Why Son Of Conservative Megadonor Is Running For Congress In Wyoming

Below is a transcript of an interview with Steve Friess. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

DCNF: Mr. Steven Friess, thank you so much for joining us here at the Daily Caller News Foundation. I appreciate you taking the time out to talk to us. I want to start out just asking you straight up — you’re running for Congress in Wyoming to replace Rep. Harriet Hageman, who’s running for Senate, and it’s a crowded field out there. So, I just want to ask you straight up, why are you running?

Steven Friess: I think this is a transformative presidency and President [Donald] Trump needs people with business experience, people that are proven leaders that can help him drive the America first agenda forward. And as I looked at the other folks in the race, I thought that I brought a little bit more to the table.

I think the the experience that I had helping develop a set of executive orders that President Trump used in his first administration gave me some insight into the regulatory process and the fact that you don’t always need to create a new law if you can get a regulation changed and you don’t always need a new regulation if you can change the guidance. And this is an important realm for the state of Wyoming because what I really want to do is put that knowledge to work in unleashing Wyoming’s energy potential. And with all the various agencies that our extractive industries have to fret their way through, it’s the regulatory process that’s really holding back Wyoming from providing more and higher paying jobs.

And Wyoming, you know, is a very small state. It’s only, I think you know, less than less than less than a normal congressional district of 750,000, and families really care about staying together and when opportunities aren’t there people move away. So by really breaking through a lot of the redundant regulatory processes, I think we’ll be able to grow. I’m confident we’ll be able to grow economic opportunity in the state and allow families to stay and build and grow there.

DCNF: Yeah, energy is a huge topic. It’s, you know, people like to say it’s the basis of all growth. If you don’t have energy, your city’s not going to grow. You’re not going to have high paying jobs. What needs to change in America’s thinking, how we approach energy development in order to take advantage of what Trump wants to do, which is the golden age?

Friess: Well, I think we’ve really suffered under the Obama and the Biden administrations where a lot of green energy initiatives were put in place that, you know, a lot of gimmicky tax credits and a lot of enormously wasteful things. I know Daily Caller wrote a lot about Solyndra where billions of dollars just vanished. It’s also distressing to me that China came in and flooded the market with cheap solar panels, kind of undercutting American manufacturers there. With the resources that we have in Wyoming in oil and gas and coal and uranium, we have a role to play because as you stated, energy is the bottom input cost of all the prices in America. And if we can lower the price of energy, the price of everything goes down. And that’s what’s going to drive better affordability in the country for all its citizens. Wyoming has an important role to play there.

DCNF: There’s a fascinating story in mining just in the last couple months. I think it’s the Ramaco mine. They have a coal mine but they found that a lot of the coal has [rare earth] metals in it. That is a fascinating story. Have you been out to that?

Friess: Have not visited that site yet. But it’s very important that we develop our own domestic sources for these strategic minerals. We can’t be asking China for them as we pursue both our military security and also the AI [artificial intelligence] race.

These minerals are essential in all the technology products that we create and Wyoming has them in abundance and we need to cut through a lot of red tape to get those mining operations up and running.

DCNF: You mentioned you worked on several executive orders. Do you mind saying what those were and what you’re most proud of in that?

Friess: Absolutely. Yeah. So, this was a project that I started earlier. You might recall when President [Barack] Obama signed this DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] order, which for months before he said he can’t do that, but then he went ahead and did it. So, I started paying attention. The next order that I read was this very detailed list of everything that big labor wanted. And I happened to come across a fellow resident in Wyoming, former Vice President [Dick] Cheney, and I asked him, you know, where’s our team that’s putting together orders to prepare for the next president to start reversing some of these things. And his attitude was more, you know, you’ve got to win the elections first and you figure that out later.

And I thought we needed to be better prepared. so I was able, actually with the Daily Caller co-founder Neil Patel. He introduced me to some of the sharpest lawyers in DC and we expanded the network from there. And by the time [2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt] Romney was nominated, we had 58 signature-ready orders that a President Romney could have used. They waited for President Trump and some of the greatest impacts we delivered there.

You recall when President Trump said he would repeal two regulations for every new regulation that he passed. It isn’t the number that’s important. What’s important is the cost of the regulation. And every agency has to do an assessment of, what burden are they placing on the economy with this new regulation. So what this order required them to do it was really a budget. So if they wanted to pass a regulation that was going to put a $10 billion cost on the country, they had to pay for it by repealing $10 billion worth of regulations. And if by the end of his first term, I believe he had repealed seven regulations for every one that he passed. And I think it was a tremendously stimulative effect. And honestly, I think even regulators know they can’t just keep piling burdens on the country. And I think they appreciated that direction,  to be doing some housekeeping and getting rid of redundant and no longer necessary regulations or even ones that they were able to determine just time to go. We need to be lightening the burden on our industries, on our manufacturers, on our innovators so that America can really fulfill its destiny.

DCNF: You’ve been clearly involved in conservative politics behind the scene for some time. What does the future of the conservative movement look like after Trump?

Friess: Well, that’s a fascinating question. I think one of the reasons that I’m coming here is to preserve and continue the American First mentality and that means less government, more opportunity. It means boldly standing on the world stage and expecting our allies to live up to their commitments and as Secretary [Marco] Rubio has said, maybe reassessing some of these relationships if they aren’t providing the back and forth that we expect. I think that we have an abundance of exciting potential leaders in the party.

I had never intended to enter elected office, but, as I was contemplating it, I remember scrolling across a reel of Brandon Gill and I just thought, ‘Hell yeah, I want to work with that guy. I want to lean that hard into the issues that matter.’ And I was just watching him interrogate some folks about some irreprehensible policies with illegal aliens who’d committed terrible crimes and the lenient sentencing policies that were a legacy of the Biden administration.

It’s just appalling. I think President Trump has done a spectacular job securing the border. That’s something we’ll continue. And really the next step and the most important thing to ensure the future of our country is the SAVE Act. We need to know that only citizens are voting and there needs to be photo ID at the polls so that we can ensure that only accurate votes.

DCNF: You’re involved in a classical academy in Wyoming. What’s the most important thing that Congress and the current and next administration need to do to make sure that our children are being educated in a way that’s going to set them up for success in the future, and also help the country?

Friess: Fantastic question. So, education is an absolute necessity and improving the quality of education is an absolute necessity for the future of our country. I’ve been very excited about the classical education method because the focus there, the emphasis is on how to think instead of what to think. It’s not about teaching to a test. And then we’ve seen over time these national tests drift more and more and really be kind of infected with a leftist, woke agenda. The classical education model really digs into the great tradition from the past from the earliest Greek thinkers on through. It typically involves a study of Latin. My vision for how the education system could improve would include a greater emphasis on just the big ideas and for young people to understand the conversation of humanity. What are the big ideas that have led us to the success of America? What are the founding principles of this country that set it apart from the rest of the world?

And at the same time I feel like a lot of people — there was a time in the country when I believe that having a college education was a ticket to success. I believe that universities have become bloated institutions in many cases pushing a leftist agenda that kind of undermines the country. But it also removed the pathway for people to see that they can have a fantastic life and raise a family on an income driven by a manual skill whether it’s HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] or plumbing, electrician, construction.

I think we misled a lot of young people to think that they had to go vastly into debt for an esoteric degree that doesn’t really have a payoff at the end where there isn’t a career that degree leads to that can even pay the debt for having earned the degree. I think that’s been a kind of a tragedy that occurred in the last decade or so.

DCNF: Would you vote to eliminate the Department of Education if that came before Congress?

Friess: So in a short answer, yes, I would. I think they have a loan portfolio that can be transferred to the Treasury, but the Department of Education was really only created under the Carter administration. Really, as I understand it, a thank you to the teachers unions.

And I think it’s abominable that a bureaucrat at the Department of Education can be making three times what a teacher is in Wyoming. I think we’ve seen education spending increase across the nation at a rate that has — I wish I could remember the exact rate there. I think we’ve seen an explosion in the spending on education nationally, an explosion in the bureaucracy supporting it, but we have only seen kind of a flatlining of actual academic performance as compared to our international peers. And I think that’s something that can only be addressed by putting the responsibility for education back where it belongs, closest to home in the states and communities. When you think about it, we’re sending tax dollars to D.C. that we’re getting back. They’re taking a tax and then restricting what we can do with it. It’s nonsensical.

DCNF: You and your father, Foster Friess, were both big supporters of TPUSA early on. Since Charlie’s assassination, it seems like he was sort of the glue that was holding a lot of the Trump coalition together and it’s kind of falling apart right now. Where do you think TPUSA’s role is in the future of the conservative movement, politics, etc.

Friess: I can tell you it was an absolutely magical moment when we met Charlie Kirk.

He was 18 years old. We were at the GOP convention. We met him in a stairwell. And you could just tell even at that age, this was a young man with a vision, with drive, and with just an innate sense of goodness about him. And so, it’s very exciting to be able to, you know, say that we were one of the key launching founders and supported the organization for years. It’s an incredible loss to the country.I think Charlie Kirk would have been a phenomenal president in a few short election cycles because he really understood what was important about America. He was the kind of guy when you met him, you had a quick sense that, you know, what matters to Charlie Kirk matters to me. and it enabled him to to lead in a way that’s just unparalleled. The way he was able to engage in a respectful discourse with so many people with views that were on the other side of the world or or reality to him. It’s just a tremendous loss to the country that when his whole message was let’s communicate, let’s talk and so the left decides that means that voice has to be silenced.

So when you look ahead with the organization I’m actually really impressed with [Turning Point] Action. They led an effort in the last election to chase the ballot as they described it. So they were identifying people who were very much with an America First vision but who had not voted and reached out to them, got them registered, got them to the polls sometimes even and made sure that people who cared about America understood the role they had to play by voting and participating in the electoral system. And that effort of [Turning Point] Action, I think in some ways might be his greatest legacy going forward. Although he also had tremendous initiatives in the education area and also empowering pastors and churches to understand what was completely allowable speech from the pulpit because so often the leftist ideas are diametrically opposed to what what is preached from the pulpit, and to give them confidence that they can point that out and they can they can really take a stand that in the past might have seemed too political but is really in the service of their faith and in service of the country.

DCNF: What is it that you would like voters to know about you as you’re running for Congress?

Friess: Voters in Wyoming need to know that I’m a successful businessman with proven leadership, that I’m a conservative like Reagan and a fighter like Trump, and that I’m going to use my insights into the regulatory system that I learned when I created executive orders for the president. I’m going to use that knowledge to optimize Wyoming and unleash its energy potential, provide more jobs there, and provide a future for the state. That’s also going to be a great benefit to the whole country.

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