Mike Braun: There's Going To Be Some House Cleaning

Mike Braun: There’s Going To Be Some House Cleaning

Republican for Governor Mike Braun joined Rob Kendall to discuss his platform in detail, and how he would streamline our inefficient government.

Fresh from his debate with Democrat Jennifer McCormick, Republican Mike Braun joined Rob Kendall in studio to discuss his platform in more detail.

Source: WISH-TV / other

This discussion focused on Property Taxes, School Choice, and cleaning up the size and scope of our inefficient state government.

Rob Kendall:

I do yell at my TV when you guys are debating because I debate along with you guys. One of the things that I would have liked you to go into more detail last night, and I think for a lot of maybe our libertarian, hey, “Let’s get government out of our lives, people. Let’s make government more efficient” people. You kept saying I’m a business owner, I’ll find inefficiencies in government, and we didn’t get a lot of detail on that last night. Can you talk about at a very high level the approach you’re going to take to state government, because I agree with you, there’s tons of inefficiencies, there’s tons of areas we can make a difference. I think a business guy is going to be able to do those things. But I wanted to give you an opportunity now that you have some time to tell those people what that means to you and what that looks like.

Mike Braun:

We’ve got 30 plus agencies, 30,000 plus employees. I’m going to go through every one of them and I can give you an example: My brother back years ago under the Pence administration, ran the Department of Workforce Development with like 2100 employees. He said he couldn’t tell what everyone was doing. Well, 101 is don’t rehire right when somebody quits. And it got down to where he lowered that by 10% and it was working better. Folks started looking around saying hey, “we’re not replacing it” got more pep in their step. So that’ll be easy for me. And I will start with, “are you over regulating? Are you giving good customer service to the Hoosier citizens that interface with you? And if it’s like four or five acronyms that I’m getting from state legislators… there’s so many of them. There’s going to be some house cleaning. There are some that are running reasonably well. But that doesn’t mean they’re super-efficient. That’ll be easy for me. I’ll go through it. I’m going to set the mission state for freedom and opportunity. I won’t lose sight of those details. And I’m going to have first lieutenants working for me that are going to get their hands dirty on making sure that this government is working efficiently. That’s how we finance tax decreases is by running the government more efficiently. And Rob, I did that for 37 years and got real good at it because my office was literally in a used mobile home for those 17 years. It was scrappy survival. You learn a lot, much more than you do through an MBA.

Listen to the discussion in full here.