Tag Archive for: Federal Spending

Rand Paul Releases Report Detailing $1,000,000,000,000 In Gov’t Waste. Here Are The Worst Offenders

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul released a report on Monday outlining more than $1 trillion in government waste from the past year.

WATCH: Rand Paul exposes Biden admin for wasting $1 trillion

The 2024 “Festivus” report highlighted various instances of wasteful government spending from the federal government, including a pickleball complex in Las Vegas and a cabaret show on ice. This year marks Paul’s 10th annual report.

“This year, I am highlighting a whopping $1,008,313,329,626.12,” Paul wrote in the report. “That’s over $1 trillion in government waste, including things like ice-skating drag queens, a $12 Million Las Vegas pickleball complex, $4,840,082 on Ukrainian influencers, and more! No matter how much money the government has wasted, politicians keep demanding even more.”

The Department of the Interior (DOI) spent $12 million on a Las Vegas Pickleball Complex, according to the report. The DOI also spent $720,479 on wetland conservation projects for ducks in Mexico.

“I have a lot of problems with federal spending, and now it’s time to hear all about them,” Paul wrote in the report.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded the Bearded Ladies Cabaret a $10,000 grant to support a cabaret show on ice skates focused on climate change, according to the report. The NEA also spent $365,000 to promote circuses in city parks, the report states.

The State Department spent $500,000 to expand the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia’s #USInvestsInEthiopians social media campaign to a larger national public relations campaign, according to the report. The State Department also sent $253,653 to Bosnia to fight “misinformation,” spent $2.1 million for Paraguayan Border Security, and spent $3 million for ‘Girl-Centered Climate Action’ in Brazil, according to the report.

The Department of Health and Human Services spent $419,470 to determine if lonely rats seek cocaine more than happy rats, the report states.

The National Science Foundation spent $288,563 to ensure bird watching groups have safe spaces, also known as “Affinity Groups,” according to the report.

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Nov. 12 that he had picked Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to co-chair a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), aimed at cutting down on wasteful government spending.

“As always, taking the path to fiscal responsibility is often a lonely journey, but I’ve been fighting government waste like DOGE before DOGE was cool, Paul wrote in the report. “And I will continue my fight against government waste this holiday season.”

Many Americans have faced steep costs amid high inflation throughout President Joe Biden’s term, with inflation hitting a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. While inflation rates have eased some since June 2022, prices still remain high, with the consumer price index (CPI), a measure of the price of everyday goods, experiencing a year-over-year increase of 2.7% in November, according to a Dec. 11 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Some experts have attributed massive government spending under the Biden-Harris administration to fueling inflation rates. The national debt was at $36.16 trillion as of Tuesday, according to U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data.

A spokesperson for Paul did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

Ireland Owens

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Bah Humbug! Biden’s Christmas Gift To America Is Going To Burn A Hole In Household Budgets

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ROOKE: House Speaker Gives Tone Deaf Speech Defending The Swamp’s Last Funding Stunt Before Trump Comes Home

House Speaker Mike Johnson is promoting a pork-filled spending resolution that would give Congress more power and waste billions of taxpayer dollars, making this the coal in Americans’ Christmas stockings.

Johnson promised members (and voters) under his leadership that massive spending bills would be an open process led by committee chairs. He also said that members would have at least 72 hours to read the bill before they were expected to vote and that the passing of any Christmas omnibus spending packages would be a thing of the past.

However, in the past 24 hours, he has broken almost all of these promises by introducing the Christmas Continuing Resolution (CR), which would keep the federal government funded until March 2025. Worst of all, Johnson is shamelessly trying to sell the American people on the idea that passing the CR is the conservative way to handle the funding issue.

Johnson tried to make his case Tuesday night in an interview with Newsmax.

“This was the conservative play call. We don’t normally like what’s called a Continuing Resolution, a CR. But in this case, it makes sense because if we push it into the first quarter of next year, then we have a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald J. Trump back in the White House, we’ll be able to have more say about funding decisions in 2025,” Johnson said.

“Now, that would have been an easier thing to do, but then we had circumstances outside of our control. We had these emergencies that are required. We had, as you know, a record hurricane season. We had Helene and Milton, and they just did massive destruction across our red states, frankly,” Johnson continued. “And then we had farmers who are in jeopardy of permanently going under. They’ve had three loss years in a row because of Bidenomics and inflation and other circumstances outside of their control. So when you coble those two things together, there’s a desperate need for that aid, and that’s what adds another 100+ billion dollars to the bill. That’s where everyone is uncomfortable with it.”

The problem that Johnson expects the American people to be either too stupid or too lazy to understand is that Congress has known about this funding deadline since the last time they passed a CR funding bill in late September, around the same time hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated the country. There is no reason why Congress couldn’t have gone through the standard process earlier in the last quarter to avoid the rushed vote right before members wanted to go home for Christmas.

Most Americans sympathize with the victims of the hurricanes and Biden’s economic policies. However, adding aid for these emergencies isn’t really the issue here. It’s the decision to drop an almost 2,000-page spending bill that includes way more than aid to desperate Americans right before Christmas. We can see that this bill is supposed to allow policies Americans wouldn’t support to go through and designed to drop when it did in order to avoid a public debate.

In his defense of the omnibus, Johnson did not mention that Congress would receive a massive salary increase or that a carve-out would give members the legal freedom to avoid subpoenas of their electronic conversations. Nor did he tell Americans that the Christmas omnibus would fund the Global Engagement Center (GEC) for another nine years. The GEC is part of the federal government’s Censorship Industrial Complex, which worked to pressure social media companies to censor Americans.

Johnson continues to signal that he and other Republicans believe business in Washington will continue as usual despite the American voter mandate handed down Nov. 5. We are emaciated, exhausted, and ready to fight the federal government over the abusive relationship it’s formed with us. We are tired of the status quo. We want fighters willing to end the swampy business Washington elites conduct. This Christmas Omnibus is a red flag.

AUTHOR

Mary Rooke

Commentary and analysis writer.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

DOGE Zeroes in on $150 Billion Spent on Illegal Immigration in Single Year

As the U.S. continues to accumulate debt at a record pace, entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are calling attention to tens of billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on illegal immigrants.

Citing a Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) study, DOGE posted on X Monday, “In 2023 alone, illegal immigration cost taxpayers $150.7 billion. To put this in context with other costs (adjusted for inflation): World War I: $334 billion[;] Apollo Space Program: $257 billion[;] Manhattan Project: $30 billion[;] Panama Canal: $15.2 billion[;] Hoover Dam: $1 billion.”

The FAIR study, which was released in March of last year, combined estimated expenditures by the federal government ($66 billion) with state and local costs ($115 billion), minus $31 billion in estimated tax contributions from migrants. The money was spent to cover schooling, health care costs including uncompensated hospital expenses and Medicaid, law enforcement costs including incarceration, removal, and border protection, and welfare costs including food and housing assistance, among other expenses. The $150 billion total equaled a $35 billion increase from a previous estimate of $116 billion in 2017.

The sharp acceleration in spending has coincided with the largest surge in illegal immigration ever seen in the U.S., which has occurred as a result of a series of open-border policies implemented by the Biden administration beginning in 2021. The total number of encounters with illegal border crossers as of June was 8.2 million more than in the entire first Trump administration.

The spending on migrants is part of a four-year federal spending spree never before seen in American history. Biden has overseen annual budget deficits of $2 trillion, and by the time he leaves office next January, it is estimated that he will have overseen a net increase of over $9 trillion in the national debt, a record-setting amount for a single term.

FAIR Executive Director Julie Kirchner told Fox News on Tuesday that the total amount of taxpayer dollars spent on illegal immigrants is likely much higher than their original estimate. “The population we cited in the study was 15.5 million. We now estimate that it’s over 16.8 million, and we’re in the process right now of doing another estimate on the illegal alien population, and I’m sure it will be higher. So, we know the costs are going to go up.” She also noted that their report did not include state and local costs associated with sheltering migrants.

In New York City, where there are currently over 58,000 illegal immigrants facing criminal charges, almost 100,000 migrants seeking asylum have moved there over the last two years, and the city estimates it will spend over $12 billion through fiscal year 2025. Meanwhile, Chicago has spent over $400 million on migrants over the past two years.

“The scale of spending on illegal immigration boggles the mind!” Musk observed Monday in response to DOGE’s highlighting of the FAIR report.

Kirchner expressed confidence that DOGE’s efforts could save “billions and billions of dollars each year” in taxpayer money by ending government-subsidized health care plans as well as income and child tax credits for illegal immigrants.

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Is Bipartisanship Dead?

If there’s one thing we all learned from the election, it’s that the American people agree on a whole lot more than their representatives do. Despite the breadth of our differences, this country still wants a lot of the same things. What most voters can’t understand is why 334 million of us can find some scrap of common ground and the 535 men and women on Capitol Hill can’t. Is compromise in politics even possible in a city where the two sides view each other as mortal enemies? Or is unity just the casualty of these ferociously divided times?

Of course, as a lot of historians would point out, hyper-partisanship is nothing new. The Founders had to wrestle with competing ideas every day just to get this remarkable experiment off the ground. Ratifying the Constitution took compromise. The Bill of Rights took compromise. The dozen-plus amendments that followed took compromise. But as Senator Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) pointed out in a poignant farewell speech on the floor Tuesday, these men “understood what was at stake, and they were willing to put their differences aside to build something extraordinary.”

A lot of our struggles, Manchin emphasized, are pale in comparison to the disagreements they had 235 years ago. But unlike today’s leaders, they also understood the value of a raucous debate. Two centuries and a half later, Congress has lost the will to even have a conversation.

That’s one of Manchin’s greatest regrets. The moderate, one of the handful left in either chamber, mourned the loss of collaboration on the Hill, “of good people coming together to solve tough problems.” Thinking back on his 14 years in the Senate, he said emotionally, “[T]oo many opportunities to fix what’s broken in America [have] slipped right through our fingers.” They were missed, he insisted, because “politics got in the way of doing our job.”

There’s a power, the former governor wanted his colleagues to know, “of sitting down and listening and getting to know each other. And we don’t do that much here.” Everyone should be arguing over ideas, he admonished, “not personalities.” “George Washington warned us about the dangers of political parties dividing our country over 200 years ago, and we’re living in the world he feared today.”

That’ll have to change if the 119th Congress has hope of getting any legislation over the finish line. At last count, the GOP majority was dancing on a knife’s edge in the House, with just a single-vote margin for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — at least for the time being. With Donald Trump poaching three Republicans for his new administration, the special elections could take months to resolve. In the meantime, the chamber will have to decide: will gridlock or cooperation rule?

FRC Action’s Matt Carpenter is optimistic. “As contentious and consequential as the November 5th election was,” he told The Washington Stand, “I do think there are opportunities for bipartisanship. There’s already evidence that the results have kicked off an internecine squabble among Democrats on many of their social priorities, which were wildly out of step with the average American voter.” This may be the one thing that turns the tide, he believes. “I think this has opened up the possibility of some Democrats in Congress who may want their party to move back toward the middle in order to be competitive again in 2026. That may mean rethinking their party’s position on transitioning minors into the opposite gender, so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, open borders, and soft-on-crime policies, for example.” Carpenter points out that “there has been bipartisan support for other things like enforcing insider trading rules and term limits for members in the past. I’m hopeful the new Congress can find common ground on a range of issues.”

In the not-so-distant-past, the parties were also unified on political hot potatoes like taxpayer-funded abortion, natural marriage, Israel, national defense, and a host of other issues that have become sticks of ideological dynamite in recent days. The area with the most agreement, 38% of Americans believe, is foreign policy — but Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack and the ensuing war have certainly challenged that notion.

“It used to be said, in the area of foreign policy, that politics stopped at the water’s edge,” observed Chuck Donovan, a longtime leader in the conservative movement and senior writer for the Reagan White House. “That ideal was never actually realized, as the Reagan years showed with their bitter conflict over intermediate-range nuclear forces and the Iran-Contra controversy,” he told TWS. “But there was some effort at least not to highlight division and embarrass our nation in foreign settings when it counted in the 1990s and after. Some of that spirit might return as the thorny issues regarding Ukraine and Israel ask us to act with character and foresight under a new administration.”

On the domestic front, he said, “One can always hope because the problems are so severe. We had bipartisan agreement for decades on preserving social security, eliminating government waste, equal opportunity for women in economics and politics, tax relief for families with children, and incentives for transitions from welfare to work. Some of this can be revived,” Donovan observed, “but there is tension over reducing deficits and the size of government while leaving entitlement programs untouched and offering absurd policies as we did with COVID relief grants and waiving student loans.”

As someone who spent four decades in Washington politics, he believes America “desperately needs a rejection of the selfishness of the Sexual Revolution and a revival of the institution of marriage. The Left has an opportunity to back away from the ‘gender’ madness. The Right has the opportunity to join forces with a true feminism that is appalled by the suppression of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban and presses for freedom for women in nations where it is sliding backward at an accelerating rate.” But, most importantly, Donovan added, “If we relearn how Creation is the work of a loving God who is the source of our rights and our only hope, we might yet again do things our forebears could scarcely imagine. We might seek our future among the stars and abandon not a single one of our young.”

Interestingly enough, there are areas in government where the two sides seem to peacefully co-exist. The philosophically-diverse Supreme Court is famously congenial, and the close friendship of the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg became the stuff of D.C. legend. While the two almost never agreed on the application of the law, Scalia would say of the unlikely duo, “Some things are more important than votes.”

Obviously, those justices don’t have to enter the mud-slinging campaign world and run for reelection, but if Congress thinks bitter gamesmanship is what the American people want every two years, they’re wrong. The country wants the unity that’s spoken about so often but rarely practiced. At the height of Biden’s failure of a presidency, Americans were asked if the parties should try to work together, and 74% said yes. Only 9% had a lot of confidence they would.

“It speaks to the frustration that people are feeling,” Lee Miringoff, director of Marist College Institute for Public Opinion told NPR. “Because they really would like things to get done. … They would like the system to run smoother.” In fact, he pointed out, 74% is the “highest we have had in a decade in terms of people wanting bipartisan compromise. So people are frustrated. That’s not news. But it sure shows in these numbers. … They would like more in the direction of working together. But they’re totally not convinced that that’s likely to occur. And who can blame them, given the … back-and-forth every day that we’re seeing in our politics coming out of the Capitol?”

In the frigid tensions of Washington, however, there are signs of a coming thaw. Just this week, three Democrats made the bold move of publicly supporting Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (Fla.) declared, asking to join the House caucus on the effort. Agencies like Homeland Security, he argued, have “gotten too big.” “It’s not practical to have 22 agencies under this one department.”

Jaws dropped when radical leftist and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) agreed with this new tact. “Elon Musk is right,” Sanders tweeted. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.” California Democrat Ro Khanna chimed in, “There needs to be more open competition, not the monopolization in defense contractors.”

Then, there’s the great awakening some Democrats are starting to have about the nightmare of gender ideology in this country. After November 5, where the transgender issue almost certainly fueled Trump’s swing-state sweep, more congressional dads are opening up about the party’s intolerance for common sense on things like girls’ sports.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who’s taken the brunt of the abuse for saying he doesn’t want his little girls competing against biological boys, is slowly being joined by other members of the party whose eyes are opened to the dangerous (and politically suicidal) strong-arming Democrats are doing on the issue. “We seem to have a set of liberal litmus tests, and if you don’t meet those litmus tests, then you’re not even allowed to share your opinion. I mean, this is the attitude that a lot of Americans feel the Democratic Party takes to the entire country. ‘If you don’t agree with us, then not only are you wrong, but you’re a bad person, and these things are not up for debate,’” he explained on CNN Tuesday.

“So, I gave this example of transgender women in sports. It’s just one of many issues where we’re not even allowed to have a debate. And many Americans are turned off by that. They say, ‘Why would I want to be a part of a party where my views aren’t valid, they’re not even up for discussion?’ The definition of a majority party is you actually encompass the majority views of Americans. And a lot of people feel the Democratic Party is out of touch right now. So if we want to start winning again, we’ve got to start embracing more ideas.”

Since then, more Democrats have come out from hiding, including Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) — who barely won reelection. In an interview with The New York Times, he argued that his party needs to “stop pandering to the far-Left.” “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports. … Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”

Maybe in the new year, with a fresh start, both sides will find their way back to Christopher Buckley’s wise words, “Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.” And as Manchin stressed in his long look around the chamber, “What the country needs right now [is] more of us together. Listening to each other, respecting each other, working together.” Because, as he said — and so many of us feel — “I still believe in this system. I believe in the purpose of what we have … and the need to cherish it.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Trump Vs. Sleeper Cells in America.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

5 Ways the Biden Administration Is Working to ‘Trump-Proof’ Washington

The Biden administration has gone into overdrive securing progressive policy goals from the impending Trump administration 2.0. From confirming progressive judges, to constraining American energy with environmental red tape, to simply spending every last unjustified dollar, the Biden administration is committed to ensuring their policies carry on into the Trump administration for as long as possible.

“It comes [down to] setting land mines and making it more difficult for the incoming administration to reverse those changes,” said Cato Institute policy analyst Tad DeHaven. “It matters or else they wouldn’t be doing it.” The American people have decisively rejected the Biden agenda. So, naturally, the Biden administration has responded by forcing their agenda upon Americans even harder, right down to January 20.

Employees

Across the bureaucracy, career government employees are lining up lawyers and setting up to lobby against mass firings, reports The Washington Times. At the end of Trump’s first term, by executive order he created a new class of federal workers (Schedule F) which would be easier to hire and fire. The Biden administration undid Trump’s change, and now the bureaucracy is afraid Trump might reinstitute it.

Employees in two divisions of the Justice Department are also rushing to unionize, according to the Times. This would make it more difficult to fire them. It also provokes the question, why? Shouldn’t their unimpeachable integrity and relentless pursuit of nonpartisan justice be enough to protect their positions?

Rulemaking

While executive branch employees rush to protect their jobs, executive branch agencies rushed to protect their progressive policies. For instance, the U.S. Department of Education is rushing to finalize a proposed rule canceling student loans for people with “financial hardships,” which it previously expected to finish in 2025.

Regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency have been particularly busy. They announced $3 billion in grants to facilitate a rule that requires local municipalities to replace lead pipes within 10 years. They finalized a rule on November 12 to fine oil and gas companies for “wasteful methane emissions.” They are also rushing to impose penalties and reach settlements with companies accused of violating their environmental regulations. The EPA also plans to grant California a waiver to enforce its rule banning the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles in the state by 2035.

Meanwhile, bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Energy are hurrying to complete a study on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, which is expected to conclude that they are not “consistent with the public interest” because of their climate impact. This won’t directly stop the Trump administration from restoring America’s energy exports, but it could help anti-fossil fuel activists challenge the Trump administration in court. “Biden’s decision on LNG is the most consequential thing he can do on climate and fossil fuels before Trump takes office,” declared Fossil Free Media spokeswoman Cassidy DiPaola.

Other environmental rules the Biden administration is rushing to finalize include “narrowing the scope of an oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” “restricting drilling, mining and livestock grazing across nearly 65 million acres … to save an imperiled bird,” and “finaliz[ing] three rules restricting the release of toxic chemicals.”

“From what we can tell, they’ve done a very good job lining this stuff up, so there’s not a whole lot at risk of getting punted into the next administration,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities. “I think everyone learned that lesson in 2016.”

The flurry of administrative rulemaking aimed to meet a late-November deadline, marking 60 days from the inauguration. Rules passed within 60 days of Trump taking office are subject to the Congressional Review Act, which means that the incoming Republican majority could block them, along with Trump’s approval.

Judges

Another area requiring cooperation between the administration and Congress is judicial appointments. Senate Democrats are hurrying to confirm Biden-nominated judges to the federal bench, leaving few slots open for Trump to fill.

Positions in the federal judiciary, which are tenured for life, are officially not partisan, but it is generally acknowledged that judges appointed by Democratic presidents tend to lean more progressive, while appointees by Republican presidents tend to lean more conservative. This means that the federal judges President Biden can get through a lame-duck Democrat-controlled Senate in the final days of his administration will likely look favorably on his progressive policies.

Before the Senate left for Thanksgiving break last week, Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise deal to vote on as many as 14 nominees for district court appointments, but not to vote on four appellate court nominations.

Spending

The Biden administration is also hurrying to spend the remaining money allocated by Congress’s stimulus spending in 2021-2022, so that it won’t be available to the Trump administration. The Washington Times cites unnamed officials who plan to spend the remaining $46 billion available in fiscal year 2025.

Foreign Policy

The Biden administration is also spending its lame-duck session making major foreign policy moves — which it declined or refused to make earlier — in hopes of constraining President-elect Trump’s diplomatic options. Biden is trying to spend $6.4 billion in aid for Ukraine — funds Congress allocated in April but have not been spent — and cancel $4.65 billion in debt owed by Ukraine to the U.S. Biden also permitted Ukraine to fire longer-range missiles into Russia, provoking further Russian escalation. The Biden administration is also working hard to finalize another major loan to Ukraine through NATO, before Inauguration Day.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the Biden administration pressured Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hezbollah before Trump took office.

Why It Matters

The Biden administration is hoping to outfox the incoming Trump administration in a high-stakes, bureaucratic game of hot potato. Every time the White House changes hands, the incoming administration seeks to undo the rules adopted by their predecessors. Thus, in 2021, the Biden administration reversed administrative actions taken by the outgoing Trump administration, just as the Trump administration, in 2017, had reversed policy moves made by the Obama administration.

This back-and-forth has gone on at least since President Bill Clinton reversed President Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy, but it has recently expanded to cover an ever-growing number of issues. “It’s unfortunate but expected that [Biden officials] will try to throw as many roadblocks at what President-elect Trump has pledged to do,” said Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance.

The reason why competing administrations play increasingly critical games of bureaucratic football is that they realize the legislative branch lacks either the ability or the will to stop them. And the sad truth of the matter is that progressives — with greater buy-in from employees of the executive branch and greater faith in the government’s problem-solving capabilities — are usually better at playing the game than conservatives. To the extent that there is a “Deep State” in “The Swamp,” this is it.

Ordinary Americans don’t spend their lives obsessing over politics, except for occasionally wondering why voting for good people never seems to produce the desired results. In my conservative opinion, the answer resides not in electoral results but in the long-term executive and judicial strategies that round out our system of checks and balances (and which is currently tilted in favor of the executive branch).

This is why bureaucratic maneuvering like these by the Biden administration matter. When President Trump takes the keys and slides behind the wheel on January 20, the success of his whole administration will depend on how quickly he can take America from zero to 60. This question — and particularly Trump’s first 100 days — will set the momentum for the next four years. And this question depends on how adroitly his deputies can remove these roadblocks thrown in their path by the Biden administration.

If Trump wants to return America to the prosperous, cruising state of 2019, he must undo four years of rulemaking by the Biden administration, and he only has four years to do so. Can his bureaucracy work faster than Biden’s? We’ll soon find out.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

DOGE Could Save Taxpayers $1.7 Trillion, Congressman Reveals

If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy implemented just one single reform during their new cost-cutting government board, it could save taxpayers $1.7 trillion, enough to shave nearly one full year off of the national deficit, a congressman has revealed.

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped the two billionaires to oversee the soon-to-be-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In addition to eliminating the perennial targets of waste, fraud, and abuse, DOGE promises to “delete” whole federal agencies, if necessary, to make government operate in taxpayers’ interests once again. Experts say streamlining the federal budget could yield the American people abundant savings year after year.

“If you were to set aside all the rules in place, put in place by the Biden administration and this bureaucratic state … you would save $1.7 trillion,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice last Friday.

Regulations added to the federal code during the Biden-Harris administration have imposed $1.7 trillion on the private sector over the last four years, “surpassing all predecessors,” according to a recent federal report.

The administration also imposed 300 hours of paperwork on businesses, according to the report titled “Death by a Thousand Regulations: The Biden-Harris Administration’s Campaign to Bury America in Red Tape,” released September 25 by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

A stunning $1.3 trillion of the $1.7 trillion (76%) in added regulatory burden comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the report found.

“To cement radical left-wing priorities, the Biden-Harris administration spared no expense and pushed a whole-of-government regulatory blitz on American businesses and consumers,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.). “The Biden-Harris administration’s extreme regulatory overreach has only suffocated the American dream.”

“The Biden-Harris administration has added nearly 200 major regulations — those carrying an annual price tag of $100 million or more — to the books,” noted the Foundation for Government Accountability’s Liesel Crocker in August.

The regulatory state has grown so far out of control that tens of thousands of felonies were “rule-created by the bureaucracy — not created by Congress, but by the bureaucrats,” Biggs told Hice.

Eliminating just the Biden-Harris administration’s regulations would save nearly enough money to erase this year’s entire federal deficit of $1.8 trillion.

Within the last week, the U.S. national debt reached a record high of $36 trillion — $2 trillion higher than at the beginning of the year. Creating such a large federal deficit has moral implications, commentators say. Racking up “$36 trillion in debt is immoral,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Monday. “Spending money that does not belong to you and you have no intention of paying back is theft.”

President Donald Trump tried to curb regulatory power early in his first term, issuing an executive order mandating that, for every one new regulation added to the federal code, two must be eliminated. He seems poised to expand that margin in his second term. “I’m pledging today that in my second term, we will eliminate a minimum of 10 old regulations for every one new regulation,” President Trump told the Economic Club of New York in September.

The newly formed DOGE will also take a scalpel to the federal budget, its founders promise. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Ramaswamy vowed to abolish the Department of Education and defund National Public Radio and Planned Parenthood. The abortion giant alone receives nearly $700 million in taxpayer funding each year.

At the same time, the House of Representatives plans to form a DOGE Committee, led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), to assist the DOGE department’s efforts in Congress. The committee is “going to try and identify programs, agencies, departments that are redundant, that are wasteful and slip those over to the legislative branch, which is where we sit. And they’ll have hearings and introduce legislation that will decouple those wasteful programs and agencies from the federal government. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new chairwoman, has said that she expects to close agencies and fire people,” said Biggs.

Together, the two DOGE entities will create a “synergistic effect,” he said.

In the end, said Biggs, the House of Representatives must use the normal budgeting process to rein in out-of-control spending. “This is why the bureaucratic state is growing: Every time you do a continuing resolution, you keep funding the same programs at the same levels. Periodically there will be an omnibus that raises all that spending. You’re just on cruise control,” Biggs told Hice. “The way you stop it is you actually do your appropriations bills and you say, ‘We’re not going to fund Planned Parenthood. We’re not going to fund various DEI programs or woke programs in the military or anything else,’ that will be designated by DOGE or designated by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s subcommittee on Oversight.”

Despite America’s polarized nature, Biggs says he believes many of DOGE’s commonsense proposals will find bipartisan support. “Some Democrats have come up to me privately and told me they agree” that Congress has to “get some [power that resides in the federal government] back to the states, where it was always intended to be under the Constitution.”

“The focus is going to be on the fourth branch of government, which is the bureaucracy,” Biggs emphasized. “The federal government is so upside down big that it needs to be turned right side and made right-sized again.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: This Thanksgiving, Walmart’s DEI Retreat Is Just Gravy

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Pro-Life Leaders Praise ‘Beautiful’ Plan for DOGE to Defund Planned Parenthood

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans to protect taxpayers from wasteful spending will take a scalpel to Planned Parenthood funding, reasserting Americans’ financial autonomy by removing federal funds from the nation’s largest abortion chain.

The pair outlined their vision for the forthcoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, specifically underscoring plans to enact a host of policies long supported by pro-life advocates and government efficiency experts alike.

“DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood,” wrote Musk and Ramaswamy.

Planned Parenthood received $699.3 million in taxpayer funding fiscal year and carried out 392,712 abortions in its 2022-2023 fiscal year, according to its most recent annual report.

Taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood surged $65.9 million since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, even as inflation and a slow economic recovery from the artificial COVID-19 shutdowns eroded Americans’ real income.

Some of Planned Parenthood’s spending has been blatantly political. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Planned Parenthood announced plans to spend $140 million on supporting Democratic candidates who support abortion (and abortion funding) and to launch a long-term campaign to expand abortion in all 50 states. Their policy outline included $40 million on door-to-door canvassing, TV and online advertising, phone banks, and direct mail targeting voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the 2024 presidential election. It also joined other left-wing organizations to launch a 10-year, $100 million campaign aimed at “securing access to abortion care in every state.”

Planned Parenthood’s annual report also notes the abortion chain spent $46.7 million on “public policy” and $14.8 to “engage communities.”

Pro-life and pro-family leaders welcomed the efforts to extricate taxpayers from funding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain which has increasingly stepped into carrying out transgender procedures, often to minors as young as 12.

“Americans work hard for their money — and under the Biden administration, despite loads of hard work, that money didn’t go very far. For many, the economy was a top issue in this election. Working to ensure that American taxpayer dollars are only used in ways that work to further the good of our nation is at the forefront of the Trump administration’s agenda,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “It was beautiful to see that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have recognized that using American taxpayer dollars to fund the killing of unborn children is a complete waste of money. It is inefficient on so many levels — including that it robs Americans of future generations of children. I look forward to seeing the other areas DOGE recognizes as a waste of taxpayer dollars; this first announcement signaled that rebuilding a culture of life is part of taking back America.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins found “lots of good news in this plan,” specifically highlighting its calls to:

  • Defund Planned Parenthood.
  • Defund international [organizations] at odds with our interests.
  • Defund PBS/NPR.
  • Mass rescissions of unconstitutional regulations that exceed the authority of the Executive branch.
  • Return the federal workforce to the office five days a week, which “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America (SFLA), had raised the issue of defunding Planned Parenthood repeatedly in recent days. “Hey DOGE, our tax dollars fund abortion,” she posted on social media last Thursday. “Taxpayers should not be forced to fund abortion. If President Trump’s goal is to end federal involvement in abortion, we must start by defunding & debarring Planned Parenthood.”

SBA Pro-Life America noted that Planned Parenthood had amassed a whopping $2.5 billion in net assets. “They should never get taxpayer dollars,” said the group, as it thanked Musk and Ramaswamy “for focusing on this important issue.”

Lila Rose of Live Action described the DOGE defunding proposal as “Amazing!”

Liberty Counsel hoped DOGE’s policy will push toward “ending all taxpayer-funded abortion.” Human Life International called DOGE’s focus on defunding anti-life programs “such good news” but asked Christians to “pray that this includes defunding global anti-life programs.”

“The federal government shouldn’t be in the business of giving away free money to non-governmental organizations. That should be obvious,” Ramaswamy commented separately.

But Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson lashed out at Musk and Ramaswamy, deriding them as “agents of chaos.”

Defunding Planned Parenthood means “wreaking havoc on our public health system, of which Planned Parenthood is an integral part,” she contended.

“Planned Parenthood doesn’t get a blank check from the federal government. Like any other health care provider, or hospital, Planned Parenthood affiliates are reimbursed for services provided to patients at health centers,” she asserted. “What Musk and Ramaswamy call ‘federal overspending’ provides critical and necessary sexual and reproductive health care to thousands of people every day — care that will disappear if they get their way.”

But Planned Parenthood officials settled a Medicaid fraud investigation, paying the state of Texas $4.3 million in 2013. Planned Parenthood’s Houston affiliate, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast (PPGC), “improperly billed the Texas Medicaid program for products and services that were never actually rendered, not medically necessary, and were not covered by the Medicaid program — and were therefore not eligible for reimbursement,” announced then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R), who is now governor. Planned Parenthood accepted no blame in the settlement.

Wisconsin state auditors also concluded that up to two-thirds of all Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood facilities were fraudulent in 2016.

The abortion industry CEO said Planned Parenthood had defeated efforts to defund it in the past and would win again. “We’ve been here before — we are not new to shutdown and ‘defund’ fights. We fended off a number of these attacks during Trump’s first term — and Planned Parenthood health centers are still there serving millions of patients across the nation,” she claimed.

But Planned Parenthood gave up federal funding rather than choosing to reduce taxpayer-funded abortion advocacy. President Donald Trump stipulated in 2019 that recipients of federal family planning funding through Title X cannot refer women for or carry out abortions. Rather than “fending off” the fight or continuing to provide “care,” the Planned Parenthood Federation of America pulled out of Title X in 2019. President Joe Biden reversed the Trump administration’s pro-life policy in October 2021.

The Planned Parenthood CEO also noted that “50% of Planned Parenthood patients are enrolled in Medicaid and other federal and state programs for uninsured patients,” pointing out other potential revenue streams for DOGE to eliminate.

All branches of government aim to assist DOGE. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) announced that he plans to create a Government Efficiency Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in the forthcoming Congress.

The administration’s plans call for DOGE to end all operations on Independence Day: July 4, 2026.

“Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution,” wrote Musk and Ramaswamy. “There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Dems Support FEMA Funds Being Diverted to Migrants

While Americans are still struggling to recover from a devastating hurricane season, Democrats are signaling that they approve of federal agencies giving relief money — not to their fellow Americans — but to migrants.

According to a Rasmussen Reports survey published Monday, the majority of likely voters (59%) want the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to focus its resources on American citizens, but 29% approve of FEMA spending money on migrants. A majority (59%) of Democrat voters approve of FEMA diverting resources from Americans to migrants, while only 8% of Republican voters and less than 20% of Independent voters do the same.

While a majority (61%) of voters have a favorable view of FEMA and its Hurricane Helene disaster response, Democrats are the most likely (at 82%) to rate government agencies favorably, as opposed to only 45% of Republicans and 42% of Independent voters. Rasmussen Reports noted, “Among all voters who have a very favorable opinion of FEMA, 68% think spending FEMA money to help immigrants is a good idea.”

The survey follows reports of widespread mismanagement, misallocation of funds, and inaction on FEMA’s part in response to Hurricane Helene, which destroyed a 500-mile swath of homes, towns, and cities in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and parts of Tennessee and Virginia.

Following Hurricane Helene’s landfall, FEMA and other government officials reportedly blocked private American citizens from providing help to impacted areas, especially in the western region of North Carolina. Private citizens conducting search and rescue missions, carrying supplies, or attempting to provide transportation were halted by FEMA and, in some cases, threatened with arrest. Reports have also suggested that FEMA employees are working regular nine-to-five hours, staying in hotels that are then denied to victims of the hurricane, and confiscating supplies and donations, diverting them to immigrant communities instead of to American citizens.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been criticized for announcing that FEMA is almost out of funding and does not have the money to last through the remainder of the hurricane season. However, the agency has spent $1.4 billion since 2022 on illegal immigrants. On Monday night’s episode of “Washington Watch,” former Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, who helped oversee FEMA during the Trump administration, said, “As the Secretary of Homeland Security, part of your job … is to show those impacted that for the most part, the federal government hears you and we’re there to help you as best we can using the authorities that we have.”

He continued, “One of the first things [Mayorkas] says on the way down to North Carolina is ‘We’re out of money, FEMA doesn’t have enough money,’ which I would say is the exact wrong message to send to the people that are hurting in North Carolina.” Wolf added, “They want to know that the government is on their side and is doing everything possible to make sure that they get the assistance they need in such devastating, devastating times.”

Wolf also explained that Mayorkas’s claims of FEMA being out of money may not be “accurate,” noting that the agency has “access to over $20 billion to draw from. And so, the amount of money that they have obligated versus what they have actually spent — they’ve obligated a good amount. What they’ve actually spent is very low.”

He continued, “Now is not the time to talk about ‘We need to replenish what we call the Disaster Relief Fund.’ Now is the time to help individuals on the ground.” He explained that after resources have actually been depleted in hurricane relief efforts, FEMA can ask Congress to supplement the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF). “And Congress is there to do that. They’ve done that historically. There’s little debate. The only debate is how much? They’re always making sure that we take care of those impacted most,” he said. Wolf added, “Frankly, I think there’s more than enough funding to get them through that period of time, and then they can certainly come back after that.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Vance: Trump Has Been ‘Consistent’ about Defunding Planned Parenthood

Former President Donald Trump’s running mate is pledging to defund the abortion giant Planned Parenthood if Trump is elected for a second term. Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) was asked by RealClearPolitics over the weekend if a second Trump administration would defund Planned Parenthood, a policy Trump discussed during his first presidential bid. Vance replied, “On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood, look, I mean, our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions. That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around. It will remain a consistent view.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, said, “The majority of Americans believe that taxpayer dollars should not fund abortion. Planned Parenthood, an organization that kills close to 400,000 unborn babies every year, feels differently.”

She continued, “American taxpayer dollars are meant to help our country be stronger and more secure, and to help our people be healthier and better cared for. Using taxpayer dollars to kill unborn children does not accomplish any of these goals.” Szoch added, “Praise God that the Trump-Vance ticket recognizes that the hard-earned dollars of American men and women should not be used to kill the most innocent among us.”

During his first administration, Trump revised the Title X federal family planning program to bar tax dollars from going to organizations that partnered with the abortion industry or provided referrals for abortions, effectively forcing Planned Parenthood to withdraw from Title X. “For decades, American taxpayers have been wrongfully forced to subsidize the abortion industry through Title X federal funding. So today, we have kept another promise,” Trump announced at a Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America event in 2018. He continued, “My administration has proposed a new rule to prohibit Title X funding from going to any clinic that performs abortions.” The Biden-Harris administration reversed Trump’s Title X rule upon taking office in 2021.

Trump was responsible for appointing three of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 — an achievement he touts when appealing to conservative evangelicals and Catholics — but announced earlier this year that he intends to leave the issue of abortion legislation to the individual states and will not use federal authority to protect the unborn.

Prior to the 2024 Republican National Convention, Trump was responsible for slashing the Republican Party Platform, removing the GOP’s longstanding commitment to pro-life principles. Since then, both Trump and Vance have avoided promoting pro-life legislation and have even stated that they would oppose a national abortion ban. However, both have also called the Democratic Party “radical” for promoting abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, even up until the moment of birth, and have pressed Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris to admit that they support unrestricted abortion.

Earlier this year, Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins called on Trump to defund Planned Parenthood in a second administration, “If you want no federal involvement in abortion, then debar and defund Planned Parenthood. The federal government wasted almost $700 million on Planned Parenthood, according to their 2022-2023 annual report.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. Households Continue to Struggle under Nagging Inflation, Sky-High Interest Rates

Financial reports continue to indicate that in the three and a half years that have elapsed since the Biden-Harris administration came into office, the percentage of American households that have become financially insecure has grown. Experts say that the administration’s economic policies have contributed to the increase in poverty, particularly by exacerbating inflation through massive federal spending increases, which in turn caused interest rates to spike.

Following a sharp increase in federal spending as part of an emergency COVID relief package that former President Donald Trump signed in December 2020, the Biden-Harris administration and congressional Democrats continued the same level of spending in 2021 and 2022 instead of letting the emergency spending expire, spending $5.9 trillion more than what was spent in pre-pandemic 2019. As pointed out by economic expert J.T. Young, this “excessive spending has helped over-weight demand relative to the supply of goods — too much money chasing too few goods,” causing prices to rise.

When Biden took office in January 2021, inflation was at 1.4%. By March, it had risen to 2.6%, and by January 2022, it ballooned to 7.5%. Six months later, it peaked at 9.1%, a 40-year high. But by December 2022, the rate was still at 6.5%. Currently, the rate is at 3%, which Young noted is still well above the Federal Reserve’s acceptable target rate of 2%.

As Young went on to observe, this was “only half of Americans’ pricing squeeze. The other half comes from the huge jump in interest rates that the Federal Reserve had to implement to cool Biden’s spending-infused inflation inferno. Eleven times the Fed was forced to hike rates, taking them from 0.25-0.50 percent in March 2022 to 5.25-5.50 percent in July 2023,” where it remains currently.

“So, Americans are trapped between inflation’s twin pressures: The prices they pay and the money they borrow,” Young added.

According to data that has recently come to light, the economic situation is continuing to have enormous financial consequences for vast swaths of U.S. households. As reported Wednesday by The Epoch Times, a nonprofit that tracks household budgets called United For ALICE (UFA) has estimated that, according to its most recent available data from 2022, 42% of American households are facing an impossible choice every month: “Pay the rent or put food on the table.”

While the data for 2023 and 2024 has yet been published, recent trends indicate that the struggles have only continued. A Forbes Advisor survey from last year found that 40% of respondents reported living paycheck to paycheck, with 29% saying they could not cover standard expenses. In July of this year, financial services provider LendingTree reported that since 2022, financially insecure households have grown from 34.1% to 36.4%.

“It shouldn’t be terribly surprising,” remarked Matt Schultz, LendingTree’s chief credit analyst. “The perfect storm of record debt, sky-high interest rates, and stubborn inflation have resulted in many Americans’ financial margin of error shrinking to virtually zero.”

Another factor that is hampering millions of households is stagnant growth in wages. Kristen Rotz, president and CEO of United Way of Pennsylvania, told The Epoch Times that 2023 and 2024 have seen virtually no change. “Inflation is slowing, but wages, though increasing somewhat, are still lagging. The cost of the basics outpaced wage growth.”

As a result, food banks from Brooklyn, N.Y. to Michigan are experiencing record demand. A Port Huron, Michigan food bank told the Epoch Times that it recently served a record 38 families in one day. “Groceries are so expensive,” a volunteer observed, stating that the average value of a food pick-up per family is $150. “That amount does not even cover their whole weekly grocery bill. We supplement their food budget so they can pay the rent or car expenses. It’s inflation and the economy that is driving people to us.”

In Brooklyn, about 2,500 people come to the Council of Peoples Organization every week for food, a vast increase from the few dozen that came weekly before the pandemic. According to Chief Executive Officer Mohammad Razvi, many of those coming for the food aid cite sky-high housing costs as a primary reason for not being able to afford groceries. Since the pandemic, home prices have soared 54%.

Republican lawmakers are contending that the financial struggles millions of American households have been experiencing under the Biden-Harris administration are unlikely to change if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president.

“Every day, the American Dream moves further out of reach, and hardworking Americans are feeling the consequences of the Harris Price Hikes everywhere — from the grocery store, to paying rent, to filling up their cars to get to work,” stated Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) last week.

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) expressed similar sentiments. “One thing Democrats cannot change is the Biden-Harris economic record: 20 percent rise in prices and skyrocketing interest rates preventing families from buying a home and small businesses from growing. Whether it was supporting the trillions of dollars in Democrat spending that overheated the economy or endorsing the absurd claim that inflation was transitory, Kamala Harris has been in lockstep with every one of Joe Biden’s radical economic policies.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Biden White House Staff Is Largest Since Nixon, Costs Taxpayers $225 Million

President Joe Biden has spent $225 million paying hundreds of White House staffers since the 2021 fiscal year, federal records show.

The president’s spending on staffers totaled $60.8 million for the 2024 fiscal year, marking the highest level adjusted for inflation recorded over the past two presidential administrations, according to an analysis conducted by Open The Books. Biden employed over 500 staffers in three of the four fiscal years he has been in office, including 565 during the 2024 fiscal year, a headcount benchmark not hit since the Nixon administration in 1971.

“This payroll was made public just hours before the statutory deadline and days after the presidential debate set off a torrent of questions about President Biden’s ability to serve,” Open The Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a press release. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, the support system around him has grown historically large and costly.”

Biden has been an ally to bureaucrats, adding 40,000 workers to the federal payroll during his first three years in office, according to Open The Books. In addition to swelling the size of the bureaucracy, Biden also opted to give bureaucrats an average raise of 4.7% in 2023, the largest such raise since the Carter administration.

Former President Donald Trump raised pay for federal workers by 1% during 2017 and by 2.6% in 2020. Biden’s pay raise even exceeded those awarded under the Obama administration.

Trump signed an executive order in 2020 that would have removed protections for some bureaucrats, making them easier for the president to fire. The Biden administration has since finalized a rule that would elongate such a process, anticipating that Trump may try to fire federal workers if he wins the 2024 presidential election.

The president retains several highly paid staffers tasked with improving racial and gender equity, federal records show. The White House pays the deputy assistant to the president for racial justice and equity $155,000 a year and its director of global gender issues $169,429 per year.

The White House employs 106 “special assistants to the president” on policy issues ranging from “gun violence prevention” to “climate policy,” collectively costing taxpayers $13.9 million for the 2024 fiscal year, according to Open The Books. Additionally, Biden is still paying “pandemic response” staffers, spending $723,500 on their salaries despite having declared the pandemic over in September 2022.

First lady Jill Biden’s staff is also twice as large as Melania Trump’s was at its highest point, according to Open The Books. The Office of the Vice President claims it is not required to release its payroll data.

Biden had overseen over $11 trillion in spending as of December 2023, according to the House Budget Committee. The national debt increased by $2.5 trillion during the first three years of the Trump administration, compared to $4.7 trillion during Biden’s first three years, according to Fox Business.

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SCHMAD

Contributor.

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‘Total Abomination’: $1.2 Trillion Bill Funds Teen Trans Programs, Abortion to 22 Weeks

A sprawling, $1.2 trillion government funding bill includes funding for abortion facilities, as well as LGBTQ activist centers that carry out transgender injections, target minors, hold drag shows, and help illegal immigrants who identify as gay or transgender gain U.S. citizenship — a bill one congressman calls “a total, total abomination.”

The “Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024” funds the Departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services (HHS), Homeland Security (DHS), Labor, and State until the end of the fiscal year, September 30. Congressional leadership released the text of the 1,012-page bill at 2:30 a.m. Thursday, giving members of Congress just hours to read before an anticipated vote to head off an impending government shutdown at midnight Saturday.

As of this writing, the bill contained the following earmarks:

  • $400,000 requested by Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) for Briarpatch Youth Services in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. The group promises to hide minors’ struggle with gender dysphoria from their parents while indoctrinating teens in extreme gender ideology. Its “Queer 101 Training” promises to teach “an intersectional understanding on queer oppression” and aims “to demonstrate how limiting the ‘male’ and ‘female’ binary is.” The organization offers “individual counseling services” for children “ages 12-17,” in which a “[c]ounselor can work with children on exploring identity, resiliency, and creating a Gender Support Plan for school support and advocacy.” The group’s website says, “Youth do NOT need parent/guardian permission to join Teens Like Us. We understand not all youth are at a point in their lives where they can safely and confidently ‘come out.’” (Emphasis in original.) The group’s “Queer 101 Training” aims “to demonstrate how limiting the ‘male’ and ‘female’ binary is.”
  • $400,000 requested by Senator Bob Casey (D-Pa.) for the Mazzoni Center in Philadelphia, which carries out transgender hormone shots, clears the way for transgender surgeries, advertises transgender services for minors, and holds drag show fundraisers. Mazzoni carries out cross-sex hormone injections and provides medical letters for transgender surgeries. The center begins targeting teens with its Pediatric & Adolescent Comprehensive Transgender Services (PACTS). Its “Youth Drop In,” which is held each Wednesday night, is aimed at teens “ages 14 to 24” and notes, “Patients under 18 can receive confidential care regarding sexual and mental health without parental permission.” The Mazzoni Center both contributes to and profits from the LGBT movement. Mazzoni invited donors to mingle with “a wide range of acts that include drag queens, drag kings, trans-identifying, bearlesque, and burlesque performers” at its December 3 Code Red fundraiser. “In December, fundraising for Mazzoni Center truly was a drag,” the center cracked. “Drag entertainer Cherry Pop and her fabulous friends united for the 10th annual Code Red fundraiser, a drag/variety show,” which it described as a “powerful night” for a “vital cause.”
  • $1,808,000 requested by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed (both D-R.I.) for Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, which carries out first- and second-term abortions at its Family Planning Clinic. “If you need to discuss abortion care for pregnancy, please feel free to contact the Family Planning Clinic,” states its website. Its “services” include “[s]urgical abortion under general anesthesia in the operating room for people up to 22 weeks pregnant” and “[m]edication abortion (the ‘abortion pill’) for people up to ten weeks pregnant.” The facility will also implant a potential abortifacient inside women after the abortion, advertising a “[p]ost-abortion IUD or contraceptive implant.”
  • $650,000 requested by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) for Dartmouth Hitchcock Nashua in New Hampshire. “We routinely provide both medication and procedural abortion care up to 22 weeks of pregnancy,” the group declares. The facility describes surgical abortion as a procedure “ending a pregnancy by having the pregnancy removed by doctors.”
  • $780,000 requested by Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) for Amador Health Services in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which boasts that it “can provide transgender/gender non-conforming (GNC) health education, therapeutic counseling and referrals, and additional LGBTQ+ support that puts your safety and comfort first. If you’ve felt rejected by family and loved ones, isolated from your community, or are just in need of an ear to listen, we’re here.” It also decries the “social stigma” surrounding “undocumented immigration” (e.g., illegal immigration). “[W]e’re working every day to eliminate that stigma and make all feel like they belong.”
  • $146,000 requested by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) for Apicha Community Health Center, for facilities and equipment. Apicha’s two locations in Manhattan and Queens advertise “transgender and gender-affirming services” — specifically “initiation and maintenance of hormone replacement therapy,” “letters of support for gender-affirming surgeries” and “help with name change process.” They also distribute potential abortifacients Plan B and IUDs.
  • $706,000 requested by Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) for Entre Hermanos, an LGBT group that helps put illegal immigrants on a path to U.S. citizenship. It offers legal counseling and “free immigration clinics” to illegal immigrants who identify as LGBTQ to obtain U.S. citizenship and hosts workshops on “the many identities” under the transgender “umbrella” and strategies to minimize “transphobia.” The group’s website currently advertises the upcoming “Drag Brunch” on April 28.
  • $850,000 requested by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) for LGBTQ Senior Housing, Inc. (“The Pryde”), in Massachusetts, a controversial funding provision that House Republicans stripped out of a Transportation funding bill last year.

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, also listed the following concerning earmarks:

  • “Sen. Bennet (D-CO), $845,000 – Envision: You, CO (SAMHSA) – LGBTQ advocacy.”
  • “Sen. Shatz (D-HI), $550,000 – Hawaii Health and Harm Reduction Center, HI (SAMHSA) – LGBTQ services and syringe exchange.”
  • “Sen. Schumer (D-NY), $1,000,000 — SAGE, NY (ACL) – LGBTQ advocacy.”

The “earmarks in it for abortion facilities” make the bill a “total, total abomination,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told Steve Bannon’s “War Room” on Thursday.

“We continue to fund abortion tourism, we continue to fund transgender surgeries at the Department of Defense,” Roy continued. “It busts the [spending] caps … funds the FBI headquarters, doesn’t secure the border, funds the World Health Organization.”

Even these dedicated funding streams do not cover the full extent of the bill’s harmful funding, say its critics. “I have multiple concerns, among them are the many new social services that this bill would create for the millions of illegal immigrants streaming across our border. Additionally, it would fund facilities providing routine abortion services, including late-term abortions,” said Aderholt.

Experts say the short time frame legislators have to review such massive legislation makes it more likely wasteful or immoral spending will find congressional approval. “Lawmakers are using arbitrary deadlines and shutdown politics to extort the American people and force lawmakers to vote for a bill they don’t have time to read,” said Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation. “Conservatives were told that the days of omnibus spending bills shrouded in secrecy were over. But this process and the bill it produced are indistinguishable from typical Swamp behavior that’s taken our economy and country to the brink of disaster.”

Principled lawmakers seem to agree. “This is not the bill that my subcommittee produced and supported,” the chairman added. “The Senate has taken liberties with their Congressionally Directed Spending requests that would never stand in the House.”

“Under no circumstances should [House Republicans] vote for this bill,” said Roy. “A vote for this bill is a vote against America.”

“In good conscience, I cannot and will not vote for these projects or this bill,” Aderholt concluded.

The bill is expected to pass Friday.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

More Money for a Woke Pentagon? ‘No Sir, Not This Time. We’re Not Falling for That’: Senator

Hill leaders may have escaped another shutdown showdown, but there’ll be plenty of heavy-lifting when Congress comes back into session next week. It hasn’t been easy, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said, “trying to turn the aircraft carrier back to real budgeting and spending reform.” His analogy for getting back to real appropriations work was an interesting one, since Republicans seem to swing an ax at every budget but one: Defense. And maybe, one senator says, it’s time to rethink that.

The party of frugality has always had one big exception. No matter how deep America’s debt, Republicans have never minded funneling money to the military — and, in most cases, argued for more. With Gaza in flames, Russia on the move, and China ready to take over the world, beefing up our national security seems reasonable. But is that what this money is actually doing? Or are Republicans making billions of dollars sacrosanct without proof that our military is actually becoming stronger and more prepared because of it?

Right now, the U.S. Army is at its smallest size since 1940 — and getting smaller. Just this week, leaders announced a 24,000-person cut, because too many jobs remain empty. They’ve tried dropping standards — letting soldiers enlist without a high school degree in some branches, allowing retired officers to return, even telling men and women they can show up to boot camp with marijuana in their system. And still, the military is 41,000 recruits short — with no end to the struggles in sight.

Worse, the Pentagon we do have is falling woefully short of expectations. In last month’s edition of the Index of U.S. Military Strength, The Heritage Foundation rated America’s military as “weak” and “at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict.” It was the second year in a row they’d earned such a dismal ranking. More specifically, they categorized the branches this way: Army: marginal; Navy: weak; Air Force: very weak; Marine Corps: strong; Space Force: marginal; and nuclear capabilities: marginal.

We’re spending more, but not smarter, Heritage’s Wilson Beaver warns. China, on the other hand, has become such a sophisticated force that their “increased capabilities” have put the U.S. on notice, raising questions about whether we could even counter a challenge from the communist regime.

Now, in this race to pass appropriations bills (one of which is Defense), Republicans have been fighting to protect their golden calf from cuts, which is a scenario Congress faces if it doesn’t pass all of its bills by April 30. But as Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) pointed out, would slashing part of the Pentagon’s budget be such a horrible thing? We’re throwing billions of dollars at the military, he pointed out, “and how’s that working out for us?” We can’t recruit, our readiness is negligible, and our leadership is more focused on pronouns than warfare.

Republicans have been “saluting the military industrial complex at every turn and saying year after year, ‘Well, I don’t want to spend this much, and we ought to be able to have some sort of policy win here. We’re not getting that. But, gosh, the troops and the Pentagon demand it. They’ve got more weapons to buy. We’ve got to give them whatever they want.’ And they rope-a-dope us into giving them whatever we want,” Lee vented to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “That is why we’re $34 trillion in debt.”

“That,” Lee went on, “is giving money to a Pentagon that is woke. It’s more focused on being politically correct than it is on actually protecting American national security. That, Tony, is giving hard-earned American taxpayer dollars to America’s enemies or those determined to assist America’s enemies,” he said with intensity. “We shouldn’t be facilitating any of that. Not with this administration, not with this Department of Defense, not with Secretary Lloyd Austin, who has betrayed the American people in so many ways. No, sir. Not this time. We’re not following. We’re not falling for that, and neither should any Republican.”

This is a problem, Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Robert Maginnis reminds people, that didn’t happen overnight. This “radical social engineering tainting the Pentagon,” he told The Washington Stand, “arguably began with Bill Clinton, continued under Barack Obama, and now is accelerated under Joe Biden.” Ultimately, the FRC senior fellow for National Defense, said, “This robs our ranks of readiness, wastes funding, and creates a recruiting shortfall by stiff-arming the traditional conservatives that would otherwise fill our ranks.”

Lee is right about the waste, fraud, and abuse, Maginnis agrees. The DOD “doesn’t know how it spends the taxpayer dollars.” And unfortunately, “the problem is … complicated because we face a phalanx of real adversaries equipped with very sophisticated weapons and platforms. We are trying to keep pace, which is incredibly expensive: space race, hypersonics, quantum computer, AI, drones and much, much more.”

The only way to fix this “is to divorce our Defense establishment from the radical political agendas and then focus like a laser on true national security.” That will be expensive, he conceded, “however, it can be done more efficiently, and we ought to cut out the nonsense like DEI training, wasteful investments, and much more.”

Until the president and his team gets “serious enough about our challenges and finding savings for the taxpayer,” Maginnis said, nothing will change. This spending debate is the Republican Party’s opportunity, Perkins insisted. “This is the moment to force them to choose between their woke DEI policies and actually doing what their mission calls for.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Budget Office’s 10-Year Forecast: Historic Deficits, Record Debt, Higher Taxes

America’s fiscal future is gloomy, according to the 10-year forecast released Wednesday by the economic meteorologists (accountants, really) at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO projected that by 2034 the U.S. federal government will run a $2.6 trillion deficit, equivalent to 6.1% of GDP, while public-held debt would nearly double from $26 trillion to $48 trillion, reaching a record 116% of GDP. These numbers are “mind boggling” and “absolutely astounding,” said Heritage Foundation research fellow Jeffrey Griffith on “Washington Watch.”

Indeed, the historic nature of America’s irresponsible borrowing binge is so unprecedented that it earned multiple mentions in the CBO’s report summary. The CBO noted that a debt equivalent to 116% of GDP represents “an amount greater than at any point in the nation’s history.” That’s more debt — both in absolute terms, and as a percentage of GDP — than the U.S. accumulated during any war, including the Revolutionary War and World War II, during any economic crisis or peacetime spending binge, or even during the century and a half that the government survived without an income tax.

Regarding the deficit reaching 6.1% of GDP (the 50-year average is 3.7%), the report noted that “deficits have exceeded that level” only three times since the Great Depression: “During and shortly after World War II, the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and the coronavirus pandemic.” In other words, soon the U.S. federal government will be running up the credit card as fast as it did during America’s largest international war and the two worst economic crises of this millennium — for no discernable reason at all.

The problem, fundamentally, is too much spending. The CBO estimated government revenues to average 17.8% of GDP over the next 10 years, slightly above the 50-year average of 17.3%. That estimate was based on the assumption that the 2017 tax cuts will be allowed to expire in 2025. By contrast, the CBO estimated that government spending will average 23.5% over the next decade, topping out at 24.1%, far higher than the 50-year average of 21%.

Although the CBO’s statistics might be useful for comparisons over time, they fail to communicate the gravity of America’s current economic peril. Griffith bridged the gap by converting the trillions into numbers that can be brought home to each family. “We owe $400,000 per family in federal debt,” he said. “We’re expected to add another quarter million dollars per family over the next 10 years.” Who’s ready for a third mortgage?

Two types of spending were leading culprits in the CBO’s growing deficit projection: “Growth in spending on programs that benefit elderly people and rising net interest costs” — in other words, mandatory entitlement spending and servicing the debt. The CBO projected that mandatory spending will increase steadily to 15.1% of GDP, net interest payments will increase to 3.9%, while discretionary spending (both military and domestic) will actually decrease to 5.1% by 2034 — if you can believe it.

Forecasters have known for decades about the fiscal turbulence catalyzed by the rising longevity of America’s aging population. The relatively new factors are the recent arrival of a high interest system and its costly interaction with mountains of recently accrued debt.

According to the Committee for Responsible Budget, for the first time, net interest payments exceeded Medicaid spending in 2023 and will exceed defense spending and Medicare spending in 2024. “Starting next year,” wrote CBO, “net interest costs are greater in relation to GDP than at any point since at least 1940, the first year for which the Office of Management and Budget reports such data.”

Griffith translated, “We’re already paying around $10,000 per family per year, just on the interest on the federal debt. And that is going to nearly double to close to $20,000 per family per year.” Sorry, Jimmy, I know you wanted to go to college. But now your Uncle Sam needs that money to pay off his gambling debts.

These factors, combined with sultry stagnation of Bidenomics, are cooking up the perfect fiscal storm. Americans can expect a “Poor Front” to follow. “Such soaring debt would slow economic growth, push up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, and pose significant risks to the fiscal and economic outlook,” analyzed the CBO. “It could also cause lawmakers to feel more constrained in their policy choices.” Coming from an agency that reports to Congress, that last sentence is the bureaucratic equivalent of, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, boss.”

Based on historical precedents, Griffith described “multiple ways this can pan out.” Through Door Number One, America could fully embrace European socialism. We already have most of the social programs; now we just need the taxes to match. This solution could avoid the fiscal crisis at the cost of “a long-term relative decline in our prosperity,” said Griffith. Through Door Number Two lies the fate of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, who nearly went bankrupt during the Great Recession through extreme profligacy. To obtain the foreign loans they needed to stay afloat, they were forced to make deep spending cuts dictated by outside countries — which naturally caused massive social unrest. Through Door Number Three, Griffith described “very extreme examples” of hyperinflation, such as Argentina and Venezuela. “None of the scenarios are good,” he warned.

Predicting the future is notoriously impossible, and CBO budget forecasters are usually no more successful than weather meteorologists. If anything, however, the CBO’s debt estimate is a conservative, even “optimistic” one, as The Wall Street Journal editorial board remarked skeptically. “They assume no recession and that the 2017 individual tax cuts and Inflation Reduction Act’s sweetened ObamaCare subsidies expire in 2025. Oh, and that Congress doesn’t lather on more spending, and more student debt isn’t canceled by executive decree.” That’s four unsafe assumptions that each lower the CBO’s 10-year debt estimate.

Undeterred by the glowering forecast, the Biden administration has planned a weekend cook-out. “Over the past three years, the Biden administration has driven an historic recovery,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen declared during Thursday testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, with all the cheeriness of a turnip. She later conceded under questioning that “we need to reduce deficits and to stay on a fiscally sustainable path,” an answer as effective as a clogged culvert. “By suggesting that we need to stay on a sustainable path, she’s saying we’re on one right now,” Griffith responded. “We are already on the path to unsustainability.”

Yellen further argued that America’s current debt burden is nothing to worry about. “Thus far, in real terms, the interest burden of the debt has remained within or below historical norms,” she said. According to the CBO, the 50-year average of net interest expenditures is 2.1% of GDP; the U.S. government spent 2.4% of GDP servicing the debt in 2023 and will spend 3.1% of GDP servicing the debt in 2024. Coming from a current Treasury Secretary and former Federal Reserve chair, Yellen’s remark is akin to an air traffic controller arguing, “Thus far, in real terms, that jet airliner accelerating down the runway has not yet become airborne.”

In response to a question from Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Yellen said she had “seen no sign” of waning foreign interest in U.S. debt, an “absolutely ludicrous” remark in Griffith’s estimation. “Over the last two and a half years, foreign investors have only been willing to purchase about one penny of every new dollar of federal debt that we’ve taken on. In years past, foreign investors bought about one third of our federal debt,” Griffith explained. “With investor demand drying up for that debt, that means that the federal government has to pay more to those who will lend us money. … That trickles down directly to us as consumers.”

While the Biden administration may be unconcerned about the debt, at least some members of Congress have sought to restore sanity and accountability to the budgeting process. Thus far, their achievements have been flimsy at best. As a result of the spending cuts Republicans negotiated in the debt limit deal last summer, the CBO reduced their estimated deficit for 2024 by $0.1 trillion (4%) and their estimated cumulative deficit for 2024-2033 by $1.4 trillion (7%). You could as easily dig a trench with a teaspoon, or stop a locomotive’s momentum with a Q-tip, as resolve America’s budgetary crisis with such puny half-measures.

This situation illustrates the truth that elections have consequences. The reason why congressional budget hawks can’t achieve any significant savings is that there are too few of them, compared to their colleagues who want to keep spending money. At root, this is a problem that can only be solved when voters and candidates get serious about demanding and delivering fiscal sanity in Washington. America is barreling straight toward a fiscal cliff. Will anyone care enough to stop her?

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

High Consumer Prices among Top Concerns as Voters Lose Confidence in Biden, Polls Show

As new polls indicate that American voters remain worried about the persistently high cost of goods and have largely lost confidence in President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, a leading economist is pointing out that the economies in red states that feature free market policies are outpacing the economies of blue states.

An NBC News poll published Sunday revealed that Biden lagged behind former President Donald Trump by over 20 points on the question of “which candidate would better handle the economy.” Overall, the poll found that Biden’s approval rating has reached the lowest point of his presidency at 37%.

The survey comes as voters say that the economy is among their top concerns going into the November elections. A recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll found that inflation was the primary worry for 32% of respondents, a close second behind the border crisis at 35%.

While inflation has largely leveled off since reaching a high of 9.1% in June 2022, consumers are still worried about the persistent rising costs of virtually all goods since the 2020 pandemic that have not come back down. As reported by CNN, “More than 90% of the items tracked in the Consumer Price Index are more expensive than they were in February 2020, with most price increases landing north of 20% and some (fuel and margarine) approaching 55%.” Overall, food prices have risen almost 25%.

Stephen Moore, distinguished fellow in Economics at The Heritage Foundation, joined “Washington Watch” last week to discuss the current economic outlook in America.

“What’s happening in America today is you’ve got red states with low taxes, less regulation, [and] right-to-work that are doing extraordinarily well,” he explained. “You know, they’re actually booming [in] Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Utah, Idaho. So many of these states, [like] South Carolina, the southern states are doing amazing. … [B]y the way, the South now is the number one leading region in the economy. It used to be the northeast for 100 years. But the northeast is losing its people, its businesses, its capital. And they’re going to states like Florida and Texas and Arizona … because the taxes are lower [and] there’s a more pro-business atmosphere. They follow free market policies. That’s what American businesses want. That’s what workers want.”

Moore, who also serves as a senior economist at FreedomWorks, went on to argue that the Biden administration’s federal spending policies have negatively affected the economy.

“[T]he question becomes, ‘Why don’t we do, on the national level, what works in the states? Why don’t we cut our taxes, reduce our regulations? Why don’t we get our budget under control?’ We’re running a $1.5 trillion debt. … It’s because we’ve got a president who is spending and printing and borrowing a trillion and a half dollars a year — it’s as obvious [as] the sun ris[ing] in the East and set[ting] in the West when you have that kind of out of control spending. You know what? You’re going to get inflation.”

At an event last week, Biden accused grocery stores of “ripping people off” through “price gouging, junk fees, greedflation [and] shrinkflation.”

“That’s the way all these Democrats are,” Moore responded. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, the profits are too high.’ Why don’t you go out there and show you can make a profit? It ain’t so easy to do it. These are businesses that are providing jobs, providing growth for our economy, putting food on our table. I’m sick of him criticizing American businesses.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.