“Furious” is the word U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet used to describe how he still feels about the Democrats losing to Donald Trump in November.
“I blame Donald Trump for many things, but not winning the election. And the fact that we lost to him not just once, but twice … we have a lot of soul searching to do as a party, and I think that Colorado has a lot to say about what that future should look like,” the Colorado Democrat said in a conversation with Colorado Matters senior host Ryan Warner Wednesday.
Bennet is also among the national Democrats demanding consequences for an intelligence breach revealed this week wherein Trump Administration officials discussed attack plans in Yemen on a group chat that included a journalist from “The Atlantic.” During his conversation on Colorado Matters he discussed what should happen as a result of the breach, the federal cuts he’s concerned about and the future of the Democratic party.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Ryan Warner: It's tough to figure out what Elon Musk and the Trump administration are doing in Colorado. Federal workers have been laid off, but we don't know precisely how many. Funds have been frozen, but difficult to say where and for how long. Are you any closer to understanding what's been cut in our state?
Sen. Michael Bennet: We're really not any closer to doing that. We are asking everybody who was a recipient of a federal grant that's been canceled to please let our office know, and we've been in touch with county commissioners and mayors all over the state to ask them the same questions. Things are coming in every now and then, but the best way for us to monitor it is, I think, on the ground in Colorado because there isn't anything coherent that's coming from the administration on the funding side. On the federal employee side, Colorado, as you know, is home to about 60,000 federal employees. They have been treated incredibly poorly, and I think the citizens of Colorado have witnessed the unfair treatment that our federal employees have received.
We have been fighting for all of them, but in particular the Forest Service people who have been laid off just as we're getting to the beginning of our fire season. The Trump administration should have restored those positions, but they still haven't done it. Part of the criticism that Donald Trump and DOGE and Musk leveled at our federal employees is that they sit around all day and don't do any work. Those of us that have worked with our federal employees from the Western Slope to Fort Collins know that there's a lot of valuable service they're providing, but now that DOGE has fired people, then brought people back, put people on administrative leave, they've now created a situation where the federal government is paying some of the employees, but not allowing them to come to work on behalf of the American people. That makes absolutely no sense.
Warner: When it comes to the funding, you've asked, as you've just said, folks who've lost grants, who've lost funding to come to your office and to report that. But you know, you're one of nine members of Congress for Colorado, so if (Sen. John) Hickenlooper is making the same request and (Rep. Jeff) Hurd is making the same request and (Rep. Brittany) Pettersen is making the same request, are people having to report this nine times to Congress?
Sen. Bennet: No, we're actually coordinating well, Senator Hickenlooper and I are, Congressman Hurd is, even Congresswoman (Lauren) Boebert. We've all had discussions together about the importance of our coordinating the information that's coming in, and making sure that no matter whose congressional district, we're following up. And I think as we set these processes up, there'll be less redundancy and more coherence, but I've been very pleased at the way the congressional delegation has been working together, without regard to party, on this question.
Warner: Severe weather season is around the corner. Colorado is a tornado state, a hail state, a wildfire state, a flood state, a lightning strike state. What confidence do you have in predictions and warnings given cuts to NOAA in Boulder and elsewhere?
Sen. Bennet: I was up in Boulder this weekend with (Rep.) Joe Neguse. We had a town hall that had more than a thousand people, and the question actually came up. The cuts to NOAA will reduce our ability to have the kind of warnings that this country should be able to rely on. It's just one of the many illustrations of how foolhardy the approach DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) and President Trump have been here. I haven't met a Coloradan who hasn't said that there's probably a right way for us to reform government at any level, but the way that these guys are approaching it which is, to be kind, haphazard and, to be more descriptive, has been brutal, is not putting us in a better position to either predict the weather or prevent measles outbreaks from happening in the richest country in the world. We're not seeing measles break out in Europe, they're breaking out in the richest country in the world because of the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Warner: There have been outbreaks in Texas and even closer to Colorado and New Mexico. Not to use a Forest Service metaphor here, but I'm trying to see the forest for the trees. Is your understanding that the idea would be DOGE would privatize all of this? Is this a way of gutting the public sector so that, I don't know, an AccuWeather steps in and starts providing subscription weather forecasts and depending on what happens with the postal service, some for-profit comes in. Do you have a sense of the long game here?
Sen. Bennet: I think the long game is to basically destroy and dismantle the federal government. That's what I think they're trying to do.
Warner: What do you base that impression on?
Sen. Bennet: I base it on what they come to work to try to do every day. I mean, I think that Donald Trump is trying to dismantle, consider pieces of our democracy through, for example, his unwillingness to, in many cases, uphold decisions that have been made by federal judges. His pardoning of people that were involved in January 6th, his attack on the Associated Press because the Associated Press was unwilling to report the Gulf of Mexico was the Gulf of (America.) I mean, every day there's more of this, and I see their assault on the federal government as just part of their broader assault on American democracy.
Warner: Do you see opportunities in what they are doing?
Sen. Bennet: I'm not sure I understand your question.
Warner: Are there opportunities for reform? Are there opportunities for betterment?
Sen. Bennet: I think there are huge opportunities to reform our government agencies in this country, but I don't think the way they're doing it is the way that one should approach it. I've long believed that, for example, that we should be fighting to make sure that we pull our K-12 education system out of the 19th century and into the 21st century. But I don't think that's what DOGE and Trump and Elon Musk have in their mind. I think it's just wanton destruction.
Warner: Except in the dismantling of the Federal Department of Education, the idea is to send more money directly to schools as opposed to federal bureaucracy. I'll note that you were superintendent of Denver Public Schools, and so you have a unique perspective.
Sen. Bennet: Well, as you know, 90 percent of the money we spend on K-12 education is at the state and local level as it is. There is Title I money that comes from the federal government for the poorest students in America. There is special ed money that has never, by the way, been a sufficient amount of funding for that to address the horrible warehousing of children with special needs in American history — it's one of the most shameful parts of our education history — that they propose to get rid of. There's the federal student loan program that students all over Colorado and all this country rely upon, which, by the way, is itself not perfect and could stand to be reformed. But what we're seeing out of these guys is not a question about how to pull our K-12 system into the 21st century, or how to make sure that kids graduate from high school with the skills to earn a living wage and from college without bankrupting their families if they decide to do that.
We're not seeing from Donald Trump or Elon Musk a question about why our reading scores are at the lowest level that they have been in decades or any concern for that at all. All we're seeing is the destruction of funding streams that are really important when they get to the local level to support kids with special needs and the poorest kids in America.
Warner: Colorado has two Democratic senators who ran for president, including yourself, a Democratic governor, who, some speculate could run in 2028, an outspoken mayor of the state's capital city, and yet it's Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who last week were rallying voters against the current administration and drawing record crowds in doing so. Why aren't Colorado Democrats the face of the pushback?
Sen. Bennet: Well, I think it's important for us to be the face of the pushback. I spent last week, the first week that I was on recess in 10 weeks, having four town halls across the state of Colorado. I'd be surprised if anybody in the Senate spent more time in town halls or talked to more people than me, except for Bernie Sanders, I suppose, who was in Colorado. I actually thanked him for coming to Colorado. And we had thousands of people. If you add it all up, it's not the same crowd that the two of those guys had, but I'm glad they had a huge crowd, and I'm glad that I had the chance to be able to have conversations as I have always have had with Coloradans. And by the way, they were in places that, in Greeley and in Jefferson County and in El Paso County, places that I picked because I wanted to make sure that I was talking not just to Democrats, but to all Coloradans.
Warner: Well, let's talk about what you heard then. When you step outside, for instance, the fairly Democratic Denver bubble, you get into more conservative areas. What are you learning? What are you being challenged on? What are you hearing?
Sen. Bennet: What I'm hearing is a lot of anger with what's going on in the Trump administration, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of pain, and a lot of agony. A lot of worry about what's going to happen when maybe more than a million Coloradans are suffering the prospect of health care cuts as a result of the Trump administration's attack on Medicaid. I'm hearing from people that are worried about whether or not we're going to be able to turn over to our kids and our grandkids, a functioning democracy. I believe that we will. I believe that we'll get through this terrible period that we're in right now, but those are the kinds of things that I'm hearing from people.
Warner: And is your word to them, wait for the midterms?
Sen. Bennet: Those words have certainly never come out of my mouth.
Warner: What words do come out when people are starved for a solution?
Sen. Bennet: Well, the words that come out that I spend a lot of time thinking about prior times in American history, when we have faced the kind of reactionary politics that we're facing today as a country and the way that ordinary citizens and an elected leadership together have stood up to that reactionary politics and replaced it with the progressive era that has come after that. And this is a moment when we have to pull together to do that again. I mean, we have no business giving up here any more than the people that fought for, mostly women that fought for a hundred years, the self-evident right for women in this country to vote. We have no right to give up any less than John Lewis did when he was subjecting his skull to the billy clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, not for himself, but for the sake of our democracy.
We're being called on at this moment to stand up for our democracy, to stand up for the rule of law, to stand up for the example that only America can set in the world, which has, I think, been undermined so gravely by this administration. That's part of it. Part of it also is my deep anger that the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump. I'm furious about that. I blame Donald Trump for many things, but not winning the election and the fact that we lost to him not just once, but twice, and that the second time we lost to him, we lost after he had already taken away a woman's right to choose, the first civil right, the first fundamental right that any president has taken away from the American people since Reconstruction. We have a lot of soul-searching to do as a party, and I think that Colorado has a lot to say about what that future should look like, and that's been part of the conversation we've been having as well.
Warner: Any answers on that front, or is the soul-searching still going on?
Sen. Bennet: No, I think, well, I think the soul-searching better go on until we figure out the nature of the problem, but there are answers to it. I mean, I think if you look at where Democrats were on health care, in this election, what we were saying was ‘extend the tax credits for Obamacare.’ That's not a compelling view. I mean, in a country that needs universal health care, where we are desperately in need of mental health care, especially for our kids, but all our citizens, to have a system that costs twice as much as any industrialized country in the world, but delivers the kind of scarcity our health care system delivers, that's shameful.
Warner: Am I speaking to Senator Sanders or Senator Bennet?
Sen. Bennet: To Senator who?
Warner: To Senator (Bernie) Sanders or to Senator Bennet, here?
Sen. Bennet: I mean, there's nothing I just said to you, Ryan, that I haven't said for years on the campaign trail, in town halls, in that failing, very modest campaign for president. Literally nothing that I said in the last minute is anything that I haven't said in all of those places. I'm sorry you haven't heard it, but that is what I've been saying for years.
Warner: I want to turn to international issues. You sit on the Intelligence Committee. On Monday, the editor of “The Atlantic” wrote that senior Trump administration officials accidentally texted him sensitive war plans for an attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. I'm going to play an exchange you had with CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Tuesday about how this intelligence breach occurred.
Bennet: When he was added to the thread, you're the CIA director. Why didn't you call out that he was present on the Signal thread?
CIA Director John Ratcliffe: I don't know if you use Signal messaging app.
Bennet: I do. I do, not for classified information. Not for targeting.
Ratcliffe: Well, neither do I, Senator.
Bennet: Not for anything remote-
Ratcliffe: Neither do I, Senator. To be clear-
Bennet: Well, that's what your testimony is today.
Ratcliffe: It absolutely is not, Senator. Were you not listening at the beginning when I said that I was using it as permitted, as it is permissible to use.
Bennet: I agree that's your testimony. Yeah, I agree that's your testimony. You asked me if I use it, and I said not for targeting, not for classified information.
Warner: What are the consequences here? What should they be, or will there be?
Sen. Bennet: I think the consequences should be that these guys lose their jobs. They should never have been sharing battle plans on an unclassified network, which is what Signal is. They've then spent, since they've been caught, lying about the classified nature of the material that was on there, and in that hearing, disgracefully asserting that there was nothing wrong with the Signal thread, which is such an insult to the men and women of our intelligence agencies who are held to a much higher standard than that. You asked, ‘Will they be held accountable?’
We're going to do everything we can to make sure they are held accountable. And by the way, that includes Pete Hegseth, who I think should never have been the defense secretary to begin with and should step down as a result of his pathetic participation in this moment. But I would not be surprised in the least if Donald Trump refuses to not only not hold these people accountable, but continue to attack Jeff Goldberg and “The Atlantic” for the failures that the Trump administration has created.
Warner: Jeff is the journalist in question. It appears as though the largest land war in Europe since World War II is more likely to end on Russia's terms rather than Ukraine's. After more than three years of fighting, hundreds of thousands of casualties, to you, is it more important that this war end than on whose terms it ends on?
Sen. Bennet: No, I think on whose terms it ends on is vitally important to our national security, to the security of Europe, and the security of the world. I mean, this is one of the most astonishing things that I've seen in the time that I've been here, is the way the Trump administration has undermined President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy's negotiating position, has undermined the Ukrainian negotiating position, and has undermined our own negotiating position, as well as Europe's. There should not be a peace here that does not end in a security guarantee by Europe and a security guarantee by the United States of America. Not for Ukraine's sake, but for the world's sake.
And Donald Trump's profound misunderstanding or denial about what has actually happened in this war is so shocking to me. I mean, yes, of course the American people have been incredibly generous with the weapons we supplied Ukraine. There's no question about that, but it's been in our interest. But the Ukrainians are the ones that have suffered more than 400,000 casualties on the front lines starting this war, basically, I mean, if one's honest about it, by fighting Putin with their bare hands, the Russians have suffered 750,000 casualties in this war. Their army has been exposed to be far weaker than Putin was claiming before the war started. So the idea that we would undermine our own negotiating position and Ukraine's and give aid and comfort to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, given what Ukraine has actually achieved on the battlefield is ridiculous. And from a national security perspective, (it) makes absolutely no sense for the United States of America. Donald Trump is acting like we are a weak country, not a strong country, and it's pathetic.
Editor’s Note: Colorado Matters did not ask Bennet about speculation that he may run for governor of Colorado in 2026 as Senate ethics rules prohibit discussion of potential campaigns from Senate offices.
