Hegseth spars with lawmakers

No, you use that-- --out of respect for these officers.

--as an excuse. But, ultimately, we want to take the department in a particular direction, certain services in a particular direction, and we want leadership that's running as fast in that direction as possible. And in some cases, we make changes accordingly but do so out of respect to those officers. Now let's bring in political reporter for Axios,Hans Nichols. Hans, thank you so much for your time today. What stood out to you so far from what you heard from Hegseth? Oh, mostly the consistency, the consistency with what Secretary Hegseth said yesterday and what he's saying today. The tone is the same. A few of the questions are a little bit different. There are some protesters. But if we take a step back, what's pretty clear is that the secretary of defense-- secretary of war, as Pete Hegseth likes to be called, wants to have this conversation. And we're going to be having this conversation a lot more, not necessarily on the Senate side, where I am, but over on the House side. If the House flips and you have a House Democratic majority, expect Hegseth, expect others in the cabinet to be drawn in front of the Capitol and drawn in front of congressional committees not on a weekly basis but on a much more frequent basis. But I think what we also can anticipate is that Hegseth likes this. He likes fighting about it. He likes articulating his views, and he doesn't mind the confrontation. And I think that's going to be a feature of administration congressional relations going forward, especially if there's a flip in one of the chambers. Yeah, and, Hans, I think it's important to note that while he doesn't like the confrontation and he speaks very strongly as he talks to those lawmakers, there is still that $1.5-trillion budget request. Do we know where things stand with that and the likelihood of that even being approved? I don't suspect it'll be that high, but look, we have about six months to go through what we call here the normal appropriations process, and you want to get everything done before the end of the fiscal year. So five months, I guess that puts us at the end of September, if my math is right there. Always dicey when you do public math. The bigger question is if they don't quite get-- if Republicans and their congressional allies in the White House don't get to $1.5 trillion, what other tools do they have to plus up the Department of Defense's budget? And they've got this thing called reconciliation, and that's what they're doing right now to get about $70 billion to ICE and Border Patrol because Democrats won't fund it. So they've sort of opened up-- there's a debate here on whether or not they've opened up a loophole into the filibuster, and so you don't need 60 votes in the Senate. It's going to be really hard to get 60 votes in the Senate for $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon. But the question for Republicans is if they don't get that, do they go about a roundabout way? Do they try to do reconciliation and they try to do what we would traditionally think of as a straight appropriations bill through this reconciliation process that has all kinds of quirks to it that I won't bore your listeners with? But the important thing is you only need 50 votes for that. So TBD on $1.5 trillion.

We'll see how it all plays out. Axiospolitical reporter Hans Nichols, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it. You bet.