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A visibly exasperated Sen. John Kennedy (R) was of two minds about the budget bill the GOP-controlled House has handed to the Senate to consider, agreeing with Elon Musk on its deficiencies then claiming it still needs to be passed.

Speaking with the co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," the Louisiana Republican claimed Republicans may have no choice but to move forward with passing the bill because Donald Trump's tariff war has created economic instability.

According to Kennedy, "I've said and will continue to say because I believe it, that I'm for cutting spending, um, unproductive spending, until we run out of votes. But we can't do everything that everyone wants, and some people are just going to have to accept a ham and egg sandwich without the ham."

"We have some members of the Senate that will not get all the spending reductions they want," he added.

Addressing co-host Joe Scarborough, he continued, "Here's what's driving this, Joe, and this is ultimately why I think the bill will pass. We're in uncharted waters with the tariffs. I think the markets are telling us that we don't know what impact they're going to have on the economy, but if we don't extend those tax cuts, we're going into a recession and our economy is going to be on a journey to the center of the earth and, ultimately, I think that's why the bill will pass."

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An air traffic control supervisor credited for stopping two planes from colliding head-on near the troubled Newark airport told the co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that a lack of manpower is still making flying unsafe.

During his appearance on the MSNBC morning show, Jonathan Stewart explained that it is no longer uncommon that three air traffic controllers are being pressed into service doing a job that requires 14.

Under questioning, Stewart went into great detail about his job as a supervisor at Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON), and admitted that it is "insane" that the problems are increasing.

Admitting that he is in no way speaking for the FAA, he told the hosts, "I've said before, the way I tried to run my operation as an operational supervisor was I would do an hour on and an hour off, and that was based on the volume of traffic, the complexity, a lot of other things."

"You know: how tired is the controller, how far along in the shift is he? So on and so forth. But yes, your eyes start to get tired. I'm 45, not 25, so yeah, your eyes start to get tired, you start to truncate call signs and reverse call signs. For example, Delta is DAL, United is UAL, so that you start to look like a D, that D starts to look like a U. That's one of the signs that, you know, you're starting to get mental fatigue and that for me is a warning sign. I'm like, 'Okay, I need to get out of here, I need a break,' and that's going to be different every single time you plug in, depending on, you know, how tired I am, what I have going on at home –– like there's so many things involved in that."

"So it's important that the supervisor that's in charge, operational supervisor is cognizant of the ability and the mental acuity of the people that he's working with, right?" he elaborated. "So if I know that so-and-so is having a bad day, he's tired, I'm probably not going to put him in a busy position. The issue arises when you don't have anybody and now you have no choice, right? So you you want to do the right thing, but you can't because you have three people and you need 14. So, I mean, I don't even know what to say to that. That's just, that's insane."

He went on to note that the pandemic, which occurred during Donald Trump's first term, has been a major factor in the personnel shortage.

"It made it way worse because during the pandemic, we stopped training, people that were eligible to retire, just retired because what are you going to do, like sit around and, I don't know, make half a paycheck?" he recalled. "The same thing happened with the airlines too, to be fair. So you have a lack of experience on both sides of the microphone right now, which is a recipe for not good things –– let's leave it at that."

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Donald Trump's "big beautiful" budget bill is still facing major headwinds with some Republican senators balking at the very real prospect that it will explode the national debt, and one MSNBC host stated they need to get their act together or face a wipe-out at the polls.

On Thursday morning, "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough went on an extended rant aimed primarily at House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) for being in denial about what he is asking his GOP colleagues in the Senate to go along with.

After sharing comments of Johnson stating he doesn't agree with billionaire Elon Musk's harsh criticism of the bill, former House member Scarborough bluntly stated, "I mean, let me just be really clear here: this bill would never pass when we served and we balanced the budget four years in a row and actually ran a budget surplus for two years."

"This is just pure, simple math," he insisted. "And it's as if these House Republicans, who claim to be conservative, it's as if these House Republicans, they see this, a house on fire, and they run to it, $37 trillion debt, and they run to it, and they throw trillions of gallons of gasoline on the fire to have it explode. Specifically $2.4 trillion worth of debt added on. No ideology, this is black and white."

"And by the way, this is something that Democrats, my Democratic friends and Republican friends need to understand: the game is over, the gig is up. You can't keep kicking the can down the road but that's exactly what this bill does. We can't afford it anymore," he claimed.

"I'm sorry, I don't know where Mike Johnson thinks his members are going to be running over the next two years, but they're going to be running in red state America where they're going to be a lot of people who are going to be hurt by this bill," he warned. "They can call it a big, beautiful bill all they want to, but the fact is this is a type of bill? No conservative would ever vote for it, ever. It's reckless, it's irresponsible, and it's a fiscal nightmare."

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