Tag Archive for: Taxpayer Funding

DOJ Confirms over 450 Fraud Prosecutions Launched in Past Two Weeks

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Federal law enforcement and prosecutors are revealing that rampant fraud is plaguing the entirety of the U.S. — not just cities like Minneapolis or Los Angeles. The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced at a press conference Tuesday that it has charged more than 450 individuals across 45 states for defrauding taxpayer-funded health care programs of approximately $6.5 billion.

“This announcement marks the greatest combined federal and state effort in combating health care fraud in history,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asserted. “This team is working tirelessly to take down fraudsters who steal from taxpayer-funded programs and prey on vulnerable Americans.”

According to Blanche, the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and the DOJ have been joined by multiple executive branch agencies and 41 state attorneys general to tackle crippling fraud across the country. “That’s what we talk about when we say this is an all-government approach to combating fraud. It’s not just the Department of Justice, it’s not just HHS — it’s all government, including working with our state and local partners,” Blanche affirmed. “Today, we are announcing federal and state charges, all of which were charged or unsealed at some point over the past two weeks’ — the past 14 days’ coordinated nationwide action. Since June 8, we’ve charged 455 defendants across … 45 states.”

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “President Trump directed this administration to confront health care fraud aggressively, and we are doing that.” Kennedy, a former Democrat, thanked blue state attorneys general for joining the effort. “Fraud does not recognize party lines, and neither does accountability,” he stated. “These schemes did not target government programs. They targeted the American taxpayer. They stole money from workers who pay taxes from families who depend on Medicare and Medicaid, and from patients who trusted their health care professionals to be serving their health interests, when it turns out they were just chasing money from our agencies.”

The individuals charged have been accused of fraudulently billing programs like Medicare and Medicaid for services never performed, stripping taxpayers of billions of dollars. One individual in Arizona was charged with fraudulently billing Medicare over $1 million per patient for “wound grafts,” netting $1 billion in ill-gotten money. Ten other defendants were charged with fraudulent “wound care” schemes, amounting to more than $2 billion in fraud. The defendants would purchase wound graft materials for anywhere from $30 to $75 and then inflate the price to nearly 50 times that, pocketing the difference reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid and paying kickbacks to marketers, nurses, and others. According to the DOJ, the defendants “then used the taxpayer money to bankroll multimillion dollar homes, luxury vehicles like a $135,000 Maserati, jewelry like an $865,000 Bulgari necklace, and — to top it all off — to fund the construction of a $4.6 million hotel at a beach resort in the Philippines.”

According to Kennedy, health care providers ordered medically unnecessary tests and prescriptions that patients did not need in order to pocket the Medicare and Medicaid refunds, and even “fueled opioid addiction to increase their own revenue.” In several cases, patients died because their health care providers were more concerned with defrauding American taxpayers than with helping their patients.

In one case, a hospice care owner illegally paid others for the personal Medicare and Medicaid information of patients who had died. Kennedy noted that the federal government has shut down over 800 hospices in the Los Angeles area due to suspected fraud. “One of the ways that we’ve been able to detect that fraud is that in many of them, the patients never die. They live forever. That’s not supposed to happen in hospices,” he said, adding that the hospice owner purchasing the information of deceased patients was then using that information to artificially make it appear as though patients were dying in hospice at a normal rate, in order to avoid detection. He made nearly $30 million from the scheme and purchased himself a Rolls-Royce. “That case illustrates exactly what is at stake,” Kennedy emphasized. “Every fraudulent dollar diverted into a criminal scheme is a dollar unavailable for patient care, for medical innovation, or for services for vulnerable Americans.”

In another case, a health care provider used predatory marketing schemes to scare student athletes into submitting to cardiovascular testing to prevent cardiac arrest. Instead of examining any test results, the defendant simply “rubber-stamped” them. One of the young men, whose 64-image test results were marked as healthy within 11 seconds, actually had an enlarged heart and cardiovascular issues, which the health care provider no doubt would have noticed had he actually examined test results instead of attempting to maximize his payout from taxpayer-funded programs. Just a few weeks later, the student athlete suffered a cardiac arrest and died on the basketball court.

Due to the inaction and negligence of former President Joe Biden’s administration and numerous Democratic officials, such as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz or California Governor Gavin Newsom, many fraudsters have managed to evade law enforcement. Out of the $6.5 billion in taxpayer funds stolen by fraudsters, the DOJ has recovered $182 million in cash and assets over the past two weeks, accounting for less than 3% of stolen funds. Of the many defendants charged with fraud schemes in 2025, the DOJ just managed to get two extradited from Estonia and transferred a third to U.S. custody in an unnamed foreign state.

In fact, the Biden administration actively facilitated fraud. According to Kennedy, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, now a candidate in California’s gubernatorial election, implemented a “pay and chase” program, ordering HHS not to stop payments to likely or known fraudulent entities but to instead try to “claw back” those funds at a later date. “This is crazy because, of course, we never claw back anything,” Kennedy quipped. Becerra further instructed HHS employees to “focus on enrollment” in taxpayer-funded programs and to ignore fraud.

Additionally, Biden and Becerra tried to “liquidate” HHS’s program integrity office, which is charged with identifying and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer funds. According to Kennedy, Becerra slashed the number of program integrity officers from 80 — which Kennedy said is already too low a number for policing multiple programs over 50 states — to only six. He stressed, “That opened up the floodgates for all of this fraud, $100 billion in fraud a year that are being stolen now from my agency.”

The lax standards of the Biden era have been replaced with stringent controls to allow the federal government to identify and prevent fraud in the future, in addition to identifying previously committed fraud and prosecuting fraudsters. “If you exploit patients for profit, if you steal Medicaid or Medicare dollars, if you treat taxpayer dollars as your personal bank account, we will investigate you, we will build the case, and we will bring you to justice,” Kennedy pledged. “We will find fraud. We will stop it. We will recover taxpayer dollars whenever the law permits, and we will restore integrity to the programs that millions of Americans rely on for their care.”

“Fraud is no longer being tolerated. It is not being put up with,” said Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel. “The interagency and state and local partners focused on one mission and one mission alone: to combat fraud and make sure the American public’s precious taxpayer dollars go where they’re supposed to go, to the American people that need them the most, and not to these criminals who are stealing from us day in and day out,” Patel continued.

Blanche added, “This is just the beginning. Fraudsters can no longer rip off American taxpayers. If you seek to harm or cheat Americans, we will find you, seize any assets, and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

The widespread fraud has also gotten the attention of lawmakers like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who say that a significant portion of the theft was largely enabled by Biden’s inflationary injection of $7 trillion into the U.S. economy.

“He threw $7 trillion worth of money into the economy — no economic basis for that, just sending it out, and people committed fraud all over the place,” he pointed out during “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “And … then you don’t have enough oversight.”

Biggs further emphasized that Congress must begin attaching enforcement mechanisms to spending bills. “We need to keep working with DOJ and other law enforcement to make sure they have the tools that they need, but we have to make sure that we start putting checks in the spending bills. When people get going around here, they just sign off on spending bills instead of putting in all the checks and balances and restrictions necessary to make sure only the people that are intended and are qualified to receive those benefits receive those benefits.”

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. ©2026 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 Big-City Public Schools Spend Billions More but Students Learning Less

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Public schools in five of the nation’s most densely populated cities are spending billions of local, state, and federal tax dollars, but students are learning less compared to where they were five years ago, according to results reported in the 2025 edition of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).

The NAEP — also known as “The Nation’s Report Card” since passage of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 — measures student learning in math and reading at the fourth, eighth, and 12th grade levels. The five school districts examined by The Washington Stand include the New York City Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools, Houston Independent School District, and the School District of Philadelphia. Phoenix has a larger population than Philadelphia, but it has dozens of small districts rather than one large district encompassing all or most of the city limits.

Collectively, the five big-city districts’ student enrollment exceeds 1.9 million. The total of federal tax dollars in 2024 to the five districts is $25.7 billion, for an average of $13,116 per student, and enough to fund five NASA Artemis II-like missions to the moon and back. When all funding sources are included, the overall average spending per-pupil increases to $26,578, which is 50.6% above the national average per-pupil spending of $17,644.

The average teacher salary for the five districts is $94,271, compared to the national average of $74,495. The average salary of the big-city administrators is $110,515, with the national average of $117,000. All of the teachers in the five districts are represented by unions, with most covered by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and a portion of the Los Angeles teachers by the National Education Association (NEA).

So, per-pupil spending in the five districts is significantly above the national average, as are teacher salaries, and yet, as the following data make clear, hundreds of thousands of students in those schools are not learning at even the basic proficiency level in math and reading for eighth graders.

The scores for New York City public schools show 49% of eighth graders tested at or below the most basic proficiency level in math, as did 38% on reading proficiency. For Los Angeles eighth graders, the scores were 54% at or below basic proficiency in math and 42% for reading proficiency.

Chicago’s eighth graders turned in scores of 51% at or below basic proficiency for math and 37% for reading proficiency. In Houston, the scores were 51% at or below basic proficiency in math and 44% in reading. For Philadelphia, the scores were 62% at or below basic proficiency in math and 50% in reading.

Overall, as a group, these five big city school districts thus averaged having 53%, or more than half of their eighth-graders at or below basic proficiency in math and 42% at or below basic proficiency in reading. By comparison, the average for all large cities, according to the NAEP, shows 48% at or below proficient among eighth graders on math and 39% at or below among eighth graders in reading.

Since all of these data are for eighth graders, it raises the question of whether their substantial lack of learning might be eliminated by the time they reach the 12th grade. But the 12th grade scores show negligible changes. In New York, for example, 49% of the 12th graders were still at or below basic proficiency in 2024.

Sadly, the bad news is not limited to these five large metropolises, according to NAEP’s own analyses. Learning losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic that kept students at home for much of 2020-21 are accelerating nationwide rather than declining.

“As a nation, U.S. students have not recovered from the devastating impact the pandemic had on education. National scores are below pre-pandemic levels (2019) in ALL tested grades and subjects. Higher-performing students drove most of the progress made in 2024. Gaps are growing between higher-performing and lower-performing students — a trend we’ve been seeing for more than a decade. Just how big is this gap? On a 500-point scale, the lowest-performing students generally score about 100 points below the highest-performing students in 2024,” NAEP observed in its “10 Takeaways” analysis.

How serious is the situation? The same takeaways analysis noted that “reading scores are down nationally in both fourth and eighth grades. No state saw reading gains in either grade, compared to 2022. A third (33%) of eighth graders are not even reading at the NAEP Basic level — a greater percentage than ever before. Which means, a third of eighth graders likely could not identify basic literary elements in a text such as the order of events, character traits, and main idea.”

On the eighth grade math scores, the takeaways analysis pointed out that “in fourth grade, math scores are up nationally by two points. While this is promising, middle- and higher-performing students drove the progress. Scores for lower-performing students were flat. In eighth grade, math scores are flat nationally, which is of particular concern given the historic eight-point drop for eighth graders in 2022. Unfortunately, that overall flatness masks higher-performing students’ gains in 2024 and lower-performing students’ declines.”

An inherent limitation of the NAEP data, however, is that it is a snapshot in time from one year to the next rather than tracking the same students over a length of time, as is the case with “longitudinal” data analyses, according to Jonathan Butcher, the acting director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

“If it doesn’t say it’s longitudinal, then it’s not. Even if they have results going back for several years, they are just monitoring the different kids in those grades from year-to-year. So, it’s important when looking at the results to say this is not the same population of kids, this is a new population of kids. So, what that tells us for those grades is [that] the results are consistently poor. The schools on a consistent basis are failing to live up to the expectations we have set for them,” Butcher told The Washington Stand. “It’s also important to note that this downturn happened before COVID, and so those from the unions who would say this is all because of COVID, we’re just trying to make up ground here. No, no, things were going bad before COVID, since 2009.”

The data for these five big-city public school districts suggests that there is little correlation of per-pupil spending and teacher salaries with academic proficiency. And a 2023 analysis by the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University concludes the lack of correlation is also evident among school districts at all spending levels.

“The experience of U.S. states since 2003 offers a cautionary lesson: Rising per-pupil education spending has not been reliably correlated with higher NAEP student achievement. Even among the highest-spending jurisdictions in 2022 — such as New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Jersey — academic outcomes have been mixed at best, and in many cases worse than two decades earlier,” wrote authors Dennis W. Jansen and Somali Ghosh Sinha.

“These results do not imply that education funding is unimportant. Rather, they emphasize that the returns to spending depend critically on how resources are used. Differences in instructional quality, curriculum rigor, administrative efficiency, student demographics, policy choices, and societal changes are all candidates for explaining the low correlation between educational spending and educational achievement,” they said.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 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 Lock Horns with GOP over ICE, as Friday the 13th Deadline Looms

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There’s probably an oddsmaker crunching the numbers as we speak. Which will thaw first — the D.C. snow drifts or the tension over Homeland Security funding? Heading into Friday’s deadline, the outlook is bleak for both. While the city is finally registering some above-freezing temperatures, the warmth hasn’t extended into the Hill’s negotiating rooms, where both sides seem more dug in than ever on the biggest flashpoint of a young 2026: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

But for those worried about another partial government shutdown, there is some reassurance. As most veteran staffers will tell you, if there’s anything more sacrosanct than the two parties’ principles in Congress, it’s recess. And with Presidents’ Day around the corner and a week-long break already built into the schedule, something will have to give. What that something is, no one is quite sure. Republicans have largely panned Democrats’ demands for ICE reforms, which include controversial ideas like removing agents’ face masks and mandating the impossible-to-get judicial warrants for immigrants’ arrests.

The White House has tried to engage Minority Leader (and chief rabble-rouser) Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a compromise, but those overtures were rejected Monday night. Together with his House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the men dismissed the outline as “incomplete and insufficient” in “addressing the concerns Americans have about ICE’s lawless conduct.”

Republicans, on the other hand, argue that the president has already made key concessions, sending border czar Tom Homan to calm down tensions in Minnesota, draw down hundreds of agents, work more intentionally with local officials, and shift to a more targeted approach. Mandating body cameras was already in the works, thanks to the ICE portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill — as was the agency’s funding, conservatives are quick to counter, not that Schumer and company care to tell the American people that. They’re banking on voters’ ignorance, hoping they won’t notice that what Democrats would actually be shutting down is the rest of Homeland Security — TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, and a million other non-ICE related things the country relies on every day.

They’re being “entirely unreasonable,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) complained of Schumer’s party. “First of all, ICE is already funded from the Big Beautiful Bill, and there was already a provision in there that would fund paying for body cameras. So, [they’re getting] their wish taken care of there,” he pointed out on “Washington Watch.” “But they’re trying to leverage and say, ‘Well, we’re not going to pay FEMA. We’re not going to pay TSA, we’re not going to pay Coast Guard, and several other agencies.’ That’s the leverage that they’re trying to wield. And I just don’t think it’s rational or reasonable, the things that they want done.” It’s unacceptable, Biggs continued before warning, “I think they’re underestimating the resolve of President Trump and the Republicans in Congress…”

His colleague, Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), is equally perplexed at the Left’s strategy. “It just doesn’t make sense. Democrats are willing to go to the wall, shut down agencies that help us as Americans — [things like] making sure that travel continues to operate smoothly, making sure after these storms that we had in the southeast and in the South that FEMA has [the ability] to be helping where they’re needed. So, to go out and say this is going to somehow affect the outcome of what ICE is doing is just not the case.” But, once again, he stressed on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” “Democrats are showing that they’re willing to fight for the illegal in this country more than they are to fight for the American citizen.”

For House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), it’s just another day in the life of the two-year migraine he inherited as leader. “I wish we didn’t have these dramatic events every week in Congress now,” he admitted on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill” with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, “but this is the reality with small margins. We have a one-vote margin in the House now, and they have just three in the Senate. So this is what you get.”

Despite the wrench Democrats are throwing into the DHS debate, Johnson refuses to let them rob Republicans of their biggest accomplishment. “We’re really grateful, really proud, that we got the 12 appropriations bills through the whole process until the very end. Eleven are now signed into law. The president did that triumphantly in a signing service at the Oval Office. … But now, we’re all tied up on the Homeland Security bill,” he sighed. “The Democrats are politically posturing over the [ICE] issue, and we’re all sort of on the edge of our seats to see what they’ll agree to.”

That said, he acknowledged, “We obviously need to have immigration enforcement that is balanced and smart and efficient and obviously complies with the Constitution. There are always ways to tweak the processes and procedures,” the Louisianan said, “and the president has shown complete good faith in wanting to ensure that that’s true. But Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate are trying to use this for political posturing. And so, I’m not sure how exactly it’s going to sort out. But the two sides are pretty far apart at the moment.”

Considering the short runway — Friday the 13th is the deadline, ironically — it would take a miracle beyond even Mike Johnson to resolve this issue by the long weekend. Recognizing the long odds, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has been trying to prep another short-term funding extension to buy Congress more time. Hill experts just can’t envision a scenario where House or Senate Democrats vote for a DHS bill “in any form,” Punchbowl warns. “It won’t get better by next week. In the Senate, Republicans would need at least seven Democrats to join with them to clear another DHS funding patch. For now, Senate Democrats are using the imminent deadline to try to prevent a loss of momentum. Which means nearly every Democratic senator is indicating they wouldn’t support another stopgap funding bill for DHS.” Where does that leave us? Even Johnson isn’t sure.

On Saturday, he was iffy on a short-term CR. “But, of course, the amount of time it takes to move something across the floor in the Senate, you have to think ahead. Leader Thune in the Senate is doing that for the Republican side. We’ll see what happens. I’ll just tell you, it probably comes down to a couple of really tough issues that the Democrats are demanding that I think would be unworkable and unsafe.” As he has in other interviews, the speaker slammed the ban on masks. “That’s a dangerous prospect, because we know that those individuals are being doxxed. I mean, it puts their own families in physical jeopardy for their safety. So we can’t do that. We have to protect our law enforcement officers.”

The other non-starter, Johnson outlined, is the Democrats’ push for a “brand new judicial warrant requirement in order to go and apprehend someone. And that’s not workable,” he argued. (As have others.) “We have tens of millions of illegals who come across the border into the country over the four years [under] the Biden administration. It would literally be an unworkable standard. It means no one, no illegal, practically, could be apprehended.” Bogging down the courts and bringing ICE arrests to a screeching halt, however, is all part of the Left’s game plan — however onerous and unworkable it may be.

As Perkins rightly pointed out, “That’s already been a part of the immigration problem … the court backlog. So this would only make the situation worse.” Absolutely, Johnson agreed, “and it would effectively allow all illegals to stay in the country, almost all of them. And that’s obviously not something that we can do. It’s not something the American people would agree to. So we’ve got to navigate through all of that this week.”

On the mask issue, which has been a point of real contention, Biggs reiterates that agents are wearing law-enforcement vests and visible ICE jackets, so people can easily distinguish them in a crowd. “But think about this too,” he offered. “Sometimes they’re going into undercover-type situations, and they’re basically saying we want everybody to be designated and out in the open.”

FRC’s president, who spent years in the police force, agreed that it wouldn’t make sense to unmask anyone in an undercover operation. But, he countered, “I do think we need to consider this … the standard we apply to federal law enforcement [and] local law enforcement. I do think there’s some room for negotiation here.” But none of this matters, he argued, if the cities’ leaders continue to condone lawlessness. As long as there’s mayhem and rioting in the streets — and a general disdain for law and order — the chaos only gets worse.

As the speaker pointed out, “If you have friction between local and state law enforcement and the feds, that creates a problem, an inherent problem, and it is going to escalate. So we’ve got to get everybody back on the same page. We’ve got to do the work that the American people elected the Trump administration to do, and that is to apprehend and remove dangerous criminals. That’s the mission, and I think they’ll get back to it.”

In the meantime, there’s no clear way out of this mess if Democrats are locked into their corner, holding the wrong budget lines hostage, and refusing to negotiate in good faith. “I don’t know anyone in Washington who sees a ready off-ramp for this debate [that would allow] this funding to go forward,” Newsmax’s James Rosen admitted to Perkins.

But Schumer might want to be careful, he cautioned. “We’ve seen the Trump White House in 2.0 make use of shutdowns and fiscal cliffs and funding disputes in a fundamentally different way than previous White Houses have. And they have used those kinds of gaps in funding and these fiscal cliff situations to punish the Democrats, to punish blue state programs through the White House Office of Management and Budget.” He paused before adding, “And they’re very savvy about it. And to some extent, ruthless. So if there is going to be a resolution, I suspect that that could potentially put the parties together a little more swiftly.”

Until Democrats get serious and come to the table, Johnson warned, “They’re playing with fire here.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand colum is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 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.

Why Schumer’s Shutdown Could Be the Death of Obamacare

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When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) opted to force the October 1 shutdown of the federal government to protect Biden-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax subsidies, he doubtless saw himself as saving the government health care program informally bearing former President Barack Obama’s name.

Instead, when the longest federal shutdown in history wrought coast-to-coast commercial airline service chaos, left federal civil service unpaid for weeks, and jeopardized federal food benefits for legions of poor and lower-middle-class Americans, Schumer’s decision put an unprecedented national spotlight on the reality of Obamacare’s many failures.

Shortly after Senate Democrats defeated the 14th Republican effort in five weeks to end the shutdown, President Donald Trump issued a November 8 Truth Social post laying out his idea for ending the spiraling costs under Obamacare once the government re-opened, saying:

“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money — sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare.”

In a stroke of pure MAGA populism, Trump’s post did two things: First, he framed the “Schumer Shutdown” as actually protecting the multi-billions of tax dollars the tax subsidies going annually to health care insurance corporations, and second, he framed the coming reform debate as a choice between either empowering Americans to decide for themselves their health care coverage, or protecting government bureaucrats and corporate insurance executives getting rich on tax dollars.

Trump is far from alone in wanting to put consumers in charge of their health care coverage as the key to reducing costs and improving medical services delivery. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.), for example, recently told a New Orleans NBC media outlet that he favors moving to Health Savings Accounts (HASs) that are pre-funded at a certain level by the federal government. The Louisiana Republican is a physician and a key player in any Senate decision-making on health care issues.

And Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) told The Washington Stand that “Americans hopefully now clearly see the facts proving that Obamacare was never affordable. It’s called the Unaffordable Care Act for a reason, as health care premiums have gone up substantially since Obamacare was fully implemented in 2014, going from around $16,000 for the annual average family of four to now standing around $27,000 for the same family.”

The solution, according to the Oklahoma Republican, is legislative action that “starts moving toward free market principles and away from government involvement.”

How Congress ultimately acts remains to be seen, but congressional and health care experts interviewed by TWS agree the debate and subsequent reforms are all but inevitable because of the Schumer Shutdown.

“Ironically, the Democrats have made a strong case that President Barack Obama’s signature legislation was a major policy failure. Obama said repeatedly that his bill would bend the health cost curve downward and even made the claim that the typical family would save $2,500 annually. Fifteen years later, these claims appear even more absurd than when Obama uttered them,” said Dr. Robert Moffit, senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing.

Moffit served as deputy assistant secretary for Legislation at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Ronald Reagan, as well as Assistant Director for Congressional Relations at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

As a result, according to Moffit, “congressional Republicans have a golden opportunity to change the trajectory of the health care debate. They should adopt a policy of addition, not subtraction. Let those who like Obamacare plans keep their Obamacare plans. But provide innovative alternatives for those who want more affordable coverage with broader access to doctors, hospitals, and specialists than available under most Obamacare plans.”

Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) Executive Vice-President Brittany Madni, who worked on the Hill for a decade as a senior legislative aide, declared that “the shutdown orchestrated by congressional Democrats in a bid to extract $1.5 trillion in radical demands paid for by taxpayers has exposed a key fault line: Obamacare’s ongoing unaffordability.”

The shutdown debate over the Obamacare tax subsidies exposed the fact that, according to Madni, “If Obamacare offered truly affordable or quality care, we wouldn’t even be talking about subsidies. But we are. Now, congressional Republicans are seeing this as an opportunity to consider broader reforms that would actually drive down costs, unlike throwing more money into a broken system. They would be wise to advance a pro-freedom health care policy agenda that actually puts patients and taxpayers first instead of big insurance companies.”

A congressional relations veteran who is working on health care issues and who asked not to be named told The Washington Stand that genuine health care reforms are a real possibility because there is even support for such progress among some Democratic lawmakers.

“There is some hope in addressing health care costs. Some rank-and-file Democrats have expressed an interest in addressing distortive federal policies that drive up system-wide health care costs and thus increase premiums, but their leadership has blocked them from truly engaging,” the congressional relations expert explained.

Even before the Schumer Shutdown, he said, Democrats presented a solid wall of opposition to any changes in Obamacare. But that attitude is fading.

“Since passage of the ACA, Democrats have not been open to any changes to the law, even as networks narrowed, consolidation accelerated, and premiums soared. The regulatory and tax credit structure of the ACA are inherently inflationary. Even when Republicans appropriated cost-sharing reduction subsidies in the reconciliation bill that would have reduced premiums by 10-20 percent, Democrats objected and got that provision removed in the Senate,” the expert continued.

“Real reforms to the ACA to increase competition and lower premiums, like the nice-sounding but poorly constructed Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) requirement, require 60 votes in the Senate, and Democrats have not once shown any interest in tackling these problems they created. So, Republicans have and should continue to push for people to have more affordable options,” the expert added.

The MLR is a provision requiring health care insurers to spend at least 80% of a coverage premium on medical care and health improvement. But the MLR is irrelevant in the millions of cases in which the policyholder doesn’t file a claim. In such cases, which account for nearly all Obamacare policyholders, the health care insurer keeps all of the Obamacare tax subsidies that may apply.

As for Schumer, a survey of Democratic voters highlighted by CNN shows the New York Democrat, who has been in Congress since former President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for his first term, to be four points underwater. And prominent members of his party like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) are openly calling for his resignation.

A spokesman for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is widely expected to challenge Schumer, if he seeks another Senate term, did not respond to TWS’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.

Democrats Box Themselves into a Shutdown America Blames Them for

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While the country keeps a weary eye on the latest spectacle on Capitol Hill, some D.C. establishments are trying to have a little fun with the government shutdown. On Wednesday, a local restaurant called Butterworth’s tried to lighten the mood by offering a themed drink menu, including a “furlough-rita” and a “continuing rye-solution.” It’s one of the few bright spots in an otherwise tense standoff that shows no signs of ending.

For Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), it’s a tricky spot to be in. Not only is the hypocrisy aspect dogging Democrats (Speaker Mike Johnson’s X feed has Democrat leaders on a loop decrying the stupidity of shutdowns), but no one is quite sure what Democrats expect to gain by grinding the government to a halt. Even the few brownie points Schumer might gain from supposedly “standing up to Donald Trump” are crumbs compared to the buzzsaw of public opinion, which even the liberals at The New York Times polled as bad news for the minority.

There was no sugar-coating it for the Left in the Gray Lady, which found that a full 65% of Americans objected to Democrats moving forward with a government shutdown. In “a further dagger” to the heart of Schumer’s party, even his own base is surprisingly split (47% for, 43% against).

Making matters worse, Democrats have no real case for pulling the plug on federal funding. As outraged as they may be over the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, trying to overturn President Trump’s signature legislation, after he won the popular vote, and in a Congress controlled by Republicans no less, is a fool’s errand.

Even Democrats like John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who’s sounding more reasonable by the day, recognize what a frightening precedent that would set. “I’ve at least been one [who] says, ‘Hey, now, I would love to restore a lot of those health care things.’ That’s the right outcome,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union,” “but that’s a dangerous tactic if you’re going to shut the government down for one of our policies. I condemned it when the Republicans threatened to do that thing. And it’s entirely wrong for us to do the same thing.”

Old soundbites are becoming increasingly stubborn things for his party, as footage from some of the most extreme Democrats echoes like bad campaign ads. “It’s not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has argued. “Families will be hurt. Farmers will be hurt,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is caught saying. “This shutdown — you know who’s going to feel the pain?” radical Democrat Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) asked last year. “You know who it hurts? You. Everyday people and the most vulnerable. Seniors, veterans, working families, hungry kids, y’all.”

Even the man who’s putting his party in this precarious position sang a very different tune almost one year ago. “If the government shuts down, it will be average Americans who suffer most. A government shutdown means seniors who rely on Social Security could be thrown into chaos,” Schumer claimed.

So what changed? For the minority leader, his grasp on power. After Schumer’s March decision to cooperate with Republicans and keep the government open, he was savaged by the radical fringe. How dare he engage in civil debate! How dare he give the appearance of bipartisanship! Resist Trump or step down!

As his Oklahoma colleague, Senator James Lankford (R), told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Tuesday evening, “This is all about Chuck Schumer’s personal politics, all about it. Multiple Democrat[ic] senators that I’ve talked to have said, ‘Hey, we should just keep it open. We should keep it going — except for Chuck Schumer and his politics that he’s in right now.’ So we’re there; I get it,” he shrugged. “We’ve got the socialists that [are] leading the mayoral race in New York City right now. The New York politics have shifted hard, hard, hard to the far, far, far Left. And Chuck Schumer is trying to be able to fight off the far-left socialists in his own party on it. And we’ll see where that goes.”

Vice President J.D. Vance also cut through the media’s noise to the heart of the issue. “The primary reason the government is shut down,” Vance claimed, is because “Chuck Schumer is terrified he’s going to get a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” in 2028. “Here you have a career politician who is more afraid of his reelection … than he is doing what’s right for the American people,” Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) agreed. “This is what happens when you have a career politician.”

In the meantime, any slim hopes that insiders had for a quick end to this standoff came to a predictable end on Wednesday when both parties offered their versions of a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the lights on. The Democrats’ bill, which essentially overturns Trump’s signature OBBB legislation, failed again 47 to 53. The seven-week extension from Republicans, which had the backing of two Democrats — Fetterman and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto — and one Independent, Angus King of Maine, also didn’t manage to attract any new cross-aisle support, striking out by a 55-45 vote.

Of course, the irony of the situation — and there are several — is that by keeping the government closed, Democrats are effectively handing the keys to Trump. “In a shutdown,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) reminded everyone on “This Week on Capitol Hill,” “the president gets the power of the purse. Donald Trump. [So] they’re not even going to achieve their goal,” he shook his head.

Worse than that, some argue, they’ve supercharged the White House to radically overhaul federal agencies. Under the executive branch, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has a “surprising amount of discretion” in deciding whether the furloughed employees come back at all. Employees whose work “is not consistent with the President’s priorities,” as OMB Chief Russell Vought put it, could pay personally for Schumer’s gamble. Vought has “the power to tell agency leaders to move past the usual furloughs — “temporary, nonduty, nonpay status” — to RIFs [Reductions in Force] — being permanently fired,” Donald Kettl warns.

“Vought could choose the programs that the administration has been wanting to eliminate and give a very big haircut to others,” he continued. “The result would be a dramatic, instantaneous shift in the separation of powers.” The reality is, “The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress. To top it all,” he added, “this would all be perfectly legal.”

Trump himself has warned of the dire consequences of Democrats not cutting a deal to pass the CR. “We’re doing well as a country, so the last thing we want to do is shut it down,” the president explained, “but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” he said, referring to jobs and spending Republicans have been trying to eliminate.

That’s the trap Democrats find themselves in. “They could roll over and agree to all of the administration’s demands, as they did back in March,” Kettl points out. “That would weaken the party further as leaders try to right the ship. Or they could refuse to give in, trigger a shutdown — what the Republicans are already calling a ‘Schumer Shutdown’ — and then stand back to watch an awesome stripping away of their power. Either way, the Democrats lose. It’s like an old western, where cowboys ride into a box canyon with no way out.”

It’s a sad hill to die on, especially since there’s absolutely nothing controversial in the GOP’s short-term proposal. “I had a lot of colleagues who wanted us to load this up with our priorities, but the leaders decided we should do this in good faith,” Johnson reiterated to reporters. “… There is nothing we can pull out of this bill to make it any leaner and cleaner, it’s absolutely sparkling clean.” If anything, Democrats should be tickled pink that the government is being flooded with the same dollars it enjoyed under their own president.

And yet suddenly, the speaker told Perkins, “They want to throw in $1.5 trillion in new spending. That’s with a ‘T.’ They want to have American taxpayers give free health care to illegal aliens. … They want to give a half-billion dollars to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting so they can prop up left-wing media outlets. … We’re not doing that,” he vowed. “The American people did not vote for that stuff. And they’re playing games with very serious issues.”

Quena González, Family Research Council’s senior director for Government Affairs, has been talking both to congressional insiders who have seen this coming for months and to regular citizens who were surprised to read about the shutdown in the news. “Proverbs 29:2 says that when the rulers of the land are righteous, the people rejoice, but when the wicked are in authority the people groan,” he observed. “The current stand-off, in large part over subsidies to fund abortion under the guise of ‘health care,’ is an opportunity for Americans everywhere to pray for wisdom for those in authority.”

In a sign of how dire the political situation is becoming, the Senate (whose work week rarely begins before Monday night and which famously rushes to the airports on Thursday morning) is now toying around with coming back on Friday to vote, once again, on the clean CR. Wednesday at sundown to Thursday at sundown is Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holiday associated with personal reflection. “We can only hope,” González added, “that on reflection righteousness will prevail.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.

Trump Administration Reshapes PEPFAR into Slimmer, Streamlined Program

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One astonishing element of the second Trump administration is the radical Left’s hapless pattern of choosing to fight on what amounts to political quicksand. In the latest installment of this phenomenon, The New York Times complains that “the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) … has apportioned only $2.9 billion of $6 billion appropriated by Congress for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR].” That’s right. The Trump administration is saving billions in taxpayer dollars, and the Times wants you to be mad about it.

I commend the article for its comedic value. “If Congress does not intervene, the funds will have been effectively cut, as the period for their use has passed,” they complain, paraphrasing a former congressional aide for a senator who left Congress 18 years ago. (Oh no! Tell me it’s not true!) “Then [OMB Director Russ] Vought has achieved the goal that he wanted, which was to reduce funding for PEPFAR,” the former aide said. (Well, if Vought and Trump want it, it’s clearly a bad idea. As I suggested, the comedy is top notch.)

However, I cannot commend the article for its journalistic curiosity. In 29 paragraphs, the closest the author comes to explaining why the Trump administration is running PEPFAR on a tighter budget are two passing references to candidate Trump “vowing to slash government spending and terminate many foreign aid programs” and “Mr. Vought’s stated belief that the executive branch can use the budget office forcibly to shrink the size of government.” Never does the author consider whether PEPFAR is an appropriate application of these generic goals.

The truth is, conservatives have been sounding the alarm for years, arguing that PEPFAR — once a wholesome program with broad, bipartisan support — “has been hijacked by the Left to promote abortion and LGBT ideology abroad,” as Family Research Council Senior Fellow Jody Hice summarized.

“This is a program that had a very good start, good intention,” said Max Primorac, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who worked in USAID during the first Trump administration. The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa “was a real crisis. Millions were on the verge of dying, and President Bush and a lot of faith leaders came together to respond to it. And they did an amazing job.”

“But we’re in year 23, 24 of what is an emergency program,” Primorac continued on “Washington Watch.” “After a while, you had a self-serving industry get involved in turning it into a permanent entitlement program, especially for themselves.”

This industry capture of the PEPFAR program results in two negative consequences. First, it means that “at least half of the money never leaves D.C.,” said Primorac. PEPFAR receives “closer to $7 billion,” but “about $3.5 billion, if not more, of that money [is] staying here inside Washington, D.C. to effectively serve as a money pot for the Left.”

As Primorac suggested, the second consequence is that “monies … are diverted to support abortion, the LGBT gender ideology, and other things that simply do not have the support of the American people.” This is because “the foreign aid industry also has been taken hostage by the extreme Left,” he explained. “When you look at the folks who are doing this kind of work, 98% of their political donations go to left-wing candidates.”

“I think what this administration is doing, and correctly so, is seeing where can [they] really maximize the help. Take out the corrupt middle and empower Africans to start providing their own social services,” Primorac proposed. “I’ve done work on this, and others [have]. … You can literally cut the program in half and get better outcomes by simply removing this very bloated middle.”

This is not some evil idea cooked up by a racist White House to deprive poor Africans of life-saving medicine, Primorac contended. “Every administration, whether it’s Democrat or Republican, has always talked about localization. And that is: working directly with African partners, especially the churches that are the mainstay of providing medical care to Africans throughout the continent … because they’ve got the talent there on the ground. And eliminate that very expensive and bureaucratic middle, the international NGOs, the U.N. agencies, for-profit contractors.”

“This president has been so committed to respecting the American taxpayer. The DOGE came in and did amazing work. They’re still doing amazing work,” Primorac concluded. What PEPFAR needs is not a bigger slush fund for D.C.-based organizations to dip into, but a slimmed-down version that re-focuses the program on stopping disease in Africa by actually empowering Africans. “The administration is doing it. It’s looking very closely at where the money is going,” he added. And that’s what the Left can’t stand.

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. ©2025 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.

White House Rescissions Package Would Defund PBS Days after ‘Sesame Street’ Celebrates Pride Month

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The Trump administration has introduced a multibillion-dollar budget-cutting measure to free taxpayers from subsidizing far-left programs, including a provision to completely defund public broadcasting outlets just days after a PBS children’s show posted a social media message celebrating Pride Month.

The $9.4 billion rescissions package, delivered to Congress by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday, slashes programs conservatives have long denounced as wasteful, including $1.2 million in foreign aid projects promoting the LGBTQ+ lifestyle in such socially conservative regions as the Caribbean, the western Balkans, and Uganda. The White House says it also eliminates such wasteful or controversial programs as feeding insect powder to children in Africa.

One of every eight dollars cut by the proposal comes from public broadcasting. The rescissions package eliminates more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the parent of National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting System (PBS), which conservatives have long opposed due to its lack of constitutional authorization and overwhelmingly left-wing bias. Taxpayers furnished $535 million of the CPB’s $545 million annual revenue in fiscal year 2025. (The other $10 million came from estimated interest). The rescissions package cancels all CPB allocations for two years.

The proposed budget cut came just two days after the most beloved show on PBS, “Sesame Street,” posted a social media message celebrating the LGBTQ agenda on the first day of June, dubbed “Pride Month” by LGBT activists.

PBS Is ‘Grooming Children’ at Taxpayer Expense: Congressman

“On our street, everyone is welcome. Together, let’s build a world where every person and family feels loved and respected for who they are. Happy #PrideMonth!” exclaimed the social media account representing “Sesame Street” on Sunday. The accompanying graphic depicted the show’s Muppet characters linking arms to form a rainbow. The provocative post triggered widespread outrage.

“PBS is grooming children on American taxpayers’ dime. This is unacceptable. Congress must defund them and hold the executives accountable,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) Monday morning. “Nothing to see here: just a publicly funded puppet show promoting weird sex stuff to your three-year-old,” said Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire. Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, called the meme’s creators “[g]roomer freaks.” The Center for American Renewal, founded by OMB Director Russell Vought, cited the post as “further evidence that your tax dollars are funding propaganda for kids.”

While conservatives have documented public broadcasting’s liberal bias nearly since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, they say introducing gender confusion to toddlers is a new low. “They most certainly are trying to ‘normalize’ deviancy,” said radio talk show host Janet Parshall, sharing a video of the children’s characters featuring a flamboyant man on the HBO Max “Sesame Street” spin-off “The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo.” That program, which advertises itself as a “star-studded talk show for the whole family,” won a media award from the LGBTQ+ pressure group GLAAD in 2021.

“Is this the kind of ‘education’ PBS insists taxpayers must continue paying for?” asked the Heritage Foundation. “We must defund PBS and NPR immediately. No excuses GOP,” said Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

Conservative members of Congress have heeded the call to enact the rescissions package’s cuts to these and other programs. “I’m looking forward to defunding NPR,” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Tuesday.

Four out of 10 registered voters support cutting or eliminating taxpayer funding of NPR and PBS. “Pluralities of voters say that PBS (36%) and NPR (35%) are biased against Donald Trump and the Republicans,” reported the Napolitan News survey released last month.

NPR claims it “gets only about 1% of [its] funding from the federal government,” but critics say that accounting trick ignores fees the national headquarters charges local affiliates for carrying its nationally syndicated programming. CPB figures argue at the same time that they receive little taxpayer funding and that they cannot survive without it. “Rescinding these funds would devastate PBS,” said PBS CEO Paula Kerger.

Giving the CPB a zero budget would also be a step toward codifying President Trump’s executive orders. On May 1, he signed an executive order directing the CPB to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.”

While House Republicans have introduced many bills to codify these executive orders permanently, few bills have reached the president’s desk. “We should be codifying EOs and passing rescissions by the hour — no weekends, no breaks, no vacations. We must pass ALL DOGE cuts!” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.). The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced that it has identified $180 billion in savings, or $1,118.01 for every U.S. taxpayer, so far. “We’re totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent,” pledged Trump in an Oval Office press conference with departing DOGE leader Elon Musk last Friday.

Conservatives also support the rest of the White House’s budget-cutting measures.

Rescissions Package Cuts USAID, LGBTQ, and Eat-the-Bugs Programs

The rescissions package released Tuesday also curtails controversial programs including international promotion of LGBTQ causes and programs to feed insects to children. OMB detailed numerous programs cut by the package, including:

  • $900 million from USAID;
  • $33,000 for “Being LGBTI in the Caribbean”;
  • $643,000 for LGBTQI+ programs in the Western Balkans;
  • $567,000 for LBGTQI+ programs in Uganda;
  • $833,000 for “transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks” in Nepal;
  • $5.1 million for “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements”;
  • $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia;
  • $67,000 for testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar;
  • $595,400 for training women in gender equity;
  • $500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda;
  • $6 million for “net zero cities” in Mexico; and
  • $135 million for the World Health Organization.

“I think it’s great to eliminate much of the funding of USAID,” Clyde told Perkins. “It’s ludicrous that we as American taxpayers are spending money on things like ‘Sesame Street’ in Iraq, or all these LGBTQ+ programs across the world. That is not anything that our taxpayers want their money spent on.”

This rescissions package “will be the first of many” legislative proposals to pare back spending, said Clyde — a promise made by the White House and confirmed by House leadership.

Pass Rescissions ‘Immediately’: House Conservatives

The conservative House Freedom Caucus called on House leadership to “immediately move this to the floor for swift passage,” as a demonstration the Republican Party will prove responsive to its own voters. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda. While the Swamp will inevitably attempt to slow and kill these cuts, there is no excuse for a Republican House not to advance the first DOGE rescissions package the same week it is presented to Congress then quickly send it for passage in the Republican Senate so President Trump can sign it into law.”

As of now, the date the House will vote on the package remains uncertain. “I would love to see it on the floor this week. I have not seen it on the schedule this week. But I heard that there’s a potential that it will be on the schedule for next week, and that would be fine, too,” Clyde told Perkins.

But Clyde explained moving the package through the House expeditiously may hold the key to its passage, final adoption, and the ability of Congress to deliver future rescissions packages. The cuts’ ratification “has to be done and be done quickly in order to maintain its privilege in the Senate, which means that it can bypass the Senate filibuster.” Under federal statute, both the House and Senate pass a rescissions package through an expedited process; in the Senate, debate is limited to 10 hours and both the motion to proceed to a vote and the final vote pass by a simple majority without the possibility of a filibuster.

Avoiding Democratic procedural stalling techniques “is absolutely critical, because I don’t think we’re going to get any rescissions done if we have to pass the Senate filibuster,” said Clyde. “Because it only requires 51 votes in the Senate, then we have to act on this very, very quickly. And I think that this week or next week would be sufficient. But it must be approved by the House and sent to the Senate so that the Senate can use its expedited procedures to approve it and send it back to the president for signature.”

Rescissions created by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C. 682-688) allow Congress to cut previous spending before its budgetary authority runs out, making it a powerful tool to cut back the nation’s budget deficit.

OMB Director Russell Vought has also raised the possibility the Trump administration will use impoundment, in which the president does not spend all the funds allotted by Congress, to reduce federal spending. “We may not actually have to get … Congress to pass the rescissions bills,” he said. “We have executive tools; we have impoundment.”

“Despite the modest size of President Trump’s rescission request, rescission packages can be valuable in helping policymakers eliminate unneeded and unused federal funding. Even rescissions for funding that would otherwise never be spent can prevent policymakers from later using the funds for new spending increases or tax cuts. While rescissions themselves can’t solve the nation’s fiscal challenges, they can be a step in the right direction to cut wasteful spending in the federal budget,” wrote Jordan Haring, director of fiscal policy at the American Action Forum.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. Taxpayers Must Fund Gender Transitions in Federal Prisons, per Judge

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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. Government Lost $1 Trillion in COVID Relief Funds to Fraud

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The U.S. government loses nearly $1 trillion in emergency relief funds annually, according to experts. In a “60 Minutes” interview Monday night, Audient Group founder and former Government Accountability Office executive Linda Miller alleged that international crime rings defraud American taxpayers of billions of dollars every year.

“I believe the government is losing between $550 billion and about $750 billion a year — we’re coming up close to the $1 trillion amount — [that’s] lost every year to fraud,” Miller stated. She explained, “What we’re really talking about is nation-state actors, we’re talking about organized crime rings, we’re talking about using vast amounts of stolen American identities to monetize them for criminal activity.”

Fraud was rampant during the COVID-19 era, Miller explained. “I mean, it was like they threw money in the air and just let people run around and grab it. The most egregious part is that a lot of the people who stole that money were foreign, adversarial nation-states,” she said, estimating that over $1 trillion in COVID-19 relief funding was stolen through fraud.

However, she warned that security measures need to be increased even though the COVID-19 era has ended. “One of the things I found really disheartening is, since then, I’ve talked to some folks who said, ‘Well, that was just the pandemic. We don’t have to worry about it anymore.’ Was it? No,” Miller said. She added, “It’s whack-a-mole and these guys are paying close attention. They’re seeing where better controls are being put in place, and then they’re going to where the controls still haven’t been improved.”

Miller identified disaster relief funds as a top target for fraudsters. “When a disaster happens in the country, the fraud actors see where it’s coming, they look at the zip codes and they begin buying stolen identities so that they can begin applying for disaster loans, disaster grants on behalf of stolen identities,” she explained. FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran confirmed, “All of our personally identifiable information — name, date of birth, former address, and social security number — is available on the dark net and can likely be purchased.”

Vorndran explained that much of the fraud being committed against the U.S. is sponsored by China and other nations hostile to America. He cited one case last year where the U.S. identified a $6 billion loss in COVID-era unemployment funds. The FBI agent confirmed that, unfortunately, “very little” of the money lost to fraud will ever be recovered. “These are arguably digital gangs in the 21st century that are built off of having safe haven status, meaning their governments are not going to interrupt their activity even if it’s illegal,” he said, pointing to foreign governments that sponsor or allow large-scale fraud operations in an effort to cripple the U.S. He added, “I believe that there are sustained campaigns across this globe that are very well resourced, with a goal of causing damage to the United States.”

Miller noted the fact that billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are doing more than other agencies have to combat and prevent fraud. “Elon Musk coming out and saying there is a huge amount of fraud — I welcome that message completely because finally someone is actually saying this,” she quipped. “When I watch DOGE today, I do see some hints that they are addressing the right issues,” she added. However, she advised the bloat-slashing agency not to conflate fraud with wasteful spending. “Fraud is willful deception,” Miller said.

She continued, “Often, you may not agree with what USAID does. You may not want to be investing American dollars in foreign fertilizer, for example. You may think that’s the wrong thing to be spending money on, but that’s not fraud.” She continued, “I really think fraud is not a political issue. This is mom and apple pie stuff, we all agree that bad actors should not be stealing American taxpayer dollars. … We see the adversary not as Republicans or Democrats, but as foreign adversarial nation states and organized crime rings.” Miller added, “I believe that there [are] opportunities for DOGE to save a lot of significant money if they focus on the right things, if they focus on real fraud.”

According to the Government Accountability Office and the FBI, up to $135 billion in unemployment insurance, at least $135 billion in economic injury disaster loans, and nearly $65 billion in paycheck protection program funds were stolen through fraud during the COVID-19 era. Thousands of individuals have been charged by the Department of Justice with fraud-related crimes over the past several years.

“I think it’s safe to say future historians will make entire careers on writing about the failures of the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter told The Washington Stand. “More than five years removed from the start of the pandemic, we now know masking, closures, social distancing, and vaccinations did little to nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19. Now, we know the government’s prescription to prevent the economy from collapsing during COVID-19 not only did not work but led to the largest instance of fraud in American history, that we know of at least. We are a country $36 trillion in debt. We cannot afford to have a trillion dollars lost to fraud and abuse.”

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. ©2025 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.

PERKINS: For Congress, This Tick Tock Is Not about an App

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If you already battle high blood pressure, you may want to skip this next exercise. But for the rest of us, open a browser to USDebtClock.org and watch the neon-red digits spin faster than Reverend Al Sharpton when a TV camera blinks on. In the next few minutes, the display will rise by roughly $40 million, pushing the debt far beyond $36 trillion and accelerating toward $37 trillion. That’s more than $265,000 for every American household. And every added dollar is another chain of bondage for our children and grandchildren, a silent tax on their freedom and future.

Why the relentless rise? One reason is the waste, like that exposed last week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. His report confirms that President Joe Biden’s 2021 withdrawal left the Taliban with 78 aircraft, 40,000 military vehicles, and more than 300,000 weapons — hardware American taxpayers bought for roughly $25 billion. Terrorists are now better armed than when we entered Afghanistan in 2001, funded with borrowed money

That was the Biden administration. Surely Republican leadership will reverse course — right? Not so fast. Keep your eye on that spinning debt clock.

Congress is assembling what the president calls the “one, big, beautiful bill,” a massive budget reconciliation package that needs only 51 Senate votes. Reconciliation is a rare chance to rein in spending and strip out policies that violate the GOP’s professed values —v alues that have grown hazy in the absence of a formal platform but still generally include protecting life, safeguarding children, and practicing fiscal restraint.

Yet about 20 House Republicans are threatening to torpedo the entire bill unless Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion business — continues to receive roughly $700 million a year in fresh taxpayer funding. Let that sink in: self-described pro-life lawmakers are ready to keep borrowing from your grandchildren to bankroll an organization that Congress has investigated for trafficking in baby body parts, an organization repeatedly accused of shielding sexual predators from justice.

With chemical-abortion pills now accounting for as many as two-thirds of all abortions, Planned Parenthood is eyeing its next profit center: cross-sex hormones and other so-called “gender-affirming” drugs — even for minors.

Do you really want your federal tax dollars underwriting permanent medical harm to confused children?

Here’s the bottom line: Planned Parenthood is not in the business of saving lives; it is in the business of ending or permanently altering them — about 400,000 last year alone. A Republican White House and a Republican-led Congress have zero moral or fiscal justification for sending one more dime its way.

So pray for courage — and then pick up the phone. Tell your representative to pass a reconciliation bill that cuts spending, protects the unborn, and refuses to subsidize Planned Parenthood. The debt clock is ticking, and so is the conscience of the nation.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.

Explainer: How Trump ’s Proposed 2026 Budget Impacts Transgenderism, Abortion, Education, Immigration, and More

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President Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to end divisive, taxpayer-funded programs, and his proposed budget for the next fiscal year proves he is willing to save your money where his mouth is. The president’s budget specifically asks Congress to cut billions of dollars from government programs promoting “radical transgender ideology,” “LGBTQIA+” programs, and government “targeting [of] peaceful pro-life protesters” while transferring power back to the states and increasing federal funding for national defense, border security, and public safety.

President Trump detailed his proposed FY 2026 budget in a 46-page overview of major discretionary funding changes, revealing a fiscal and ideological break with his Democratic predecessors. In all, Trump would spend $1.69 trillion, including requesting more than $1 trillion in defense spending for the first time in U.S. history to assist in “repelling the invasion of our border” and “to clean up the mess President Trump inherited from the prior administration.”

Yet the White House refers to the spending guidelines as the “skinny budget,” since it offsets significant spending hikes with $136 billion in reductions that slash 22.6% from non-defense discretionary spending. “Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide,” according to a White House fact sheet that accompanied the budget release.

If the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed FY 2025 budget sought to insert equity into every program through a whole-of-government approach, the second Trump administration has set out to uproot every vestige of compulsory taxpayer funding of the radical Left. “Over the last four years, Government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism … and even our own invasion” by illegal immigrants, said Russ Vought, director of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB). “No agency was spared in the Left’s taxpayer-funded cultural revolution.” The administration cited $315 million the Biden administration spent on grant programs “to push ‘intersectionality,’ ‘racial equity,’ and LGBTQIA+ programming for preschoolers,” adding that the FY 2026 budget “ends all of that.”

The budget also promises to advance “the Administration’s goal of restoring federalism,” tying the well-being of families to the U.S. government’s respect for states’ rights and constitutional order. “Just as the Federal Government has intruded on matters best left to American families, it has intruded on matters best left to the levels of government closest to the people,” writes Vought in a letter transmitting the budget.

Here are the specific cuts and dollar amounts removed from the federal budget.

Abortion and the Right-to-Life Movement

President Trump’s proposed FY 2026 budget slashes or eliminates abortion funding while protecting pro-life advocates’ constitutional rights. Specifically, the budget would cut $6.2 billion from Global Health Programs and Family Planning initiatives. “The United States is the largest global contributor to programs that provide so-called family planning services through liberal NGOs, and have funded abortions. This stands in direct conflict with the President’s action reinstating the ‘Mexico City Policy.’ The Budget protects life and prevents a pro-abortion agenda from being promoted abroad with taxpayer dollars.” The president reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) policy, which bars any group that receives taxpayer funding from carrying out or advocating for abortion overseas. But the budget maintains funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) for current recipients.

The proposed budget also safeguards pro-life advocates’ rights by eliminating $545 million from Biden-Harris administration policies that charged the FBI with “targeting peaceful pro-life protesters, concerned parents at school board meetings, and citizens opposed to radical transgender ideology,” as well as erasing “DEI programs.” The budget also reestablishes fairness by cutting $193 million from General Legal Activities at the Justice Department, prioritizing criminal prosecutions but reducing the budget of the Civil Rights Division, “which the previous administration weaponized against States implementing election integrity measures, local police departments, and pro-life Americans.”

Slashing LGBTQ Radicalism and DEI Programs

President Trump made eliminating DEI, critical race theory, and government-sponsored racism and sexism a focus of his successful 2024 campaign, cementing the approach through a series of executive actions that prosecute race-based discrimination. Similarly, the Republican Party spent $65 million on ads highlighting the Democratic Party’s extremism on transgender ideology, making it the top reason swing voters decided not to vote for Kamala Harris, according to the Democratic polling firm Blueprint. The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts tens of billions of dollars in DEI and LGBTQIA+ funding, as well as climate change ideology.

The proposed budget cuts $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to restore “accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH. NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health” by denying the likely lab leak origin of COVID-19 and promoting gain-of-function research, which the president recently banned by executive order. Yet “NIH has also promoted radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth. For example, the NIH funded a study titled ‘Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones,’ in which two participants tragically committed suicide,” the budget notes. The president also cuts $3.6 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a blueprint that “eliminates duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary programs.”

The president would cut $8.3 billion from Economic Support Fund, Development Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, as part of a broader foreign policy to place American interests first and save Europe from itself, but also because “U.S. economic and development aid has been funneled to radical, leftist priorities, including climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and LGBTQ activities around the world.”

The budget cuts $3.5 billion from the National Science Foundation’s grants and research on “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” That comes in addition to another $1.1 billion cut to NSF’s Broadening Participation activities, which have underwritten such programs as “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM”; “addressing White Supremacy in the STEM profession”; and preparing “the next generation of DEI leaders to promote long-term, sustainable racial equity initiatives.”

The president moved dramatically against the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after taking office: exposing their radical grants before firing most of their staff and placing the agency under the authority of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The FY 2026 budget cuts $2.5 billion from USAID and “eliminates non-essential staff that were hired based on DEI and preferencing practices” while implementing executive orders 14169 to realign foreign aid and 14151 to eliminate DEI programs.

The budget cuts more than $1 billion in grants nestled under the Department of Justice, such as “$1 million to the National Opinion Research Center to ‘investigate the social ecological context of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime reporting.’ Further, the Budget realigns Violence Against Women Act funding with its original core mission to combat violence against women and directly serve victims — eliminating extraneous programs that divert resources from these core functions. For example, grant funding from the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) had been offered for biological men. In addition, OVW’s Rural Program grants were sent to train community-based Fa’afafine advocates — an organization of biological men that describes themselves as a ‘third-gender.’”

Pro-family experts singled out the VAWA proposal as a welcome gesture. “VAWA programs are intended to help women who are the victims of abuse and in recent years it has been invaded by gender ideology. Currently, women who escape abuse in a VAWA funded shelter could be forced to share private spaces with a man,” Mary Beth Waddell, director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “We are grateful that the president is calling out this injustice.”

The budget cuts $4.5 billion from the Department of Education while maintaining full federal funding for K-12 schools, consolidating 18 programs into one formula grant that allows the DOE to do as much work with fewer employees. “The new approach allows States and districts to focus on the core subjects — math, reading, science, and history — without the distractions of DEI and weaponization from the previous administration,” notes the budget. It also saves $127 million in administrative costs.

At the college level, the budget cuts $195 million from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Ed (FIPSE), noting that Congress has “abused FIPSE by using it to fund initiatives unrelated to students or institutional reforms, including earmarking $1.2 million for San Diego Community College’s LGBTQIA+ PRIDE Center staffing.” It also cuts $1.6 billion from TRIO and GEAR UP, two programs that incentivized colleges to engage low-income students. The administration argues that economic incentives have eliminated the need for the federal government to continue underwriting colleges and universities’ outreach. “A renewed focus on academics and scholastic accomplishment by [Institutions of Higher Education], rather than engaging in woke ideology with Federal taxpayer subsidies, would be a welcome change for students and the future of the Nation.” The budget also removes $691 million in cultural exchanges for foreign exchange students that prevent American students from acquiring high-demand skills, which the foreign students then take back to their home countries.

The budget cuts $1.6 billion by consolidating the Labor Department’s Make America Skilled Again (MASA) grants, defunding nonprofits promoting DEI, and “the hiring of illegal aliens and migrants; sometimes providing them subsidized housing in addition to a job.”

It cuts $1.3 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), scrutinizing NOAA grants for “George Mason University’s ‘Policy Experience in Equity Climate and Health’ fellowship, a workshop for ‘transgender women, and those who identify as nonbinary.’”

Trump’s budget cuts $646 million from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s non-disaster grant programs, seeking to curtail such FEMA activities as “webinars promoting the distribution of disaster aid based on ‘intersectional’ factors like sexual orientation and prioritizing ‘investment in diversity and inclusion efforts … and multicultural training’ over disaster prevention and response.” Under the Trump administration, “FEMA will no longer ‘instill equity as a foundation of emergency management.’” The document rightly notes that “FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the President in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated.”

The budget cuts $624 million from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) and Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), specifically citing an EDA grant “constructing a ‘Pride Plaza’ in Portland, Oregon.”

It cuts $602 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), effectively eliminating “wasteful, woke programming in NIFA, such as activities related to climate change, renewable energy, and promoting DEI in education that were prioritized under the Biden Administration.”

The Trump administration aims to gut federally funded woke programs aimed at Americans at both ends of life. The proposed FY 2026 budget eliminates $405 million from the Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), which is supposed to subsidize jobs and employment for poor senior citizens but “is effectively an earmark to leftist, DEI-promoting entities like the National Urban League, the Center for Workforce Inclusion, and Easter Seals.” At the same time, it cuts $315 million from Preschool Development Grants (PDG), which was “weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to extend the Federal reach and push DEI policies on to toddlers.” For instance, the “guiding principles” implemented by the Minnesota Department of Education for its PDG program include “intersectionality” and “racial equity.”

The budget cuts roughly $19 billion from programs promoting what the White House calls the “Green New Scam.”

The government’s proposed budget generally reins in government grants flowing to radical causes:

  • It cuts $167 million by consolidating the Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneurial Development Programs (EDP), deleting such programs as SCORE, “which in 2023 posted ‘Six Ways to Support LGBTQIA-Owned Businesses.’”
  • It cuts $129 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which “pushed radical gender ideology onto children, funding a project at the Seattle Children’s Hospital titled, ‘Using Telehealth to Improve Access to Gender-Affirming Care for BIPOC and Rural Gender-Diverse Youth.’”
  • It cuts $112 million from programs aimed at “Strengthening Institutions,” noting, “It is not the responsibility of Federal taxpayers to support a new ‘Guided Pathways Village, expanding the current Learning Communities and creating a new Ethnic and Pride Inclusion Center for historically underserved students, including LGBTQ+ students.’”
  • It cuts $100 million in “divisive racial discrimination and environmental justice grants that were destined to go to organizations that advance radical ideologies.”
  • It cuts $70 million from Teacher Quality Partnerships, which field grants indoctrinating teachers to begin “acknowledging and responding to systemic forms of oppression and inequity, including racism, ableism, ‘gender-based’ discrimination, homophobia, and ageism.”
  • It cuts $55 million from Complex Crisis Fund, “a catch-all slush fund for nation-building projects and political interference” which “has been weaponized to mandate DEI and LGBTQ policies be implemented in recipient countries as a condition of aid to small businesses.”
  • It cuts $49 million from the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, a 35% strategic reduction to “refocus away from DEI and Title IX transgender cases … while removing their ability to push DEI programs and promote radical transgender ideology.”

The proposed FY 2026 budget also cuts a total of $19.2 billion from Energy Department initiatives it describes as part of the “Green New Scam.”

Getting the Government Out of the ‘Disinformation’ Business

The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts $491 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as part of its efforts to eliminate “weaponization and waste.” The budget “eliminates programs focused on so-called misinformation and propaganda as well as external engagement offices such as international affairs. These programs and offices were used as a hub in the Censorship Industrial Complex to violate the First Amendment.”

It also cuts $315 million for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which supported Ukrainian government efforts to brand critics as exponents of Russian disinformation and “funded the now-infamous Disinformation Index Foundation that targeted and blacklisted conservative media outlets like Federalist, Newsmax, TAC, the Blaze,” and others.

Restoring National Sovereignty

President Trump has identified himself with the words “America First,” and his budget stakes out similar priorities. It cuts $1.7 billion from the United Nations, UNESCO, and World Health Organization dues, implementing executive order 14199. However, the president may fund these organizations out of a separate funding source “to preserve maximum negotiating leverage.” It also eliminates $1.6 billion from United Nations “peacekeeping” missions that wage war under the U.N.’s blue-helmeted auspices. And it cuts $1.5 billion from Food for Peace, recognizing the waste and abuse of foreign aid transfers from U.S. taxpayers to foreign oligarchs.

The budget also acknowledges that the free market and local business development create sustainable prosperity, not foreign aid. “The program also distorts and undermines local and regional markets where the aid often could be purchased for less and with less waste,” says the budget. Similarly, it cuts $75 million from Transition Initiatives, a program that leads to “further destabilization” around the world and “funds a wasteful tangle of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and partisan cutouts pushing a leftist agenda around the world.”

Borders, Patriotism, National Unity

The budget increases funding for the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees many border enforcement and deportation efforts — by a whopping 65%, or $43.8 billion in additional funds. It cuts nearly $2 billion from programs for refugees and Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs), funds which “were weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to give cash handouts, medical services, and job training to illegal immigrants” and to release children in the custody of “insufficiently vetted sponsors,” effectively making the government complicit in child trafficking.

It cuts $650 million from the Shelter and Services Program earmarked for “non-citizen migrants,” tax payments which “funded radical leftist NGOs, who spent funding to facilitate mass illegal migration into the interior of the Nation … weakening the United States from within, taking resources away from American citizens, and promoting crime and decay in America’s cities.” And it cuts $247 million from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which the Biden administration used “to facilitate mass illegal migration by allowing illegal migrants to fly into the interior without proper documentation.”

Yet the budget radically increases funding for the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to hire more air traffic controllers; for Rail Safety and Infrastructure grants to prevent tragedies such as the train derailment and intentional detonation of a train in East Palestine, Ohio; for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to intercept fentanyl; and for stronger trade enforcement against technological and competitiveness threats from the People’s Republic of China.

“Linking proposed decreases in funding to areas of egregious mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and reorienting these dollars to their intended purpose, as opposed to ideological ones, sends a strong message that taxpayers deserve respect, and the use of their hard-earned money should be stewarded well,” Waddell told TWS.

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. ©2025 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 Employees Work Around-the-Clock to Save American Taxpayers Billions of Dollars

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Last week, the man behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, invited Fox News’s Jesse Waters to attend his team’s weekly board meeting. Just as Bret Baier’s previous March interview with Musk and part of the DOGE team had been, this meeting was eye-opening — revealing specific, appalling cases of government agencies’ waste, fraud, and abuse of millions in taxpayer dollars. In addition, this meeting revealed a number of young, college-aged DOGE employees who view their around-the-clock work to be their patriotic duty — helping the United States become financially stable for decades to come.

One Employee Dropped Out of Harvard to Help Save America’s Economy

Yet while they selflessly serve, they receive threats (Musk has also received death threats, and Teslas having been set on fire, smashed, and vandalized). One young DOGE team member told Waters:

“Many of … us have … gotten hate mail threats from reporters and the public alike. I think, you know, speaking for myself — I dropped out of Harvard and came here to serve my country, and it’s been unfortunate to see, you know, lost friendships. … Most of campus hates me now. But I think fundamentally, I hope people realize through conversations like this that reform is genuinely needed. And if … there’s one group of people who really have a shot of success it’s the people here. You know, they’re up until 2:00 a.m. Monday through Sunday. DOGE does not recognize weekends. We’re working all the time.”

When Waters asked him what inspired him to drop out of Harvard, he responded, “There’s a lot of reform that’s needed. I think the value of this and the impact here is so much more vast than anything you could learn in a classroom, doing computer science.”

Waters replied, “And you guys are sleeping here? I’m hearing you guys are up all night? You have this meeting at 10:00 p.m. every Wednesday?”

He replied, “We’ll probably … go back to work right after this, yeah.”

So far, DOGE estimates they have saved the country $165 billion, which is $1,024.84 per taxpayer.

DOE Employees Used $4 Billion COVID Fund for Parties at Caesar’s Palace, Stadiums

At their weekly meetings, Musk asks each team leader to give a report on how their team is doing. The first team member gave an incredible example right off the bat. He explained, “When a payment is made (and the computer of the Treasury pays about $5 trillion per year, crazy amounts), there was formally not a budget code on there. A payment was made, you did not know what it was for. It could have been for anything.”

He went on to explain, “There was a $4 billion COVID fund in the Department of Education. There was no receipt required, so people could just draw down on it. When people looked into it before us, they found that money was being used to rent out Caesar’s Palace for parties, rent out stadiums, etc. So the one change that we made is we had the simple requirement that if you draw down money, you must first upload a receipt. … Upon doing so, nobody drew down money anymore.”

Another Fraud Discovery? ‘Just Another Day at the Office’

Sadly, this is just one of numerous examples of government waste or fraud. Waters asked, “When you find these things, do you guys get mad? Are you like, ‘Yes, I got one!?’ How does it make you feel?”

One of the DOGE team leaders answered, “It’s so common. You get numb to it.”

Musk agreed, saying, “Unfortunately, the hundredth time you’ve heard it, it’s hard not to get a little numb. By the 200th time, you’re like, ‘Well okay, it’s just another day at the office.’”

‘Institute of Peace’ Had Loaded Guns, Spent Taxpayer Money on Private Jets, Had $130,000 Contract with Former Taliban Member

Another DOGE employee gave an example of where they encountered a “battle” with government agency employees. He explained, “We went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside their headquarters. Kind of the opposite of the title — by far the least peaceful agency we’ve worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.”

He went on to describe:

“Just a few hours after we got into their headquarters, we found their chief accountant had deleted over a terabyte of accounting records. You would have to ask, ‘Why would somebody do that?’ We were able to recover that from a few great employees at the Institute of Peace. And I think the most troubling thing was, they received $55 million a year from Congress, and any money that went unspent — instead of returning it to Congress — they would sweep it into a private bank account which has no Congressional oversight, and that’s what they would use to fund events at their headquarters on the private jets.”

DOGE has referred this case to the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Good, Hardworking Government Employees Are Thankful for DOGE and Helping Them to End Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Waters asked the DOGE team if there are good people that come up to them and thank them for what they are doing.

An employee enthusiastically responded, saying, “Absolutely! There are people in the State Department that will stop you — or all of the agencies that we’ve been to — that’ll stop you in the hallways or write emails and say, ‘I was scared to write this,’ or ‘I don’t know if you’re interested in this.’ But they usually have great ideas, and … they often have the best ideas because they’ve worked in the places, and they’ve been stifled by the bureaucracy for so many years. So one of the great things, that, at least in my experience … we listen to them and empower them.”

Musk wholeheartedly agreed and added, “So, yes, in fact I’d like to emphasize that because we’d like to just give a big ‘thank you’ to all the government employees who are helping reduce the waste and fraud because … we really couldn’t do it without you. So it’s a group effort.”

Another employee affirmed that DOGE employees are supportive of the agencies that they are working in and that they could not do their work without the help of hardworking government employees. He said:

“We are encountering droves of government employees who are missionaries, not mercenaries, who are actually here serving because they believe in what they’re doing. They want to do things well. We are trying to empower them, and they feel empowered now to ask the question of ‘Why aren’t we doing this? What else can we be doing? How can we fix this?’ And I think agency by agency, it is filled with exceptional government employees, and when we give them the tools, when we give them the systems, and we leave behind systems to help them do their jobs better, that’s the permanent change, and they’re embracing that not because it’s new to them. It’s because it’s something they’ve always wanted to do, but for the first time ever we’re giving them the tools and the collaboration to be able do that.”

Waters responded, “It’s a very important message. That message needs to get out a lot more. I’m so glad you said that.”

The employee added, “We have exceptional people at all of our agencies. Exceptional. I mean, they do a thankless job, and they work incredibly hard.”

AUTHOR

Kathy Athearn

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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 Exposes Millions in Blue-State Unemployment Fraud

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has revealed that it has found close to $400 million worth of fraudulent unemployment claims that have been paid out by the federal government since 2020. The revelation comes as the overall cost-cutting goals of the Trump administration initiative have become much more modest, but experts say that the effort is still vitally important in order to help reverse the trend of massive federal deficits year after year.

In a post on X last week, DOGE announced that it had uncovered over 24,000 claims from people purporting to be over 115 years old, for a total of $59 million in unemployment benefits. Another 28,000 people between the ages of one and five claimed $254 million, and another 9,700 people “with birth dates over 15 years in the future” claimed $69 million. “In one case,” DOGE reported, “someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k.”

In a follow-up post on April 10, DOGE noted that “California, New York, and Massachusetts accounted for most of these improper claims, totaling $305M in unemployment benefits. Additionally, California accounted for 68% of the unemployment benefits paid to parolees identified by CBP on the terrorist watchlist or with criminal records.”

Notably, the three states are almost entirely controlled by the Democratic Party, with the governorship and both state legislative chambers led by Democrats in all three states. “There’s a reason for the mass exodus from Democrat-run states that have mismanaged their economies and driven residents to the nearest Republican-led state,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Fox News. “High taxes, poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars and progressive policies continue to yield negative results, which is why Americans overwhelmingly support the work of DOGE.”

A February poll indeed showed that over three-quarters of Americans supported the work of DOGE. But by March, polls showed that enthusiasm for the cost-cutting efforts had cooled off substantially, with 47% saying they had a negative view of the Elon Musk-led effort and 41% saying they had a positive view of it. Still, the polls indicated that a majority of Americans support the idea that the federal government should be downsized.

This widely popular sentiment helped energize DOGE’s initial flurry of activity after President Trump’s inauguration in January, with Musk predicting that the department could start cutting roughly $4 billion per day in order to reach the goal of $1 trillion in cuts by the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. But over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Musk predicted during a Cabinet meeting on April 10 that DOGE’s cuts would only total about $150 billion by September, 85% less than their original goal.

Nevertheless, DOGE has uncovered a significant amount of fraud that has eaten up millions of taxpayer dollars in addition to the false unemployment claims. Last week, the department revealed that under the Biden administration, almost four million noncitizens were assigned Social Security numbers, with 1.3 million of those individuals receiving Medicaid benefits.

In wide-ranging comments to The Washington Stand, Quena González, senior director of Government Affairs at Family Research Council, expressed great appreciation for the effort that DOGE is undertaking.

“DOGE is to be commended for scrutinizing the scope and size of government to look for waste, fraud, and abuse,” he remarked. “No administration has attempted to move at the speed and scale with which President Trump has.”

“Cutting government waste is always difficult, for three principal reasons,” he explained. “First, no government entity voluntarily resigns; government bureaucracies, by definition, are self-perpetuating. As President Ronald Reagan said, ‘No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!’”

González continued, “Second, when the government starts spending taxpayer money on something, a whole cottage industry springs up around facilitating that government funding, lobbying to make sure that taxpayer dollars continue to flow, and coaching the recipients to continue to request and receive more and more funding every year. Quoting Reagan again, ‘The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy.’ Third, those who would discipline government spending have to locate and stop the actual funding streams that have been set up. This is technical work that takes time and often requires congressional action in order to be effective.”

González went on to acknowledge that DOGE has had some missteps and will likely commit more in the future. “Cutting government spending of taxpayer dollars will meet so many entrenched interests that to be successful DOGE has had to move very, very quickly and at times act bluntly,” he noted. “Disciplining the size and scope of government is probably the fastest way to create political enemies in Washington. President Trump understands this; remember, this ain’t his first rodeo, and he saw how the entrenched interests in Washington blocked his efforts to ‘drain the swamp’ during his first administration.”

González concluded by applauding DOGE for its efforts to end taxpayer-funded abortion. “Christians, in particular, should cheer the fact that, from the very beginning, DOGE put taxpayer funding for abortion providers in its sights, and now it appears Congress may follow suit by defunding big abortion in the budget reconciliation process, making DOGE’s aspirations statutory.”

“Let’s not lose sight of what a reasonable goal this is,” he contended. “Taxpayers should never have been forced to subsidize big abortion in the first place; Planned Parenthood alone receives nearly $700 million a year from taxpayers, then raises and spends tens of millions of dollars — nearly $70 million in the past presidential election alone — painting even the most benign pro-life protections as ‘extreme.’ If Planned Parenthood and its ilk want to not only snuff out a million unborn lives a year, then turn around and tithe to the politics of Molech, they should at the very least be required to do their blood-soaked work on their own dime and stop forcing pro-life taxpayers to participate.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.

10 Beautiful Bills for a Better America

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As Congress debates major issues regarding taxes, tariffs, and trade, it would be heartening for faith, family, and freedom Americans if it found time to pass topical bills that address other pressing concerns such as protecting unborn life, dismantling taxpayer-funded abortion, conscience protections, and more.

A number of these measures have been introduced in diverse forms in past Congresses indisposed to adopt them. Others are ideas whose time had not yet come. But in these still-early days of the 119th Congress, the two chambers of Congress, one of which had time for Senator Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) around-the-clock oration, might well find room on their schedules to debate measures that accommodate conscience, support mothers and families, and protect an underappreciated national responsibility — the collection and analysis of social metrics.

Here are 10 measures that fit this general description, with the acknowledgement that they are only a sample of proposals that are within striking distance of adoption and worthy of congressional attention even in a crowded calendar.

Hawley Child Tax Credit Expansion

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) champions an expansion of the child tax credit, a longtime bipartisan proposition, to $5,000 from its current value of $2,000 per child. The credit would reportedly be refundable against payroll taxes, be available during the year in which the child was conceived, and be paid out over the course of the year rather than remitted as a lump sum at tax time.

S. 4524, Lankford Conscience Protection Act of 2024

Reintroduced most recently in June 2024, legislation like this is urgently needed in an environment where existing federal conscience protections languished unenforced in the Biden years, and states like Illinois and Washington are moving to require physicians or pregnancy centers to refer for abortions against their convictions that these actions are morally and ethically wrong. S. 4524 would have reinforced several existing federal conscience laws and grant individuals and institutions a private right of action to assert their conscience claims in federal court. The proposed law would clarify that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must investigate alleged conscience violations and can suspend federal funds for health-related services if the violators do not respect conscience.

H.R. 796, Miller Second Chance for Moms Act

Introduced on January 28, 2025 by Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), this legislation would amend the basic federal food, drug, and cosmetics legislation to require the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to mandate a warning label be placed on the abortion drug mifepristone. The warning label would advise women of the availability of an abortion pill reversal (APR) protocol that can often rescue their baby after the woman has taken the drug. It would require the secretary of HHS to create or contract with a 24/7, toll-free hotline to advise women on how to access abortion pill reversal with referrals limited solely to providers of APR.

H.R. 7, Smith No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025

Introduced on January 22, 2025, Rep. Christopher Smith’s (R-N.J.) bill is an expanded version of previous anti-funding measures and now has 81 House of Representatives co-sponsors. The bill would make permanent the terms of the Hyde Amendment, which permits funding of abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or where a physical disorder, injury, or illness would threaten a woman’s life. It would apply to the full sweep of Hyde Amendment provisions applicable now to annual spending bills. H.R. 7 would also bar federal subsidies for the portion of health insurance premiums that pay for abortion coverage.

H.R. 271 and 272, Fischbach Defund Planned Parenthood and Protecting Life and Taxpayers Acts

These measures, introduced on January 14, 2025, would prohibit Planned Parenthood from accessing any discretionary or mandatory federal funds because of its immersion in the provision and promotion of abortion. The Protecting Life Act would require all federally-funded entities to certify that they will not carry out abortions or provide funds to any other entity that carries out abortions beyond the terms permitted by the Hyde Amendment. The Senate version of the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, S. 203, was introduced on January 23, 2025 by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and has 11 co-sponsors. In addition, a coalition of 150 pro-life groups has called on Congress to cut funding for Planned Parenthood in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill.

S. 334, Risch American Values Act

This bill carries forward pro-life foreign assistance policy. Introduced on January 30, 2025 by Senator James Risch (R-Idaho), the bill would amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to ensure that no appropriated funds may be used to pay for abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to be sterilized. The bill would also bar the use of funds to pay for biomedical research related to techniques of induced abortion or coerced sterilization. The bill has a dozen co-sponsors.

H.R. 627/S. 178, Norman-Ernst Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2025

Introduced by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) on the House side and Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in the Senate, this is a critical piece of legislation that will ensure the demographic and some health implications of induced abortion are tracked and analyzable to the extent possible in a national, public framework. The urgency of this legislation, which would redress a half century of voluntary and incomplete national reporting, is all the greater thanks to the rapid expansion of chemical abortion conducted with little to no medical evaluation or supervision. The bill notes the disturbing facts that not a single data point regarding abortion is publicly available for all 50 states, and that three states, constituting 15% of U.S. abortion volume, share no reports at all with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

H.R. 578, Roy FACE Act Repeal Act of 2025

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has led the fight against the much-abused Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a law that was weaponized during the Biden administration to target right-to-life demonstrators with vindictive prosecutions and harsh penalties. President Trump, as one of his initial executive actions, pardoned men and women, including grandmothers, who had been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for engaging in protests, while making little or no progress in identifying or prosecuting individuals who attacked churches and pregnancy help centers. Absent repeal of this legislation, Roy says, biased enforcement will promptly resume in a future administration. “Data my office obtained from Merrick Garland’s DOJ showed that 97% of FACE Act prosecutions from 1994-2024 were against pro-life Americans.”

H.R. 722, Burlison, Life at Conception Act

The United States has seen a recent spike in abortions, beginning before the 2022 Dobbs ruling but continuing in its wake, with one source reporting that our nation’s abortion toll has risen to more than one million abortions per year. As Congress and the states look for ways to support mothers, the fact remains that for much of the country, the legal status of the unborn is a void that must be filled. It is lawful in much of the land to dismember a child in the womb; to destroy a child in the third trimester or a human embryo because it is affected by Down syndrome or is not the preferred sex; to set aside a child born alive and deny him or her life-saving care; to use public funds to pay for and promote abortion; to leave a woman alone in a bathroom to expel the new life from her womb; or to ship abortion drugs across state lines with little or no medical support.

To address these wrongs, legislation is needed that not only delivers unprecedented levels of support for men and women to act for the good of their child, but to safeguard each and every innocent life. The Life at Conception Act, with 73 co-sponsors, faces a steep challenge in this Congress but it too would be a beautiful bill, one with the added virtue of honoring our best hope for a better future for America.

AUTHOR

Chuck Donovan

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.

PERKINS: Taxpayer Funds Should Respect the Will of the People

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A House DOGE subcommittee put a magnifying glass to NPR and PBS, funded in part with federal tax dollars through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The most recent budget shows that the two left-leaning media outlets rake in just shy of $550 million a year from taxpayers.

DOGE’s triad is waste, fraud, and abuse. An obvious issue lawmakers are debating in this age of multi-media — and our unprecedented $36 trillion of national debt — is whether the government’s funding of these broadcasts is a waste of taxpayer dollars. That’s a legitimate question. Add to that concern the abuse of left-leaning viewpoints, like NPR’s promotion of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts and the fact that there isn’t a single identified Republican working at NPR at the national level, and you can understand the growing concerns about the abuse of taxpayer dollars.

In addition to direct funding, NPR and PBS also enjoy various federal carve-outs that give them competitive advantages over other news providers. Many believe the government should keep its thumb off the First Amendment’s scale and force NPR and PBS to stand on their own — free of federal subsidies.

Yet, the starkest example of waste, fraud, and abuse may be found in the abortion industry — particularly at Planned Parenthood, which surpasses NPR and PBS in the scope of public funding and controversy.

Let’s Talk about Waste:

  • After the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Planned Parenthood reportedly raised nearly $500 million. Instead of using that money for health care services at their clinics, which the group claims is their priority, much of it went toward the organization’s political and legal interests.
  • Meanwhile, $699 million in taxpayer funds supported their clinics, where patient numbers have been steadily declining even as abortion procedures have risen.
  • According to The New York Times, Planned Parenthood has spent millions on CEO salaries, such as their national president, Alexis Johnson, whose annual salary in 2023 was $904,000. At the same time, very little funding was allocated to staff training — leading to incidents such as botched IUD placements and abortions.
  • I’m not alone in insisting that taxpayers shouldn’t be bankrolling the million-dollar salary of the CEO who heads the nation’s largest baby-killing operation. Even after the abortion lobby spent hundreds of millions of dollars after Roe fell, 60% of Americans still oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.

Let’s Talk Fraud:

  • Planned Parenthood has repeatedly faced allegations of trafficking fetal tissue — “baby body parts” — for profit.
  • There are also multiple reports suggesting Planned Parenthood has covered up criminal behavior and sexual abuse involving the very women it claims to serve.

Abuse?

  • The organization is increasingly pivoting toward so-called “gender-affirming” hormone therapy, including for minors — something many states are trying to prevent for their young residents.
  • Ultimately, it’s an abuse of taxpayer dollars to subsidize an entity involved in taking the lives of 400,000 unborn Americans.

Here is the bottom line: Our leaders should foster true neutrality in public funding and respect the will of citizens who object to financing controversial practices. It’s time to end all government funding for organizations like Planned Parenthood that are killing America’s opportunity to be great again.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.

PERKINS: Military Should Be Defined by Effectiveness, Not Ideology

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Last week, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, halted President Trump’s policy that prohibits transgender individuals from serving in the military. To understand the significance of this ruling, we need to look at the policy’s origins and the reasons behind it.

Transgender-identifying individuals were never allowed to serve in the military until former President Obama changed the policy during the final days of his administration. Upon taking office in 2017, President Trump reversed that decision, citing multiple factors, including cost and military readiness.

According to an analysis by Family Research Council, which informed the 2017 policy decision, the projected cost of allowing transgender individuals to serve — which was before active recruitment began under the Biden administration — was estimated at $1.88 billion over 10 years. It’s even more now. This staggering price tag reflects taxpayer dollars that would have been used for medical treatments like hormone therapy and surgeries, along with the cost of lost service time because of the treatments.

To put that in perspective, those funds could purchase 22 F-35 fighter jets, 116 Chinook Helicopters, 3,700 Tomahawk missiles, or a Navy destroyer instead. President Trump made the right decision in 2017, and he made the right decision to reinstate the policy.

The military’s mission is clear, as the president wrote in his executive order: “to protect the American people and our homeland as the world’s most lethal and effective fighting force. This objective should not be compromised to accommodate political agendas or ideologies. … Military service must be reserved for those who are both mentally and physically fit to serve.”

Judge Reyes, in her 79-page ruling, called the Trump policy “unabashedly demeaning” and claimed it was “soaked in animus.” Using twisted logic at best, she argued that it is sex discrimination to prohibit transgenderism, because “a biological female who identifies as a woman is not banned.” That’s precisely the point. Women can serve, and men can serve, but not men who think they are women. Keep in mind the military routinely excludes individuals based on factors that affect readiness, such as excessive body fat, pregnancy, endometriosis, or even motion sickness. These exclusions are not acts of discrimination — they are practical measures to ensure mission preparedness.

Judge Reyes may want to reconsider her interpretation of presidential authority. The Constitution, in Article II, explicitly designates the president as the commander in chief of the Armed Forces. As former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in 2022, “Judges are not given the task of running the military.” That responsibility falls to the president, whose primary duty is to ensure the safety and security of the nation.

It’s also worth noting that Judge Reyes criticized the lack of studies to support the Trump administration’s policy reversal, while ignoring the fact that the Biden administration conducted no studies when it overturned Trump’s policy on the fifth day of his presidency.

President Trump is right, and Judge Reyes is wrong. Military policy should be driven by effectiveness and national security — not the Left’s destructive ideology.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.