Gov. Matt Bevin said he’s been impressed with Trump’s picks for cabinet positions and is encouraged by the administration’s pledge to cut federal regulations.
Bevin took part in a panel discussion Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC in Washington.
He also touted his own initiative to cut bureaucratic red tape in Frankfort.
“We’ve pledged to cutting 30 percent of all the red tape in Kentucky in the next three years,” Bevin said. “We have 130,000 rules. Pretty confident that we can govern everybody with 90-something-thousand.”
Bevin took part in a discussion of federal government overreach with the governors of Kansas, Wisconsin and Arizona.
He said states are better prepared to regulate themselves in many areas now overseen by the federal government. He cited the Environmental Protection Agency as a glaring example of federal overreach, calling the agency a “regulatory Frankenstein.”
“It began arguable with good intent — you go back and you read Shelley’s book about Frankenstein; it, too, was created with good intention,” said Bevin. “And it turned on its creator.”
During a discussion about how to improve the country’s education system, Bevin said he wanted to digress slightly and talked more generally about how “the government being involved in something isn’t necessarily a good thing.”
“Anytime that federal government has declared war on something it means it’s going to cost you hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars and you will after 50 years or more end up with more of what you declared war on,” Bevin said. “And I defy you to think of any example where that’s not that case. War on Poverty, how’s that working? War on Drugs, how’s that working? War on Terror, how’s that working? I mean the bottom line is, it is a code phrase for ‘taking your money.’ And the same thing has been done in education for a long time.”
Capitol reporter Ryland Barton contributed to this story.
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