Leadership Quote by Judd Gregg

The move here is classic politician’s aikido: start with a value statement that flatters the audience, then pivot to permission. “I’ve always been a strong supporter” is less biography than inoculation, a preemptive strike against the charge that what follows is anti-environment. The dash-and-stumble construction (“we’ll have to-in order to”) is revealing: it performs reluctance in real time, like he’s thinking out loud rather than delivering a prepackaged trade-off. That disfluency is a feature, not a bug. It signals sincerity while keeping the details safely offstage.

The real payload sits in “set priorities” and “make reductions.” Those are austerity words, budget language disguised as pragmatism. He’s not arguing against environmental protection; he’s recoding it as one item in a ledger that can be trimmed to fund something else. The subtext: environmental policy is negotiable, contingent on a larger agenda that he frames as urgent and competing. “Increase another place” is deliberately vague because specificity would create enemies: which program gets cut, which gets boosted, and who eats the political cost.

In context, this is the rhetoric of an era when climate and conservation were increasingly mainstream but still treated, inside Washington, as discretionary spending and regulatory friction. Gregg positions himself as a reasonable broker: pro-environment in principle, pro-trade-off in practice. The intent isn’t to persuade true environmentalists; it’s to reassure moderates and fiscal hawks that he can wear the green pin without letting it run the meeting.