country: We make the parts.
To achieve this goal, we’ve slashed red tape and bureaucracy and unleashed the largest industrial mobilization since World War II, especially when it comes to big things like a ventilator. It’s a very big, clumsy, highly sophisticated product. And we have now assembly lines. We’re the talk of the world. We’re supplying them to other countries. We’re helping other countries that are going through this plague and they’re never going to be able to do ventilators.
So … it’s the biggest mobilization since World War II. And we’re fighting for the livelihoods of American workers, and we must continue to cut through every piece of red tape that stands in our way. And that’s why this is such an exciting meeting — beyond being a Cabinet meeting, which is always good — because with millions of Americans forced out of work by the virus, it’s more important than ever to remove burdens that destroy American jobs.
In a few minutes, I will sign an executive order instructing federal agencies to use any and all authority to waive, suspend and eliminate unnecessary regulations that impede economic recovery. And we want to leave it that way. We want to leave it that way. In some cases, we won’t be able to, but in other cases, we will.
And you’ve heard me say many times — I’ve said and I’ve said it very strongly that regulations — we’ve done more regulation cutting than any president in history, whether they’re there for four years, eight years or, in one case, more. We’ve done more regulation cutting — I don’t mean just in a year or two years. I mean in the three and a half years that we’ve been here, we’ve cut far more regulations by a factor of a lot than any other administration, any other presidency. So that’s really something.
I’m directing agencies to review the hundreds of regulations we’ve already suspended in response to the virus and make these suspensions permanent where possible. I’m also instructing agencies to use the emergency authorities to speed up regulation cuts or new rules that will create jobs and prosperity and get rid of unnecessary rules and regulations.
We had cases where it would take 20 years to build a highway. You’d have to go through various agencies to get the same permit. I lived with it in the private sector, so I know it better than anybody, where you’d go years and years and years to build a simple roadway or a simple building, and it would end up costing an absolute fortune — many, many times what it should cost.
I want to once again thank every member of the Cabinet for your commitment to helping our nation reopen, to recover and rebuild.
Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States.