Tag Archive for: Taxpayer Spending

Are Illegal Immigrants Using Taxpayer-Funded Benefits? Not Anymore.

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In another move to tackle illegal immigration, President Donald Trump and his administration are ensuring that illegal immigrants cannot access taxpayer-funded programs. The White House announced Thursday that the Trump administration “is taking the biggest step in more than 30 years to protect taxpayer-funded benefits for American citizens — NOT illegal aliens.” The Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Education (DOE), Agriculture (USDA), and Labor (DOL) have all moved to ensure that illegal immigrants cannot take advantage of taxpayer-funded programs, which the White House estimates will save “roughly $40 billion in benefits for American citizens…”

HHS officially rescinded a Clinton-era policy which the agency says “improperly extended certain federal public benefits to illegal aliens.” The withdrawn 1998 policy was an agency interpretation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 that “improperly narrowed the scope of PRWORA, undercutting the law by allowing illegal aliens to access programs Congress intended only for the American people.” PRWORA barred noncitizens from receiving “federal public benefits,” which the 1998 HHS policy interpreted not to apply to a broad swath of its taxpayer-funded programs.

In a statement shared with The Washington Stand, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said, “For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration.” Rescinding the 1998 policy, Kennedy said, “changes that — it restores integrity to federal social programs, enforces the rule of law, and protects vital resources for the American people.”

The DOE also reversed a Clinton-era policy in order to terminate “taxpayer subsidization of illegal aliens in career, technical, and adult education programs.” Like HHS, the DOE had previously issued its own agency interpretation of PRWORA, not classifying numerous taxpayer-funded programs as “federal public benefits” and subsequently allowing illegal immigrants to access government-funded career, technical, and adult postsecondary education programs. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement, “Postsecondary education programs funded by the federal government should benefit American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Due to the policy shift, she said that “hardworking American taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for illegal aliens to participate in our career, technical, or adult education programs or activities.”

The USDA has also moved to reinforce protections against illegal immigrants accessing taxpayer-funded programs, especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as Food Stamps. “The generosity of the American taxpayer has long been abused by faulty interpretations of the 1996 welfare reform law,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, referring to PRWORA. She insisted that “illegal aliens should not receive government dollars. This effort is one of many by the Department of Agriculture to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse of USDA’s programs and policies.”

Federal workforce development programs and related grants have also been shielded by the DOL. In order to benefit from programs funded by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, grantees and applicants must first verify that they have valid work authorization. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement, “By ensuring these programs serve their intended purpose, we’re protecting good-paying jobs for American workers and reaffirming this Administration’s commitment to securing our borders and ending illegal immigration.”

Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) research director Steven Camarota told TWS that legal loopholes — like those that the Trump administration is now closing — in public benefits have allowed illegal immigrants to burden American taxpayers for decades. “There are a number of reasons how and why illegal immigrants can access the welfare system, including the fact that they have U.S.-born children and they are actually eligible for some program” because of that, Camarota explained. He continued, “The bottom line is most illegal immigrant households have at least one worker, but they make extensive use of the social benefits, particularly food programs and Medicaid, because their low-average educational attainment means they generally earn low wages and qualify for programs.” Denoting legal loopholes in public benefits programs, he added, “I have no evidence that they are cheating or gaming the system, though they do seem to have extensive knowledge of the welfare system, given their use rates.”

“If we wish to avoid these costs, then enforcing the law and ensuring that as many illegal immigrants as possible go home is the only option,” Camarota insisted. He expounded, “It is virtually impossible to prevent this situation, partly because of the presence of U.S.-born children, partly because it’s impossible deny people emergency care, and partly because the United States is just not a country that’s going to stop people from receiving WIC or free school lunch or emergency medical care.” He clarified, “If the illegals remain, so will the cost.”

CIS director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan said in comments to TWS, “These steps are long overdue. Nearly 30 years ago, Congress decided that American taxpayers should not have to pay for welfare benefits and other services to illegal aliens.” Vaughan observed that numerous presidential administrations, starting with Clinton’s, “have chipped away at that law by creating loopholes to allow federal and state agencies to offer some of these benefits to illegal aliens.” She observed, “Now we are at the point where more than 60% of illegal alien households are accessing some form of welfare, which is an enormous cost for taxpayers, and which limits what is available to Americans who need them.”

“Taxpayers should not have to subsidize vocational or other post-secondary education for illegal aliens, who aren’t allowed to work in this country. Illegal workers displace American workers and cause their wages to go down,” Vaughan said. She emphasized, “We should not be encouraging illegal aliens to stay here to participate in taxpayer-funded training and education programs, when millions of Americans who would like to compete for better jobs should have these opportunities.”

Vaughan continued, “Similarly, illegal aliens should not receive taxpayer-funded child care or other non-emergency health and welfare programs. Access to these programs should be preserved for Americans and legal immigrants.” She explained, “Many American community leaders have learned the hard way in the last four years that generous social service programs like guaranteed access to shelter and health services are unsustainable with mass migration. Numerous studies have shown that this is because, on balance, illegal alien households contribute less in taxes than they receive in public 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. ©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.

Republicans Hit the Accelerator on the Next Wave of Trump’s To-Do List

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Passing the Big Beautiful Bill was tough, but not as tough as what faces Republicans now: selling it. Getting Americans on board with the idea when both barrels of the Democratic Party’s guns are pointed at the president’s law is becoming a full-time job for the GOP. “The test will be time,” Senator Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) agreed. “If at the end of the day, the time makes everything work — and everything works to the positive — everything’s great,” he told The Hill. In the meantime, conservatives say, one of the smartest things congressional leaders can do is to keep moving full speed ahead with the White House’s main agenda: shaking up Washington.

“These are good structural reforms,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) argued in defense of the law’s reforms to bloated programs like Medicaid. “We’ll be playing offense on that,” he declared. Of course, the irony of leadership’s current position is that there are plenty of conservatives who argue that the landmark legislation doesn’t go far enough. And yet, this is the Goldilocks universe of “too soft” or “too hard” that Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have been forced to navigate since the party won its narrow majorities. As the Louisianan quipped to Wall Street Journal reporter Olivia Beavers last week in the heat of the Big Beautiful debate, “Welcome to Congress. It’s a disappointing job sometimes.”

Sure, Democrats will try to make the vote a painful one for Trump’s party (with claims that are either completely fabricated or nakedly political), but Republicans need to keep hammering home the truth. And more than that, they need to keep their foot on the gas where the law left off: slashing spending, overhauling the government, and getting America’s deficits down.

Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) was only the first lap in what Thune and Johnson’s members expect to be a long race against the machine that is Big Government. To those conservatives who were less than thrilled with the scale of the changes in the law, here’s the good news: there’s a lot more Congress can do — and they intend to.

Some of the law’s more reluctant supporters hinted at this in conversations after the bill crossed Thune’s finish line. Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), who’d been initially critical of the Senate’s version of the BBB, was one of many who huddled and talked strategy about what could be done. “[T]here was no way that we were going to get anything back from the Senate that would have been an improvement. It just was not going to happen.” So what did conservatives and the House Freedom Caucus do? “We went outside the bill to make some requests for things that might offset the damage that the Senate did to the bill.”

As he’s done before, Johnson thought outside the box — or, in this case, the bill. “We got some things that I can’t yet talk about [in an] agreement, and we will see how they work going forward,” Self explained, before adding, “there [will be] more cost-cutting across the federal government. We simply tried to find those areas and get agreement that we will work on those going forward.”

The final language itself was much better, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins agreed, “because the Freedom Caucus began to negotiate on these issues.” Absolutely, Self nodded. “They started out with $300 billion … in savings. What we got was a trillion and a half well above that.” That’s just some of the progress that the Freedom Caucus made “[along] with other conservatives,” Self reiterated. As Perkins pointed out, fiscal priorities weren’t the only things hashed out beyond the BBB. “Some of the social issues that were of concern that were taken out in the Senate are also going to be addressed,” he previewed. “We look forward to that coming out in the public here in the very near future to see what the administration has agreed to.”

For now, it’s full speed ahead on the other tracks of Trump’s train that can deliver major DOGE-like savings. One thing that will certainly cushion the blow for BBB skeptics is being served up as we speak. Before next Friday, July 18, another $9.4 billion will be on the chopping block in the form of the White House’s rescissions package — the first, administration officials insist, of many. The targets include everything from the leftist Corporation for Public Broadcasting to excessive and wasteful foreign aid — millions of dollars of which included wildly inappropriate LGBT activism.

“A vote for rescissions is a vote to show that the United States Senate is serious about getting our fiscal house in order,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought told lawmakers in his testimony last month. Although some liberal Republicans are threatening to upset Trump’s apple cart — Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) personally tanked a similar request in his first term — Thune knows that finding the 51 votes is a must to prove his chamber is serious about cuts.

“After all the tough talk by Republicans in the Senate about the need to reduce spending, if we can’t agree to reduce $9 billion worth of spending porn, then we all ought to go buy paper bags and put them over our heads,” Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) argued in his folksy, made-for-TV soundbite way.

And that’s not the only way Trump is hoping to prove his sincerity on shrinking government. A new report on the White House payroll credits the president with the lowest salaries in 16 years. According to Open The Books, the total for 404 employees in 2025 adds up to $44.1 million in taxpayer dollars — “the lowest it’s been since at least 2009 when adjusted for inflation.” That’s a 29% drop from Biden’s $62.2 million staff, which had almost double the lawyers (45 to Trump’s 27).

Of course, the best bite out of the country’s ballooning debt would be through appropriations — the process Trump quietly seems intent on bypassing. Still, as recently as last month, Johnson was ready to pivot immediately from the BBB to the string of 12 spending bills for the next fiscal year. “The appropriators will be marking up some of the legislation in the subcommittees to try to line all that up,” he reiterated to Perkins on an earlier version of “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “And you’re going to see, again, a reflection of even more savings in appropriations for the next fiscal year. We’ve got a lot on our plate this summer.”

That’s an understatement. There are just 22 legislative days on the House’s calendar until the next batch of government funding runs out on September 30. Because of the August recess, Republicans will have four fewer weeks to negotiate some of the trickiest debates across the 12 agency budgets. As Politico points out, the speaker’s chamber has made “some progress” with its appropriations work, passing one bill and advancing four out of committee. Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) was hoping to complete the dozen markups by July 30. “We’re a little behind the eight ball on it,” Johnson acknowledged, “because [we spent] so much effort [on] the big, beautiful bill. But now we turn our attention immediately to that.”

It’s through the regular appropriations process where gigantic, across-the-board savings could actually be accomplished for every pocket of government. Unfortunately, that usually takes months of talks, combing through numbers, and ironing out possible landmines. Months that this party doesn’t have.

“It takes a long time to reach consensus and equilibrium on all the various competing ideas and priorities that people have,” the speaker told Perkins. “Which is why the regular order, regular process is so important. You have to let everybody have a say so they’ll be with you on the vote at the end. And that’s kind of the grueling process of every day in a deliberative body.” Still, he vowed, the House “is going to get it done and get it to the president’s desk as well. We’re going to spend less money. We’re in a series of scaling back government. This is a big part of it.”

But there are those who wonder if even Johnson, who’s managed to leap every impossible obstacle, can beat the clock. At this point, the Senate hasn’t passed a single funding bill of the 12. And if, as Punchbowl News wonders, the speaker can wrangle his side of the Capitol to approve a short-term continuing resolution to buy more time, his counterpart will need at least seven Democrats’ help to hit the Senate’s magic 60-vote threshold. Judging by the volcanic rhetoric on the other side, the odds of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) party bailing out the GOP at this point are probably zero — leaving Republicans in a serious jam.

As Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan remind everyone, “If Congress is good at anything, it’s taking things to the brink…” And yet, with Johnson at the helm, anything could happen. “You continue to defy the critics who say you can’t get it done,” Perkins pointed out. “You’re getting it done. And I think you can get the budget process back to where it needs to be and make government accountable to the American people.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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

Thune Plows Ahead with Big Beautiful Deadline Despite Question Marks

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Every couple of years, all eyes are suddenly trained on one of Congress’s most under-the-radar jobs: the Senate parliamentarian. For 13 years, Elizabeth MacDonough has equal parts elated and frustrated parties in their attempts to squeeze major legislation through the reconciliation process. The first-ever woman to hold the job, MacDonough has played the referee through four administrations and an array of different Senate leaders. It’s up to her to settle the bitter disputes over which parts of the Big Beautiful Bill are relevant under the rules and which aren’t. In other words, she’s the most important person to Donald Trump’s agenda that most people have never heard of.

For the last several days, the “parl,” as the position is affectionately nicknamed, has been combing through the fine print of the Senate Finance Committee’s version of the bill to see which parts do, in fact, meet the standards for this specialized budget process. As MacDonough once explained it, “We’re the neutral end of [these partisan battles, which is] very important. Yes, you need to think of that somebody who is not elected, not a party apparatchik.”

That matters, especially now, as the two sides duke it out over what belongs in the president’s signature legislation and what doesn’t. To unlock reconciliation, everything has to abide by the Byrd Rule, which keeps parties from tacking on “extraneous” provisions. Democrats flagged several pieces of the bill that they argue aren’t budget-related, which is the major criterion for surviving the Bryd Bath.

Already, MacDonough has announced some GOP casualties — Byrd droppings — that she’s ruled non-germane. Making matters interesting, some of the victims were programs or provisions that helped sweeten the deal for reluctant House members to sign on. Language that would force the states to pay a bigger share of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or restrictions on temporary restraining orders from lower courts have been struck, at least for now, along with priorities like EPA revisions, overhauls to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, regulatory powers, a mandate to sell the Post Office’s electric vehicles, and more were all struck — sending Seante Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) into a huddle to see which pieces Republicans might rework.

The blows didn’t seem to derail Thune’s timeline, though. “Breitbart News Saturday” asked the majority leader, “Are we still on track for getting the bill out of the Senate by the Fourth of July?” “We are,” Thune replied. Obviously, he pointed out, things are more complicated in the Senate with “laws and restrictions and procedures that we have to operate under that are different than the House. So some of that takes a bit longer,” he conceded, “but as we head into this next week, I’m fully confident that we’re going to be ready to roll, and we have to be,” he said. “We’ve got to deliver.”

One thing he’s learned, Thune admitted, is that “if you don’t put deadlines out there, nothing gets done, and this stuff can drag on and on endlessly. If we want to get the one big, beautiful bill done, the Senate is going to have to act, and we’re going to hopefully act in a way that will enable the House when we send it back over there to them, because they have to pass the same bill that we do.”

Apart from the parliamentarian, the biggest wrench to Trump’s signature bill is getting the House on board with the changes, which were significant. Unlike Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) chamber, the Senate’s version brings the state and local tax deduction (SALT) back to earth from $40,000 to $10,000. Anticipating the House moderates’ anger, Thune tried to tamp down the frustration by pointing out, “We understand that it’s a negotiation. Obviously, there had to be some marker in the bill to start with, but we’re prepared to have discussions with our colleagues here in the Senate and figure out a landing spot.”

Other flashpoints include bigger reforms to Medicaid, a $5 trillion debt ceiling (instead of the House’s $4 trillion), a “gentler” approach to the green energy tax credits that Joe Biden created, and more permanent tax cuts for businesses. Based on the extension of the climate change subsidies alone, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) announced that he wouldn’t vote for the package.

“Rumor is Senate plans to jam the House with its weaker, unacceptable [One Big Beautiful Bill],” Roy vented on X Tuesday. “This is not a surprise but it would be a mistake,” he warned. “The bill in its current Senate form would increase deficits, continue most Green New Scam subsidies, & otherwise fail even a basic smell test… I would not vote for it as it is.”

His Arizona colleague, Andy Harris (R-Md.), agreed. “The currently proposed Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill weakens key House priorities,” the chair of the House Freedom Caucus said. “It doesn’t do enough to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid, it backtracks on Green New Scam elimination included in the House bill, and it greatly increases the deficit — taking us even further from a balanced budget.”

Thune responded to critics, stressing, “This is a process whereby everybody doesn’t get everything they want.” Others, like Senator Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), sought to highlight the pros of the bill. “I think we’re going to find more spending cuts,” he explained to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “I know that won’t break your heart. … It’s plain and simple. We’re going to make the tax cuts permanent. The SALT thing is probably one of the stickier things. But at the end of the day, this bill is going to be good enough that if you voted for it in the House before, there’s no reason for you not to vote for it this next time, because then you’re given a binary choice. Is it better to pass it or not? And at that point, I think that the House will pass it as well.”

House conservatives like Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) say they’re “hopeful” that “we’ll wind up with a product that every Republican in the House and Senate can vote for. We were close in the House.” But no one is quite sure how many congressmen will fall in line.

At the end of the day, Johnson admitted that there’s heartburn on the aspects where the two chambers aren’t on the same page. “But look,” he told Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill,” “we’re giving them the space to do what they need to do. I’m in constant communication with Leader Thune over there, my counterpart, and with individual senators who have expressed concerns or questions about why we did what we did in the House version. And so, look, I think this is going along well,” he agreed. “And I certainly hope they make as many minor modifications as possible and not major modifications, because that will make it more difficult for us to pass it, as you know.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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

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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.

Republicans Face a Come-to-Jesus Moment on Reconciliation

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It was only a matter of time before House Republicans stepped on the big landmines buried under the landscape of reconciliation. For months, GOP leaders had been tiptoeing around the tripwires, desperately trying to keep the fragile peace. But this week, with the clock ticking down to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) self-imposed Memorial Day deadline, there was nowhere else to step but smack-dab onto the most explosive debate of the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”

For Johnson, who had to be dreading this part of the negotiations, finally getting his 220-member family to sit down and slog through the sticking points on Medicaid reform is a feat in itself. Whether he can cobble together a unified majority at the end of it is the $1.5 trillion question. Part of his headache, as hardline conservatives are quick to point out, is that moderate Republicans are about as enthusiastic about reducing the deficit as their big-spending Democratic counterparts. Especially if it involves paring down bloated programs that Democrats are crying wolf over.

In a two-hour meeting Tuesday night, the collision course Republicans have been on since the 2024 elections finally came to a head. By the end of it, about a dozen GOP members from deep blue states seemed to emerge victorious, somehow managing to persuade the speaker to back off of two pools of taxpayer dollars that were ripe for reform: Medicaid’s Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) and the state and local tax deduction (SALT). For the swing-state Republicans, it was a coup, but one that came at a very steep price.

If those programs are off limits for a major overhaul, House Freedom Caucus members warned, Republicans have lost the biggest bites of the apple when it comes to Medicaid savings. Some experts estimated the changes to both FMAP and SALT could be worth as much as $600 billion of the GOP’s $880 billion target. And frankly, conservatives worry, they’re running out of places to cut. No one understands that better than Mike Johnson, who gave his word during the war over the budget framework that the House would find at least $1.5 trillion in savings in the final bill. And yet, in this “ultimate group project,” as some are describing the reconciliation package, he had little choice.

The problem for the speaker is the same one that’s given him nightmares for the last year and a half. “[H]e can’t please the moderates without risking an uproar from conservatives. And vice versa,” Punchbowl News’s reporters point out. It’s the “dynamic that’s plagued the last three Republican speakers. Moderates help give Republicans their majorities. Yet they’re often forced to swallow conservative policies that don’t fit the political makeup of their districts.”

Unfortunately for everyone, these concessions only make the path to enacting Donald Trump’s agenda that much murkier. Somehow, Republicans have to find a way to pay for the extension of the president’s 2017 tax relief — or else, Johnson cautioned, everyone is going to have “an increased tax amount [of] $2,000 to $3,000 per family. That’s what’s going to happen if we don’t make the tax cuts permanent.”

Now, as Johnson and his committee chairs scramble to come up with a Plan B to find the dollars they need to offset those costs, even he’s had to adjust his thinking — and his calendar. “It just made sense for us to push pause for a week to make sure that we do this right,” the speaker told reporters Tuesday. Instead of rushing the process, the thorny mark-ups that were scheduled for this week have been pushed off until leaders can find a solution that pleases both sides. “It’s going to take a lot more of these kinds of conversations, ultimately, to get to an understanding that 99% of the House Republican Conference can agree with,” Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) admitted.

So what exactly are the programs that were taken off the table? The short answer is a hugely complicated web of payments, tax caps, and reimbursements that have been abused since Barack Obama expanded Medicaid to people who had no business being on it. But there’s a lot more to these four-letter acronyms (which are more like four-letter words to fiscal hawks).

State and Local Taxes (SALT)

“For as long as Americans have paid federal income taxes,” Bloomberg explains, “they’ve been able to subtract some of what they pay to their state and local governments from their taxable income. This federal deduction for state and local taxes — the SALT deduction, for short — has a big influence on how the tax burden is divided. It tends to help taxpayers in wealthier, more urban states, where sales taxes are higher and real estate costs more.” Back in his first term, President Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 in every state.

With that cap set to expire, GOP moderates (especially the ones from wealthier blue states like New York, New Jersey, California, and Maryland, where things like property taxes and the cost of living are much higher) want to raise the deduction to anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000. Most conservatives would rather keep the number where it is or eliminate the deduction altogether. After all, most of them represent people who would never be able to claim that write-off. (Only 10% of Americans who itemize their taxes do.) Not to mention that expanding the cap would cost money that the government doesn’t have.

“Lifting the SALT cap to $15,000 for individuals and $30,000 for couples,” House Republicans have warned, “would cost around $500 billion relative to extending Trump’s expiring tax cuts.” Enter the fiscal hawks’ outrage. Instead of finding cuts, moderates are finding ways to spend even more. Still, Johnson vows, “We’re going to find the equilibrium point on SALT that no one will be totally delighted with, but it’ll solve the equation, and we’ll get it done.”

Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP)

Heads collectively exploded when Johnson was asked about a far more egregious practice: Medicaid’s FMAP. When reporters pressed the speaker about changing the federal cost share, the Louisianan replied, “No. … I think we’re ruling that out as well, but stay tuned,” he said.

This debate goes back even further, all the way to the Obama administration when Democrats grossly expanded the government’s health care program to entire populations of previously ineligible, able-bodied Americans. Thanks to that White House and Joe Biden’s, millions of people have flooded the Medicaid rolls, most of whom aren’t seniors, children, or disabled — and who, by their very participation — are robbing truly needy people of the care and benefits they deserve. That problem only ballooned under COVID, as Biden bogged down the program with financially-strapped — but otherwise unqualified — Americans.

Now, years later, Medicaid is struggling to keep up with the burden of enrollees it was never meant to serve — pushing legitimate patients with disability or chronic illnesses to the sidelines.

Republicans have been clamoring to radically overhaul the system and return Medicaid to its original parameters, saving taxpayers billions of dollars in the process. But states have been reluctant to do that because of this FMAP loophole that actually encourages them to grow the program beyond its original purpose. As Stefani Buhajla explained in National Review, the deep dark secret of Medicaid is that its federal funding actually “undermines the program’s core mission.”

Right now, the federal government reimburses a whopping 90% of expenses of those “working-age, able-bodied adults” who were folded into Medicaid under Obama, “regardless of the state’s level of wealth.” In other words, “the federal government provides more-generous support for less needy individuals and comparatively less support for those who are in greatest need of care,” Buhajla emphasized. Those same states don’t receive anywhere close to that reimbursement for the participants who belong in the program.

“It’s nuts,” Family Research Council’s Quena González told The Washington Stand. “It incentivizes states to continue to expand services and eligibility and availability — but only to the expansion population. To those who are disabled or who truly do need some sort of help like this, the states are less incentivized.”

But, he insisted, the FMAP itself is broken, because no state is reimbursed at less than 50%. It’s a great deal for them. “Every state is robbing the American taxpayer by reaching into the till. But they’re hyper-incentivized to do this when they expand beyond the traditional Medicaid populations. See the perverse incentive here? If you’re a blue state Republican from New York or New Jersey, and your state expanded Medicaid by going into these ineligible populations, you get a 90% federal match.” If your colleagues want to cut that, González explained, “it’s not going to be popular back home. So now you’re over a barrel. You’re wedded to this lopsided expansion category — which, by the way, penalizes states that refused to expand Medicaid like Florida and Texas.”

Instead, he continued, Florida and Texas are put in the position of subsidizing the bad choices of leaders in the northeast. It creates this impossible situation where liberal and moderate Republicans from these blue states are “fighting tooth and nail to keep a mega-subsidy that never should have existed.” And the conservatives’ point is that just by returning Medicaid to its original parameters, Republicans could probably save hundreds of millions of dollars.

The House Freedom Caucus understands this. There are more able-bodied Americans “on Medicaid now than any other group,” they stressed, “which means the neediest Americans get lower priority. … This is why Medicaid spending has skyrocketed 51% in the last 5 years alone. This isn’t ‘cutting benefits,’” they reiterated in rebuttal of the Democrats’ claims. “We’re trying to fix the program and protect the most vulnerable.”

On the Senate side, Dr. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) agreed. “We have over 90 million people on Medicaid now. Ninety million,” he repeated on “Washington Watch” Monday. “It was meant to be [for] those who need that help, [who] need that hand up. It was meant for folks in a nursing home [who] maybe that can’t afford nursing home care or folks with a disability. The poorest amongst us is who it was meant for.” And yet, he shook his head, “It’s on a rocket ship as far as the amount of money we’re spending on it.”

Johnson’s Dilemma

“But if you take FMAP reforms off the table and also raise the SALT cap, where do you look for savings?” González wonders. “You can’t say, as a House moderate, ‘We get 100% of everything we want, or we take our marbles and go home.’ At some point, we have to tell them, ‘We can’t afford all of this. We can’t afford the president’s tax cuts, the push for border security and defense, and also make the tax cuts permanent.’ Everyone is realizing that there’s just not enough money to go around and do everything they want to do.” Not only are we “robbing from our children,” he argued, “but we’re playing fast and loose with the truth about where we are financially.”

While there are still ways to salvage some reforms — new work provisions for the Medicaid expansion category is one — the speaker is walking a tight line with conservatives, who are very aware how much they’ve given up already. “I don’t make promises that I can’t keep,” Johnson underscored, presumably about his pledge to conservatives to cut spending. “This is a consensus-building operation,” he implored. “We’ve been working really hard to take all the input and find that kind of equilibrium point where everybody is at least satisfied. Some people are not going to be elated by every provision of the bill. It’s impossible.”

And let’s be honest, Marshall piled on, “It’s an uphill battle. There’s no doubt about it.” But, he insisted, “I have a lot of confidence in Speaker Mike Johnson [and Rep.] Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) over there on the Budget Committee. Those folks, I think they’re doing great work. I think we’ll get it done.” He paused and smiled. “But there’ll be a little bit of hair-pulling yet to get it all the way across the finish line.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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

Waste and Fraud Unmasked by DOGE Sparks Question — Why Didn’t Congress Find It First?

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So much waste, fraud, and inefficiency in federal spending have been exposed since President Donald Trump re-entered the Oval Office three months ago that it raises the question: why didn’t Congress shine the light on such outrages long before Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came along?

Americans for Limited Government (ALG) President Rick Manning, for example, put it well recently, asking congressional watchdogs what they “have been doing over the past 20 years? Where was their spending oversight? Why have they not forced these systems to be opened up for public review so they could dig deep into the spending on authorized programs to determine whether they are being administered properly, and that the taxpayer has been getting their [money’s] worth?”

Manning’s question makes sense, considering what DOGE has uncovered barely three months into its deep-dive, including trillions of dollars in checks issued by the Department of Treasury — with no coding showing the purpose of the spending, billions of dollars of improper payments to ineligible or fictious Social Security, Medicare, pandemic, and unemployment beneficiaries, and millions of grant dollars to pay for things like transgender surgeries for Latin American men.

To get some answers to the question posed by Manning and others, The Washington Stand dug into the years of demands from congressional investigators to executive branch departments and agencies for millions of documents, threatened and delivered subpoenas, transcribed interviews, whistle-blower reports, and public hearings.

What we found can best be summed up in a comparison of what those sleuths looked at as a measure of their priorities in two years, including 2022 when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and Democrat President Joe Biden was in the White House, and 2024 when Republicans controlled the House, but Biden remained in office.

More specifically, we focused on one House committee, known in 2022 as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (HOGR), and in 2024 after the panel was renamed the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (HCOA).

In 2022, Democrats running HOGR were extremely active, but exposing waste, fraud, and corruption in government was not a priority. In 2024, Republicans focused almost entirely on waste, fraud, and corruption in government, but they met a solid wall of refusals to cooperate from political appointees and career civil servants in the executive branch.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a 30-year Democratic veteran of the House, chaired HOGR in the 116th and 117th Congress with Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, as the Ranking Member in 2022. When Republicans regained the House majority in 2023 for the 118th Congress, Comer succeeded Maloney as chairman. Because it has such wide-ranging investigative authority, the oversight panel is a major newsmaker.

Maloney’s HOGR publicly issued at least 189 official letters to government and corporate individuals and entities, providing detailed background information to explain and justify the panel’s concerns, as well as posing multiple questions to recipients who were expected to answer as if they were under oath. In only a handful of those many letters did Maloney go beyond questions and ask for documents related to the subject and issues in the committee’s investigation.

Sorting the letters according to investigative issues produces the following breakdown:

  • 26 of the 189 letters, or 14%, were focused on one of a wide assortment of left-wing ideological causes such as confirming the failed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, converting the United States Postal Service (USPS) vehicle fleet to Electric Vehicles (EVs), weaponization of election disinformation, and the availability and accessibility of menstrual products, among others.
  • 17 of the letters, or 9%, focused on allegations that the 20 biggest fossil fuel corporations like Exxon and Shell were exaggerating their efforts to reduce carbon emissions and prevent climate change-caused disasters.
  • 14 of the letters, or 7.4%, concerned Trump scandal allegations, including classified documents kept illegally at his Mar-a-Lago compound, allegations of excessive rates charged to representatives of foreign nations staying at the Trump Hotel in the nation’s capital, improper foreign gifts to Trump, and claims various Trump family members and appointees profited from their positions in government.
  • 11 of the letters, or 6%, dealt with issues related to cryptocurrency.
  • Nine of the letters, or 5%, were devoted to allegations of food and supply-chain inflation.
  • Five of the letters, or 2.6%, questioned whether social media giants like Facebook were sufficiently aggressive in removing disinformation from the internet.
  • Only 14, or 7.4% of the letters covered issues of oversight of government programs such as the propriety of contracts awarded by the departments of Agriculture and Defense to particular firms, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concerning its response to shortages of infant baby formula.

The balance of the letters, 93, covered a wide range of unrelated topics such as allegations former Washington Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder tolerated a work environment hostile to women, accusations New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) wasn’t doing enough to assure mental health care access for Riker’s Island prison inmates, Amazon labor policies and cheers for state-level programs such as New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s (D) “Cumulative Impacts” program.

Only one of the 189 letters was addressed to a federal agency — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector-General (IG) — concerning the failure to produce documents requested on three occasions about that office bungling its investigation of allegations of sexual improprieties by government workers.

Notably, the HOGR did not ask the Social Security Administration (SSA) about checks being paid to dead recipients or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about improper payments to unqualified recipients covered by the Medicaid and Medicare programs. The improper payments issue has been prominent in the work of DOGE.

Maloney, who lost her 2022 re-election bid after serving in the House since 1993, could not be reached by TWS for comment. A spokesman for the Democratic minority members of the committee did not respond to TWS’s request for comment.

The oversight panel was even more prolific in writing official letters during Comer’s chairmanship in 2024, with a total of 210. And where only one HOGR request to a federal agency in 2022 concerned failure to produce requested documents, such requests were at the center of virtually every major controversy involving the committee in 2024.

Comer’s investigators encountered opposition from the Biden administration-led executive branch to virtually every request for documents, not just to those involving the controversial and politically sensitive corruption allegations related to the chief executive’s family business.

“Biden withheld tens of thousands of documents pertaining to his involvement in his family’s corrupt influence-peddling racket that generated millions for the Bidens and their associates. … [The White House] refused to hand over documents pertaining to its war on domestic energy production, which drove up energy costs for Americans and jeopardized our national security. And the Biden administration failed to provide critical information about President Biden’s border crisis. Thankfully, the Biden nightmare is now over, and President Trump is taking action to reverse President Biden’s detrimental policies and is providing transparency to the American people,” Comer told TWS.

For example, an executive order (EO) signed by Biden in March 2021 directed an executive branch-wide campaign to ensure voter access by, among other techniques, funding supposedly non-partisan groups conducting voter registration campaigns. Republican critics contended that those registration campaigns always seemed to focus on strongly Democratic areas.

Comer’s panel made its first inquiry to the Biden White House about the EO on May 13, 2024, seeking all documents concerning the drafting, implementation, and third-party organizations involved, to be produced no later than May 28, 2024.

“The executive order requires the heads of federal agencies to allow ‘approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.’ To date, the administration has not provided a comprehensive list of who these approved organizations are, the process for becoming approved, or any guardrails for agencies in implementing this order,” Comer said.

Three months later, in an August 26 letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young, Comer emphasized the delays.

“The committee received a short letter response from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) over one month past the deadline, in which none of the requested documents or communications were produced. Additionally, OMB has not provided a timeline for production of responsive documents despite several requests by committee staff to work with your agency on this matter to obtain the requested documents and communications,” Comer told Young in the letter.

Comer said a subpoena would be on the table if the requested documents were not produced by September 2. The documents were never produced, according to a committee spokesman.

Similarly, the oversight Republicans repeatedly pressed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to produce multiple documents and other unredacted records regarding the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), headed by former Secretary of State John Kerry.

In a lengthy August 7, 2024, letter to Blinken, Comer pointed to multiple ways in which State Department officials evaded providing requested materials: “In a recent production to the committee regarding the SPEC office’s staff names and payroll information, the department made significant unjustified redactions and has withheld fully responsive information, thus undermining the committee’s ability to effectively perform its oversight functions.”

Comer further pointed out that it was “only after the threat of compulsory process did the department release some documents and communications revealing a sophisticated and targeted coordination between leftist environmental groups and the SPEC office that undermines U.S. foreign policy, energy policy, and national security policy.”

The committee also dug into the federal government’s chronic problem of improper payments, one of the most widely publicized examples of wasteful federal spending highlighted by the DOGE effort in 2025. In a March 26, 2024, statement, the committee noted the latest in a long-running series of reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the vast extent of improper payments across major federal departments.

“The GAO’s new report found there were $236 billion in improper payments in Fiscal Year 2023. Nearly 80 percent of Fiscal Year 2023 improper payments are concentrated in five areas: the Department of Health and Human Services’ Medicare and Medicaid programs; the Department of Labor’s federal pandemic unemployment assistance; the Department of Treasury’s Earned Income Tax Credit; and the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program loan forgiveness. Since 2003, cumulative improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion,” the statement said.

The panel’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, chaired by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) was the point of the spear in addressing improper payments, convening three hearings during 2024 to examine the costs, causes, and needed reforms.

Against the backdrop of hyper-partisanship that dominated Congress and the rest of the national political scene throughout the year, Sessions and Ranking Member Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) demonstrated in those hearings that members of the opposing parties can still work together seeking workable solutions to national problems on Capitol Hill.

Asked by TWS about his relationship with the Baltimore Democrat, Sessions responded that “Mr. Mfume understands this main point: If you’ve got misdirected payments to the extent that we have, that means the people that money is intended for will not get it.”

In an October 29, 2024, joint letter to Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who heads GAO, Sessions and Mfume recognized the obstacles presented by the lack of congressional access to vital documents and poor record-keeping by agencies.

“The subcommittee seeks to continuously evaluate whether agencies are getting better or worse at ensuring the levels of fraud seen during the pandemic will ‘never happen again.’ Unfortunately, because of limited or unreliable information maintained by federal agencies, the subcommittee has been unable to adequately assess agencies’ progress,” they told Dodaro.

As a result, Sessions, Mfume, and GAO launched a wide-ranging probe of why agencies too often seem incapable of eliminating improper payments and what Congress must do to fix things.

“We’re in the process now, because this is the first time in four years that we’ve had access to excessive amounts of misdirected spending. This is the first time we’ve had that kind of visibility. We knew numbers existed, fed to us by official people about money that was misdirected with, for example, COVID payments,” Sessions told TWS.

“But when you start going $400 billion here and this and that there, you are not really putting it all together for the State Department, USAID, EPA, and so forth,” he added. The Texas Republican is confident that the joint effort he and Mfume launched with GAO will yield concrete, long-term reforms enacted by Congress and signed into law by the president that ultimately will produce victory in the war against wasteful and corrupt spending throughout the executive branch.

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.

Senate Overnighter Sets the Stage for GOP to Clear ‘One, Big, Beautiful’ Hurdle

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When President Trump coined the phrase “one, big, beautiful bill” to describe his legislative strategy, there’s one word he left out: “complicated.” For House and Senate leaders, it’s been a two-month dance just to get on the same page about the broad strokes of a plan to implement Trump’s agenda. It’s like writing the rules for a game you haven’t even played yet. And this game, a “mega-MAGA” Twister of tax relief, debt limits, budget cuts, defense and border spending, offsets, baselines, and mind-numbing procedure, is winner-take-all.

Turns out, electing Trump was the easy part. Putting some of his biggest priorities into law is a different story. For weeks, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) have been working around the clock, trying to juggle the party’s personalities with the White House’s non-negotiables — and somehow make it all squeeze through the Senate’s rigid rules and the House’s aggressive timeline.

So far, the two chambers have come to the table with very different perspectives on make-or-break items — from how much fat to cut from government to whether America can afford permanent tax cuts. Right now, the Senate’s main goal is to catch up to the House, which approved its framework three weeks ago. Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is doing his best to get his chamber there, finally publishing the text of a compromise bill on Wednesday.

In it, he gives senators a bit more wiggle room on how much spending to cut (the House insisted on a floor of $1.5-2 trillion), while also clearing the fiscal brush necessary to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent and raise the debt ceiling. “The Senate Plan has my Complete and Total Support,” the president posted when the language was released. “Every Republican, House and Senate, must UNIFY. We need to pass it IMMEDIATELY!”

Of course, passing it “immediately” means enduring one of the truly entertaining traditions of the Senate (unless you’re a staffer): the vote-a-rama. One of the conditions of budget reconciliation — which is the path Republicans are choosing so they can enact Trump’s agenda with a simple majority — is that senators can offer an unlimited number of unrelated, off-topic amendments without worrying about filibusters. That usually means the minority takes the opportunity to make a political point or force the other party to cast a vote on an uncomfortable issue.

It also, veterans of the chamber will tell you, takes a lonnnnnng time. “It’s a total and unequivocal nightmare of epic proportions,” Jim Manley, a former spokesman for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, insisted with the drama of someone who’s suffered through it. “For those working in the Capitol, it is an extraordinarily stressful time. Normally cheerful individuals become snarling animals as more and more votes are taken,” he reflected. And what’s so frustrating, he said, is that “it’s largely a meaningless exercise.” “The amendments are BS. If they’re designed to do anything, they’re designed to craft 15-second digital attack ads.”

The members either pretend to hate it or actually do, but the stories that come out of vote-a-ramas are legendary. In a chamber that almost never works on Fridays, it’s the closest thing to a Senate sleepover there is. While the political all-nighters are painful for both parties, they always seem to produce funny anecdotes like back-room poker games, stealth happy hours, regional food wars, and coffee — lots of it. There are the iconic images — like former Senator Joe Manchin throwing pepperoni rolls at reporters in 2015 or the parade of mattresses wheeled in for sleepy senators in 2017.

Right now, the hazing is scheduled to begin Friday night and last until who-knows-when. Technically, it could go on until one party cries uncle and stops offering amendments. The most recent vote-a-rama, in February, lasted until 4:51 a.m,

Once the painful process is over, and the Senate finally passes its version of a plan, the cold hard reality is that it’s just the beginning. The House and Senate will have boarded the same train, but it won’t have left the station yet. “It’s a meaningful step,” Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) agreed, “but it’s a baby step, folks,” he said, tempering expectations. “It’s just a blueprint,” Kennedy said. “The real work starts after we do this.”

After a two-week Easter break, the really uncomfortable conversations begin: negotiating every single detail of the final reconciliation package and getting almost every Republican in both chambers to agree. Or, as congressional leadership might call it, torture. While the GOP might have hung together long enough to get a skeletal outline done, that’s nothing compared to sitting down and going through each and every number, arriving at one that satisfies 270 different people. Already, House members are planting flags in the ground about their “must-haves.”

As FRC’s Senior Director of Government Affairs Quena González told The Washington Stand, “Since this budget resolution is designed to pass with only Republican votes, it’s illuminating different interests in the Republican Party. Defense hawks in both the House and Senate want the Senate’s higher ceiling on Pentagon spending ($150 billion vs. the House ceiling of $100 billion) to eventually prevail. President Trump wants his signature tax cuts from 2017 to be permanent and for Congress to raise the debt limit.”

Then, of course, there are the fiscal hawks, who González points out “are worried about the deficit and debt and generally favor the House language that ties a $4 trillion debt ceiling to at least $2 trillion in overall spending cuts — while at the same time, other Republicans are worried that a $4 trillion debt ceiling could be hit before next year’s election (triggering a second debt ceiling deadline that could force Republicans to compromise with Democrats on policy and spending right before an election) and therefore favor the Senate’s $5 trillion debt ceiling.”

And the clock is ticking. For Congress to hit Johnson’s Memorial Day deadline, House and Senate committees would only have until May 9 to produce their pieces of the budget package, Quena warns, and until May 16 for the Finance panel’s debt limit increase.

In other words, it’s a lot to sort through in a short amount of time. The one silver lining for the GOP is that Democrats, at this point, “have no leverage in all of this,” González continued, “because a budget reconciliation process can be passed, albeit very slowly, on a simple majority vote, so without any Democrats.” Their sole focus, he explained, “is basically trying to gum up the works, force painful votes along the way, and generally rooting for blood.”

And right now, there’s plenty to go around. House and Senate Republicans are at very different places when it comes to spending cuts. Conservatives like Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) agree with the House that now is the time to go big. “My sticking point has always been spending, spending, spending,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “… [W]e don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. So are we willing to fix it? … We went from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to probably about $7.3 trillion this year. That’s a 63% increase [in spending]. There’s no justification for that. A reasonable pre-pandemic baseline would be no more than $6.5 trillion.”

Trump, the senator said, is committed to getting America back to those pre-COVID levels. “And I think, even more importantly, working with us to develop a detailed and rigorous process to actually achieve it. We’ve never had a process to control spending,” Johnson pointed out. “You may be interested to know the appropriation committees were established to control the big spending authorizing committees. Well, that didn’t work. The Budget Act didn’t work. Simpson-Bowles didn’t work. The Budget Control Act didn’t work. So I proposed a process very similar to a private sector budget review process, where you literally go line by line,” he explained.

“I would recommend involving senators, House members, and the administration,” the senator suggested. “And bring administration officials with their budget gurus and CFOs and literally go [through all] 2,400 individual expenditure lines in the 2025 proposed budget. We have to do that work. Nobody ever wants to do that.”

And honestly, Elon Musk’s team has put Congress in a great position to do that. “DOGE can be very useful,” Johnson observed. “Under reconciliation, we can only address mandatory spending, which is bizarre just in and of itself. So that leaves discretionary spending that has to be passed with Senate Democrats’ help. They won’t.” So he’s pushing an old process that several leaders are dusting off called “rescission” that lets the president claw back spending that’s already been approved. “I think they’re going to move forward on this as well. My recommendation was at least one rescission package a month where Elon and his DOGE group basically bundles up billions of dollars worth of spending rescissions, headlined by the most egregious examples of wasteful and abusive spending.”

At the end of the day, Johnson reminded people, “President Trump is a businessperson. If [your managers] say, ‘Hey, listen, I’ll let you grow your budget by the number of customers you’re serving and inflation — and you come back six years later and [those] budgets are 10% higher than that, you’d go, ‘What are you doing?! Knock it down back to the constraints I told you!’ That’d be a one-minute conversation, and it would be done. This would be easy.”

But unfortunately, Congress has let things get out of hand — with a big assist from the Biden administration. Now, as Speaker Johnson told Perkins, “It has to be Republicans who are [the] grown-ups” and govern responsibly.

Hammering out a bill that can pass both chambers’ wafer-thin majorities is the definition of “challenging,” but the Louisianan is “very optimistic about what we need to achieve over the days and weeks ahead of us.” He understands, “This is our opportunity to deliver what will be one of the most consequential pieces of legislation truly in the history of the Congress and our nation. And working together, we will get this done.”

Well, Perkins replied, “If anybody can defy history, it seems to be your speakership.” Let’s hope that holds for what’s certain to be a bumpy couple of months.

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.

Transparency: The Biblical Impulse Underpinning DOGE’s Mission

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Nothing in the second Trump administration has divided Washington more sharply than the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. The frenetic effort has featured foibles, but it has also uncovered shocking wastes of taxpayer dollars — discoveries which may have earned DOGE more detractors than its faults. Whatever the final results may be, it’s worthwhile for Christians to consider a driving impulse behind DOGE’s work that is deeply consistent with biblical values.

This is DOGE’s impulse to push for transparency — or, perhaps more precisely, illumination — about government spending and processes. “In a Fox interview, Musk and his team … shined a greater light on the amount of inefficiency and financial waste that’s propagated by our federal government,” said FRC Action President Jody Hice.

In that interview, Musk told “Special Report” host Bret Baier, “We want to reduce spending by eliminating waste and fraud and reduce the spending by 15%. … The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of waste and fraud. So, we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.”

“Most taxpayers would generally agree, I believe, that government transparency is a good thing,” responded Hice, a former U.S. congressman.

This is especially true of the voters who sent fiscal conservatives like him to Washington, D.C. and who were frustrated by the systematized sloth that prevented a few good men from attacking acreage of bureaucratic kudzu with any tool larger than nail clippers.

“We would often just beat our heads against the wall, because we would be so frustrated with the amount of money that the government is spending,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) recalled on “Washington Watch.” And so, he welcomed “the fact … that President Trump is allowing and asking Elon Musk and the DOGE team to go through the checkbook of the American taxpayer and find waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“We always knew, instinctively, that the government was spending money irresponsibly — not in places that the American people would ever approve,” stated Stutzman. “We used to … think, ‘Oh, it’s probably, you know, maybe 1%, 2%.’ We’ve all known that there’s probably a lot more than that. And that’s what Elon is finding.” As of April 1, the DOGE website claimed an estimated $140 billion in savings, already more than 2% of U.S. federal government expenditures in fiscal year 2024 ($6.75 trillion).

“God always asks us to be light in this world,” argued Stutzman. “When there [are] problems, you need to shine a light on the problem. And that’s what the DOGE team is doing, shining a light on all of the spending. And we’re seeing where our tax dollars are going, and it’s just appalling.”

The primary way in which the Bible calls Christ-followers to be “the light of the world” is as models of righteous living, so that others “may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).

But the application of this principle extends far beyond religious observance or spiritual disciplines. The Apostle Paul wrote that “the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:9). Therefore, he urged believers, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. … When anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible” (Ephesians 5:11, 13). (Thus “illumination” is an apter descriptor than “transparency.”)

In other words, Stutzman is right to extend the biblical metaphor of “shining a light” to exposing waste, fraud, and abuse in government.

One further extension of the Bible’s “light” metaphor is appropriate. Jesus taught in John 3 that “people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” (John 3:19-21). The most direct application is that wicked people hide their sin, while the righteous repent of their sin and find forgiveness.

But Jesus draws out at truth about human nature that remains true in lesser contexts as well. Wrongdoers often try to conceal their wrongdoing. If this is true, and if there are wrongdoers benefitting from waste, fraud, and abuse in payments of the federal government, then we would expect significant opposition to any attempt to expose that waste, fraud, and abuse. (It does not follow from this that every DOGE critic wrongly benefits from government largesse; there are other legitimate reasons to criticize the department.)

In fact, some of DOGE’s findings are consistent with a pattern of attempted concealment. One of DOGE’s first targets was the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was funding bizarre projects like a transgender comic book in Peru.

“It’s easier to hide money away from us overseas than it is to hide it here in the United States,” Stutzman pointed out, and “the fact that President Trump and Elon Musk decided just to shut down USAID shows you how bad it is … there.” On Friday, the U.S. State Department and USAID “notified Congress on their intent to undertake a reorganization that would involve realigning certain USAID functions to the Department by July 1, 2025, and discontinuing the remaining USAID functions that do not align with Administration priorities.”

Nevertheless, some DOGE detractors are “screaming very loudly” about Musk’s outsider team bringing sunshine to The Swamp, added Stutzman.

“I told the Democrats … if this is what you’re proud of — if you feel like these are the priorities of the American people — you should not have a problem with DOGE just telling all of us where our tax dollars are going —whether it’s DEI programs in South America, or whether it’s DEI programs in the Middle East, or a Sesame Street program for $20 million in Iraq,” Stutzman stipulated. “If those are your priorities, why are you upset that the DOGE team is announcing those on … social media, telling us what they’re finding? I mean, if that’s what you want done with federal tax dollars, then you shouldn’t have a problem with it.”

Here, Jesus’s words echo loudly, “Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3:20).

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a 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.

Johnson on Schumer’s Surrender: ‘Buckle Up … [We’re] Building Muscle Memory for Winning’

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Apart from Donald Trump, no one is more unpopular among Democrats right now than the Senate’s Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). The longtime leader infuriated his party Friday, surrendering on the government shutdown and handing Republicans a victory that can only be described as miraculous. Not only was his decision to cave after days of tough talk a shock, it’s also making Schumer the target of “volcanic anger” in his own party. As one Democratic aide put it after the vote, “I’ve never seen anything like it in the time I’ve been in the Senate …” And as far as conservatives are concerned, Schumer had it coming.

This is exactly what the minority leader did to Republicans when the shoe was on the other foot, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins reminded people after the vote. For once, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and the rest of his party gave Senate Democrats a “dose and a half of their own medicine,” he tweeted, referring to all the times Schumer jammed conservatives with legislation they didn’t want. “Congressional Republicans are now doing what conservatives have wanted to see — going toe to toe with the Left and winning.”

To be fair, Schumer’s hype about shutting down the government was just that: hype. After the House passed a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the lights on and got out of dodge, the Senate minority leader’s fate was sealed. His options, Perkins pointed out, were to either shut down the government and let President Trump decide what parts of the government got funded (think DOGE on steroids) or support a continuing resolution that cut billions of discretionary spending. From the Left’s perspective, it was a lose-lose proposition.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t calls for Schumer’s head. On CNN, shortly after the minority leader folded, host Erin Burnett asked former Obama advisor Van Jones, “How angry are Democrats at Leader Schumer?” He replied bluntly, “I’ve never seen this level of volcanic anger at a Democrat, ever.” “Ever,” she said in astonishment. “Wow.”

Making matters worse for the longtime Democrat, President Trump went on Truth Social to poke the bear. “Congratulations to Chuck Schumer for doing the right thing — Took ‘guts’ and courage!” Trump wrote, trolling the opposition. An angry Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) could only shake his head. “When Donald Trump wakes up in the morning and says, ‘You’re doing the right thing, Senate Democrats,’ we don’t feel that is the right place to be.”

Ultimately, 10 Democrats voted to move forward with the bill to keep the government open through September of this year — cementing a political masterstroke by Speaker Johnson at exactly the right time. “I knew when I made this decision, I’d get a lot of criticism from a lot of quarters,” Schumer insisted to reporters. “We had hoped that maybe Johnson couldn’t get the votes,” Schumer said. “But when he did … it put us in a very, very tough place.”

The speaker celebrated the hard-fought win on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “I’ll tell you what,” he reflected with Perkins, “it’s been a lot of hard work. We kept the team together. The House Republicans are building muscle memory now for winning,” he declared. “We have a string of wins under our belt, and it’s good to be underestimated. You know,” he smiled, “the Hill press corps and the Democratic Party and the mainstream media every day write my eulogy, write our eulogy. They say we’re going to go to loggerheads against one another. And the Republicans can’t stand together. But we have, and we will continue to do that, because we are going to deliver the America First agenda for the American people.”

Asked how he pulled off such a coup and kept the members together, the Louisianan admitted that it took “a lot of time [and] a lot of patience.” It required a painstaking string of meetings, sorting through people’s priorities. And at the end of the day, he concluded, “We all have the same priorities. We want to make the federal government smaller, more efficient, and more effective for the people.” Of course, he pointed out, a lot of conservatives are impatient. “Some of my colleagues want to do everything all at once. They want to cut $8 trillion in federal spending. It’s just not possible to do that.”

Johnson says he likes to use the metaphor of an aircraft carrier. “It took us many decades to get into the financial situation that we’re in,” he remarked. “You don’t turn an aircraft carrier on a dime. It takes miles of open ocean, but you have to begin to turn it. And that’s what we’re doing. This CR is a step in that direction. It freezes funding.” He paused, “Think of this,” he said. “We’re actually going to spend less money year over year for the first time maybe in history. … At least in many decades. That’s an important course correction. And then, for the FY 26 budgeting, we’re going to make a much larger part of that turn. So it’s going to be a gradual, gradual, incremental thing to fix the mess we’re in. But we’re on that trajectory now.”

That’s music to conservatives’ ears after decades of rolling over and accepting runaway spending. “The passage of this continuing resolution is a major win for President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson,” FRC’s Quena Gonzalez told The Washington Stand, “and all the more so because it is improbable. Just a few weeks ago, it was accepted wisdom in Washington that Speaker Johnson would probably fail to shepherd it through the narrowest possible partisan margin in the House — never mind what its fate might be in a Senate where many Republicans favored a different, two-pronged approach and Democrats were united in opposing anything endorsed by President Donald Trump.” Just a day earlier, Gonzalez pointed out, “Leader Schumer was bragging that Republicans didn’t have the votes to pass the CR and vowed to tank it on the Senate floor.”

What’s even more amazing, he reiterated, is that “a continuing resolution is often a sign of failed governance and kicking the fiscal can down the road.” Not so in this case. “Most conservative leaders in Washington have believed President Trump and Speaker Johnson, who said that this CR is a step toward, not away from, fiscal sanity.” This CR should give the Trump administration time “to staff up and continue cutting government” and, Gonzalez said, “give the House and Senate time to pass a budget and make appropriations.” In other words, he underscored, “Congress has acted to make space for fiscal sanity and good governance to be restored. The proof will be in the pudding.”

For now, Johnson, who’s never had the luxury of operating with any margin for error, thinks that governing with a small majority has helped to bring “a lot of clarity” to his party. “And that clarity is helpful and important to us. And we’re going to continue to do the right thing. So just buckle up and watch,” he urged. “It’s going to be a rocky road, but we’re going to achieve these objectives in the end.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

RELATED ARTICLE: EPA Slashes Climate Change Red Tape, Claws Back $20B Climate Slush Fund

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 Fires 50% of Education Department Employees

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President Donald Trump’s order to reduce the U.S. Department of Education by half will improve education, give parents more resources, and save taxpayer dollars, says one congressman, who noted the greatest opposition comes from teachers unions and “Marxists who hate faith, family, free market, education.”

Department of Education (DOE) employees were told to leave their offices by 6 p.m. Tuesday night and not to report to work on Wednesday, as DOE offices remained closed and locked.

The reduction in forces reduces the total number of employees at the Department of Education from 4,133 to 2,183. Of those let go, 313 accepted buyouts and 259 came as part of the deferred resignation program. Former employees will be placed on administrative leave starting next Friday, March 21 and will receive full salary and benefits until June 9, with severance pay afterwards. The move will close seven of the DOE’s 12 satellite offices, affecting the cities of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

“That’s the way the real world works,” Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) told “Washington Watch” Wednesday night. “What we’ve had with the Department of Education since [the 1970s] is a terrible return on investment. Our kids have been dumbed down. We’ve been made to be more divisive. We don’t have the pride in our country — no connection with our Founding Fathers, and a God Who actually had His hands all over our nation.”

“If our children are trained to be ignorant, we’re going to lose our culture. It’s just a matter of time,” said Owens. With President Trump’s decentralizing actions, “We have a chance to reset this for generations to come.”

The firings may bring real taxpayer savings, experts say. At the DOE, “86 employees were making an average salary of $201,374; more than 1,000 employees were making between $167,603 and $195,200; and more than 1,000 were making between $142,488 and $185,234, according to Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, a school choice advocacy organization.

Teachers unions and Democrats reacted to the layoffs with fury.

“Authoritarian Republicans have chosen to attack and demean our BIPOC, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ students” with “white-washed history cloaked as ‘patriotism,’” said St. Paul (Minnesota) Federation of Teachers President Leah VanDassor. “Fascist regimes always start by targeting the most vulnerable populations.” In fact, fascist regimes rely on public education to indoctrinate impressionable students in their logically untenable ideologies.

“Dismantling the Department of Education” is “simply about taking away resources from our public schools,” claimed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D).

“I’m really angry about this!” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told MSNBC about the department’s impending closure on Saturday. She claimed the administration plans to make DOE unable to work, and “reading programs, the computer programs, the after-school programs” will “go away … [I]f the funding goes away, a kid doesn’t get physical therapy or occupational therapy.”

On Tuesday, Weingarten also posted her “solidarity” with the Chicago Teachers Union, which has closed struggling Chicago schools five times in the last 13 years.

“Firing half of the staff so that the Department of Education cannot function will jeopardize the resources, programs, and protections that give millions of students the opportunity to succeed,” said the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor union. The 12-million-member coalition returned to familiar Democratic talking points, accusing the Trump administration of “pushing a Project 2025/DOGE agenda.”

The backlash was expected, because unions “prioritize mediocrity instead of meritocracy,” Owens remarked on “Washington Watch.” Re-empowering local communities “will help your child to really thrive. You now have the funds to do it, because they’re not being wasted here in D.C.,” he said. “We the People can do much better without funding than having it for folks here in D.C., who have a totally different agenda and different priorities than most parents have in their in their hometowns.”

Owens noted the role of federal education bureaucracy in foisting a divisive social agenda on the nation’s children. “The reason why we’re having this conversation about men in sports and men in girls’ bathrooms [is] because of the Department of Education. The focus is totally different; it’s an ideology” promoted by “Marxists who hate faith, family, free markets, and education.”

The move begins the process of fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promise to close the Department of Education, which has had a contentious history since its founding during the Carter administration. Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a leaked administration document showing the president aims to close as many functions of the DOE as possible and transfer their control, and funding, back to the states, until Congress passes legislation closing the department altogether.

“Ready to bid farewell to the U.S. Department of Education?” asked Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), a conservative opposed to the existence of DOE on constitutional grounds.

“The president’s mandate, his directive to me, clearly is to shut down the Department of Education,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night. “We know we’ll have to work with Congress to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.”

“We’re not taking away education,” said McMahon. The president is instead “taking the bureaucracy out of education, so that more money flows to the states.”

If education returns to the state level, “10 states won’t be perfect, five states will be probably not so good, but they will be every bit as good as Norway, and Denmark, and Sweden, and all of the states that are rated near the top,” said President Trump last Friday. He told Secretary McMahon upon her confirmation one day earlier, “I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.”

The most recent test results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed reading scores falling for fourth and eighth grade students in U.S. public schools. Eighth graders also saw their math scores decline since 2022. All students remained below pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

“When you think about high school students who are graduating, only 30% are reading proficiently,” McMahon noted.

Although federal education funding accounts for only about one-tenth of state and local education funds, it often comes with ideological strings. The Biden-Harris administration attempted to force local school districts to admit males into female showers, locker rooms, and sports events or lose education funding. Republicans foresee federal funding replaced with block grants controlled and managed by the states.

Education experts agreed the president’s mass layoff will not harm the quality of U.S. education. “Nothing about the U.S. Department of Education is essential, by design,” noted Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Education Freedom. “Constitutionally, education is reserved to the people and states.”

“For a generation, our nation’s education system has been held hostage by bureaucrats and schooling unions who care only about preserving their own power, not the needs of American students. During that time, the Department of Education has ballooned in size while our students have fallen further and further behind,” said Schultz. “This news is another signal that the bureaucratic state is coming to an end in America.”

“Better education is closest to the kids with parents, with local superintendents, with local school boards,” McMahon told Ingraham. “I think we’ll see our scores go up with our students [when] we can educate them with parental input, as well.”

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.

Trump Urged to Dust Off an Old Weapon to Legislate DOGE Cuts

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If you ask House Republicans, the most reviled phrase in leadership’s vocabulary is “continuing resolution.” Nothing seems to raise conservatives’ blood pressure like a CR — mainly because it’s become synonymous with Congress’s perpetual failure to pass a long-term budget. And while there’s certainly grumbling about the idea this time around, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) may be heading into his seventh government shutdown threat with less resistance from his own party. And another two words explain why: Donald Trump.

With a handful of days until the clock runs out on another government funding deadline, no one’s been working the phones harder than the president. Together with Johnson, the White House has been doing everything it can to hold the fragile party together long enough to keep the lights on in Washington, D.C. When House leaders released the text of a 99-page funding extension that would give appropriators another six months to hammer out the budget in regular order, Trump was the first to rally the troops.

“The House and Senate have put together, under the circumstances, a very good funding Bill (‘CR’)!” he insisted on Truth Social Saturday. “All Republicans should vote (Please!) YES next week. Great things are coming for America,” Trump promised, “and I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s ‘financial house’ in order. Democrats will do anything they can to shut down our Government, and we can’t let that happen. We have to remain UNITED — NO DISSENT — Fight for another day when the timing is right…”

The message to conservative rabble-rousers was clear: get on board and give us room to hammer out the reforms you want for the next fiscal year. Adding to the usual drama, Johnson can only afford to lose one vote on the CR with the current 218-214 margin — giving him almost zero space to maneuver if any Republicans go rogue. To sweeten the post for conservatives who complain that this bill would keep the government spending at Joe Biden’s levels, negotiators did manage to slash $13 billion in nondefense spending, boosted veterans’ health care, and found more dollars for defense. Despite the Democrats’ desperate claims to the contrary, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare would remain untouched.

Incredibly, House Freedom Caucus members, who are the most likely to upend Johnson’s apple cart, seemed a little more subdued in their criticism. That may be thanks, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) pointed out, to the group’s meeting with Trump last week.

“I’m certainly no fan of CRs myself,” he told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice Friday. “The whole notion of Congress continuing to kick the can down the road, so to speak, is very troubling. And considering that this originally started as a budget under the Biden administration could give one pause. But,” he explained, “as we look to where we’re going, there’s a couple of things at play here. One is [that] DOGE is doing some great work to uncover the waste, fraud, abuse, [and] corruption that is happening in our federal government right now. But there’s a lot more work to be done,” he acknowledged, “and we need to give them a little bit of time to finish the work so that we can take the lessons learned, the savings [can] be found for the American people, and [we can] work that into the appropriations process. And so, in the meantime, we’ve got to keep the federal government running.”

His colleague, Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) toed that same line with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Monday’s show, insisting that the only people who might profit from a prolonged fight are Democrats. “I think the key here is that we’re avoiding a government shutdown, because really, all a government shutdown is, is a distraction from getting our important work done, which President Trump has said is securing our southern border, protecting our national security interests, and reining in spending,” she underscored. “And although we don’t have the opportunity to make some of the cuts that we would like to in a full appropriations package, this holds spending flat and gives some flexibility to agencies to be able to move money around.”

After Congress gets the next six months squared away in the CR, “we will immediately go into the FY 26 appropriations process,” Bice vowed, despite the fact that the budget hasn’t been done in regular order for about 20 years. “That’s going to be quite significant,” Perkins chimed in, “if Congress is able to move through the normal appropriations process.”

But, as a growing number of senators are starting to point out, there’s another way to hack through the thick growth of government waste and fraud that Elon Musk has uncovered — and a lot sooner than October. It’s a process called rescission, a powerful — but sparsely used — weapon that Trump can use to claw back billions of dollars of spending Congress has already approved.

Thanks to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, presidents can permanently cancel funding to executive agencies if it’s within a 45-day window and if a simple majority of Congress approves. As the Congressional Institute outlines, “The President begins the process by sending both [c]hambers of Congress a message indicating how much money he thinks should be cut; what agency and project the money was for; why it should not be spent; how withholding the money will affect fiscal policy, the economy, and the program it was intended for; and ‘all facts, circumstances, and considerations relating to or bearing upon the proposed rescission.’”

While it’s hardly an obscure rule (Ronald Reagan proposed 133 rescissions), recent presidents haven’t really pursued the idea — with the exception of Trump who tried to roll back pieces of a massive omnibus in 2018 only to be blocked by the Senate.

The beauty of the rescission process is that Congress can fast-track it. Unlike normal spending bills, the proposal would bypass the 60-vote majority in the Senate. Using Musk’s recommendations as a guide, the president could zero in on hundreds of unnecessary, woke, and obsolete programs or positions to bulldoze. It would also help insulate the administration from the flurry of legal challenges to the string of cuts the president has already made. “You know, if we lose in court … we’re bound by it,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned after a GOP lunch with Musk Wednesday. “You have rescission and reconciliation. … Take these two tools and use them.”

From a messaging standpoint, Democrats would have a much harder time landing their blows on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) if the GOP handles the reforms legislatively. “What we’ve got to do as Republicans is capture their work product, put it in a bill and vote on it,” Graham argued. “So the White House, I’m urging them to come up with a rescission package.”

Even Musk himself wasn’t aware of this option to chip away at runaway spending and raised his arms triumphantly in the air when Republican senators explained it to him, Graham recounted. “[I]t’s time for the White House now to go on offense. We’re losing altitude here,” the senator declared. “… And the way you can regain altitude is to take the work product, get away from the personalities and the drama, take the work product and vote on it.”

As the editors of National Review write in support, “A successful effort would likely involve Elon Musk in his capacity as public spokesman for DOGE, making it clear to Republicans that a vote for the rescission package is a vote for cleaning up wasteful spending. The package should also be crafted by the White House with congressional input, so that Republicans know they’ll be receiving something they can all vote for.”

It’s also, they continue, “one way to ensure that DOGE-inspired spending cuts pass legal muster.” Not to mention that it would “bring some order to what has been at times a chaotic and undisciplined effort. Requiring the president to list the items he’d like to see cut in a statement that Congress can then take up and approve with a roll call vote would help make clear to the American people what DOGE is doing and give Republican members of Congress buy-in to tell their constituents they did something to cut spending.”

Obviously, the editors caution, “The rescission process is not going to come anywhere close to balancing the budget or changing the long-run trajectory of the federal debt burden. That will still require entitlement reform and spending cuts enacted through the appropriations process. But when DOGE finds dumb spending to eliminate, the president should put together a rescission package, and the speaker and Senate majority leader should work to pass it as soon as they can,” they urge. “A little spring cleaning of the budget wouldn’t hurt.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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

As Musk Bulldozes Waste, Johnson Warns ‘Deep State Is in Full Panic Mode’

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Elon Musk can’t steal a job no one’s doing. But Democrats disagree, angrily griping that the tech mogul’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is somehow a hostile takeover, a “shadow government” blowtorching the Constitution. That’s absurd, the billionaire has fired back. “The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get. That’s what democracy is all about.” Of course, neither party would know. They haven’t had the stomach for deep cuts in decades.

And it isn’t just Democrats who hate to say goodbye to pet projects and back-home interests. Republicans are white-knuckling through this winnowing process too, the AP notes. “The problem’s in that room,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said, pointing to the House chamber. “These guys, they talk real tough,” but they don’t vote that tough, he lamented. “We’ve got to get some guts, and people have got to hold us accountable,” the Tennessean leveled with reporters. Yes, “we need the waste-cutting,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) agreed, but more importantly, “we need Congress to grow a spine.”

Until then, Trump is relying on Musk’s. After years of watching Congress pledge, but fail, to make sweeping changes, his DOGE is more than ready to slash and burn. “It’s not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses,” the billionaire said. “It’s essential for America to remain solvent as a country.” He’s right, Rep. Pete Sauber (R-Minn.) added. “If there’s anybody who doesn’t believe we can find efficiencies in government, they’ve got to be blind.”

From trans comic books in Peru to supplying al-Qaeda, DOGE is storming through government receipts, shocking plenty of Americans along the way. While taxpayers cheer, Democrats have become almost hysterical, unable to keep up with the rapid-fire pace of the president’s overhauls. Fourteen state attorneys general even resorted to filing a lawsuit, a last-ditch effort to stop the seismic federal downsizing.

“Mr. Musk’s seemingly limitless and unchecked power to strip the government of its workforce and eliminate entire departments with the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse would have been shocking to those who won this country’s independence,” the chief law enforcers of Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Vermont wrote.

“There is no office of the United States, other than the President, with the full power of the Executive Branch, and the sweeping authority now vested in a single unelected and unconfirmed individual is antithetical to the nation’s entire constitutional structure,” they claimed.

Democrats, who seem to have Olympic-level skill at misreading the room since the election, haven’t stopped to think that maybe this is exactly what the country wants. As The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessey points out, “The left’s DOGE-inspired hysteria is silly — a political blunder. Donald Trump’s campaign promise in 2024 was explicit: Elect me and I’ll hand Mr. Musk a broom to clean out the Augean stables of the administrative state. Voters said, ‘OK boys, get after it.’ I’m no political scientist, but I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite of a coup.”

What’s more, he went on, “If Democrats had any brains, they’d sit back and let it happen. At some point they’ll regain the White House. If DOGE is even moderately successful, the next Democratic president will inherit a leaner bureaucracy, less plagued by waste, fraud and abuse.” Frankly, Hennessey said, unironically, “Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to defend drag shows in developing countries as an essential tool of American soft power?”

To true conservatives, who’ve been fighting this war on waste for years without a real partner in leadership, watching Elon expose hundreds of billions of dollars in outrageous programs has been cathartic. “The reason this has been happening,” House Freedom Caucus Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) argued, “is because Congress has been asleep at the switch.” He and others outlined dozens of these projects — including the embarrassment that is USAID — but when they’ve put up amendments to carve out the most egregious spending, “a majority of Republicans voted against [it].”

But, he emphasized, “It’s a new day in town. The president and Elon are exposing it. Now we can demonstrate that those of us who have been fighting this, we’re on the right side.” And if the GOP knows what’s good for it, they’ll “get on board and to work together in Congress and in the administration to support slashing this waste,” Roy said.

From his perch at the top of the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), another conservative who fought this in the rank-and-file, is enjoying the show. “It’s really something,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “The deep state is in full panic mode because Elon Musk and the DOGE team is right over the target, which is why they’re catching so much flak. I tell you, what they’re doing is truly transformational,” he underscored.

“I met with Elon for an hour on Monday night in his office,” Johnson said. “He’s working out of the Eisenhower building, which is right across … from the White House in the old Secretary of War room. And we laughed about how appropriate that is, because he’s effectively declaring war on the big bureaucracy, because he’s seeking efficiencies. And that’s exactly what the American people want, need, and deserve.”

The speaker says that the big question he’s getting is: “Why didn’t Congress know about all of these abuses?” His answer is the same as Roy’s. “We’ve tried. I’ve been in Congress for eight years. We have a really important oversight responsibility that we’re given in the Constitution … and we’ve tried to dig out and find all these abuses. But surprise, surprise, the agencies of the federal government have been hiding all this. They don’t do full disclosure. They don’t want to show us what’s under the rug. And now Elon is finding it. And it is really getting a lot of attention because it’s absolutely crazy stuff.”

Unfortunately for the Left and its big bureaucratic spenders, not only is Musk great at exposing this garbage, “he has a pretty big megaphone with X” to broadcast it, Perkins chimed in. To Johnson, “That is actually the magic of the formula, because Elon has this giant platform on which he can explain this step by step. And that’s what’s gotten the deep state so alarmed because they know that the game is up. … But what’s different about this is it’s not just members of Congress trying to grasp what we can find out of certain pieces of paper that are turned over to us. Elon has algorithms running through the actual programs of the government that have never been done before. And [as he says], the data is impossible to fake or to hide.”

At the end of the day, the Louisianan said proudly, “It’s going to be a massive transformational paradigm shift for how the government operates. It’s really exciting stuff.”

As for the Democrats’ beef that Elon is operating outside the boundaries of executive authority, Johnson says baloney. “It’s exactly the opposite. When Congress allocates money, when Congress appropriates funds for the executive branch agencies, it builds in two things: a lot of broad discretion, of course, for the executive to be able to determine how exactly it’s spent and where and when. And also there is a presupposition that the executive branch is going to use the money as a good steward,” he pointed out. “We don’t have to write that into every piece of legislation. It is presumed. But when that is not happening,” the speaker continued, “it is entirely appropriate for the executive branch of the government and a new commander in chief to go through and scrub the programs and assess where the money is being wasted or stolen. That’s something every single American should applaud. And I can’t believe that the courts are trying to intervene in this.”

Perkins compared it to the Middle East where one civilization or time period would be built on top of another. Eventually, you end up with a big mountain, where one generation built on the ruins of another. “That’s what our federal government has become. It’s just one layer on top of another, and it appears that what Elon Musk is doing is taking a bulldozer and doing some archaeological digs.”

Absolutely, Johnson nodded. “And [he’s] doing it in a way that Congress has not been able to do, because this was, in a literal sense, hidden from us. And so, that bulldozer was a long time coming. I told Elon I was so excited after our meeting this week. I said, ‘Elon, I’m sure you realize this, [but] I think of it in terms [of] a constitutional law attorney.’ He thinks of it as a scientist and a data analyst. But I said, ‘What you’re doing at the end of the day is restoring the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution.’ They wanted a limited federal government that had very careful oversight by the duly elected representatives of the people. And now this effort is empowering us, the elected representatives, to do that once again. It’s really, really incredible stuff.”

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.

10 Bills That Would Codify Trump’s Executive Orders into Law

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President Donald Trump wasted no time enacting the agenda that won him the White House in the 2024 election, signing a series of executive orders and regulatory actions nearly every day of his second administration. Yet executive orders last only as long as a friendly president holds office. There is now a movement afoot to codify President Trump’s executive orders into statutory law. Here are 10 bills members of Congress have introduced to make the 47th president’s executive actions permanent.

1. Jamie Reed Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) re-introduced his Jamie Reed Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act. The legislation would cut off federal funding to any medical institution or university affiliated with an institution that carries out transgender procedures on minors. It would also create a private right of action, allowing those who underwent such procedures to sue medical practitioners who administered them, as well as pediatric gender clinics and the hospitals/universities associated with them.

“Our children should no longer suffer from irreversible and dangerous child mutilation procedures, which the Biden administration enabled and promoted,” said Hawley. “I welcome President Trump’s strong action to reverse this child abuse and look forward to working with his administration to advance legislation that protects our kids.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”

2. No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025

Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025 (H.R. 7). The bill would bar the U.S. government from funding abortion directly, underwriting abortion through federally funded health care insurance plans (including Obamacare) and carrying out abortions at VA hospitals.

“Abortion violence must be replaced with compassion and empathy for women and for defenseless unborn baby girls and boys,” Smith, co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, told The Washington Stand.

“No matter which party holds power in Washington, Americans should never be forced to fund the violence of abortion with their tax dollars,” Marilyn Musgrave, vice president of Government Affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told TWS. “Despite Americans’ strong support of this policy, pro-abortion members of Congress attack the Hyde Amendment in every spending bill. The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act would finally apply Hyde principles permanently across the whole federal government, including stopping abortion subsidies in Obamacare.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment”

3. FACE Act Repeal Act

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) reintroduced the FACE Act Repeal Act (H.R.5577) last month. The Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that activist justices wrongly invented a “constitutional right” to abortion in Roe v. Wade, yet the Biden-Harris administration continued Democratic presidents’ decades-long practices of weaponizing the 1994 Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act against pro-life advocates until the day he left office. Roy’s bill would purge this now-irrelevant bill from the federal register for good.

“We should make this a permanent change so that no future president has to pardon, as President Trump did … individuals who were unfairly politically targeted and charged under the Department of Justice,” Roy told his former colleague, Jody Hice, the regular Friday host of “Washington Watch,” on the day of the 2025 March for Life.

“Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system. The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse — being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life” he said in a statement emailed to TWS upon reintroducing the bill.

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Ending The Weaponization Of The Federal Government,” “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” and “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias”

4. No Taxpayer Funding for the United Nations Population Fund Act

Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) reintroduced the No Taxpayer Funding for the United Nations Population Fund Act (H.R.436) last month.

“The United Nations Population Fund is a globalist, Orwellian, propaganda machine that shills for the Chinese Communist Party its brutal mandatory abortion practices. President Trump was absolutely right to end taxpayer funding to this corrupt and anti-life organization during his first term and I look forward to him doing so again,” Roy told TWS. “At the same time, Congress has a duty under our constitutionally vested powers to ensure that U.S. tax dollars — regardless of which administration is in the White House — can never flow to this dystopian propaganda machine under any future administration. That’s why we need to put this bill on the president’s desk right away.”

For years, UNFPA worked closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s population police, which brutally enforced the nation’s One Child policy.

“The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has worked hand-in-glove with the abortion industry to promote unlimited abortion in other countries,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Taxpayer dollars should never be going toward the Left’s anti-life, anti-family agenda,” agreed Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project. “We encourage all Republicans to support this effort and do whatever it takes to make it law.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: When President Trump signed three pro-life executive orders on January 25, the White House noted Trump “[c]ut all funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports coercive abortion and forced sterilization” in his first administration. This bill would help return global abortion policy to the pre-Biden status quo.

5. WHO is Accountable Act

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) has introduced the WHO is Accountable Act (H.R. 600). The bill would prohibit the use of funds to seek membership in the World Health Organization or to provide assessed or voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization unless the administration certifies:

  • WHO no longer covers up the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic and does not persist under the CCP’s control.
  • WHO increases transparency and accountability to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
  • WHO adopts meaningful reforms to end the politicization of humanitarian assistance.
  • WHO grants observer status to Taiwan.
  • No funds are diverted to such human rights abusers as North Korea and Iran.

“President Trump was right to pull the United States out of the CCP-controlled World Health Organization,” said Arrington. “Now, Congress must take action to ensure future presidents can’t foolishly rejoin this corrupt organization without major reforms. I have long said that I will fight against any attempt to surrender our sovereignty and cede regulatory power over the United States through a treaty, agreement, or arrangement. The World Health Organization aided and abetted China in covering up their incompetence with COVID-19, all while spending American tax dollars promulgating woke and radical ideology. This is why I’m proud to lead my colleagues in ensuring President Trump’s America First agenda endures.”

“The WHO is a globalist, CCP run entity that disproportionally charges the U.S. compared to other countries and pushes their CCP and progressive ideology on the American people and the world,” said Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), who co-sponsored the legislation. “This ends now.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Withdrawing The United States From The World Health Organization”

6. No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act (H.R.401). The bill states that “The United States may not provide any assessed or voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization.”

“The World Health Organization (WHO) doesn’t serve our interests and doesn’t deserve our money. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic this body ran interference for the Chinese Communist Party — arguably helping that regime make the entire outbreak worse,” Roy told TWS.

President Trump withdrew from WHO in 2018, only to see Joe Biden rejoin the global governance body on his first day in office. Last month, President Trump withdrew again.

WHO, which regularly repeated CCP propaganda about COVID-19 at face value, attempted to foist a WHO Pandemic Agreement on the world which would limit national sovereignty, claim ownership of 20% of all U.S. vaccines and medications, implement a “One Health” philosophy equating human well-being with animal and plant life, and embolden social media companies to suppress alleged “misinformation.” Family Research Council warned the controversial accord creates “a web of freedom-strangling entities, legal regulatory mandates, and relationships” that could be “switched on to function as a ‘turnkey totalitarian state.’”

“Taking money from hardworking families struggling with the aftermath of Biden’s inflation crisis to send it to a bunch of leftist ‘health experts’ and bureaucrats in Geneva is unacceptable. I have full confidence that President Trump will cut the WHO’s funding off — as he did last time — but this legislation will ensure that no future administration can restart it,” Roy told TWS. “Let’s get this done.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Withdrawing The United States From The World Health Organization”

7. R.1123: “To abolish the United States Agency for International Development, and for other purposes”

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced a bill “To abolish the United States Agency for International Development, and for other purposes” (H.R.1123). Investigators at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered billions of dollars in wasteful and often-offensive grants made by USAID, a body intended to supply foreign aid to the world’s most vulnerable populations, including funding of transgender propaganda around the world.

“As chairwoman of the DOGE Subcommittee,” which held its first hearing on Wednesday, “I’ve launched the War on Waste, and USAID is a major culprit lighting over $40 billion on fire each year. It’s time to do what DOGE does best: cut the waste,” said Greene.

“I am pleased that the rot and corruption is finally getting the attention and action it deserves from the Trump administration, but Congress needs to back this effort up and end this problem permanently,” said Roy. “With $36 trillion in debt, we have to get our fiscal House in order; but we can start right now with getting rid of USAID.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Reevaluating And Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” as well as numerous executive actions, such as a mass firing reducing USAID from more than 10,000 employees to just 294.

8. Dismantle DEI Act

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) introduced the Dismantle DEI Act. The bill terminates all DEI-based programs, offices, trainings, and grants — including identity-based quotas and anything rooted in critical race theory (CRT) — and does not allow the government to rename or repurpose them. Significantly, the legislation extends beyond government entities themselves to include federal contractors and accreditation bodies. It also creates a private right of action for individuals to sue offenders.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have plagued our federal government, academic institutions, and other aspects of our society, cheapening standards while disregarding merit,” said Schmitt in a written statement emailed to TWS. “Moreover, taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on this poisonous, divisive ideology.”

“The DEI agenda has no place in our federal government,” agreed Peter Holland of the Foundation for Government Accountability.

“DEI was never about fairness or opportunity — it was a Trojan horse for left-wing political social engineering that fosters division, not unity,” noted Cloud. “Hiring and promotion should be because of someone’s merit, excellence, and hard work, regardless of race, religion, or creed.”

“I’m grateful to President Trump for reversing these harmful policies on day one of his administration,” Cloud told TWS. “His leadership put an end to these divisive, un-American programs, and it’s now Congress’s job to follow through and codify the permanent elimination of DEI from our government.”

Should it reach the president’s desk, it should face little opposition. The Dismantle DEI Act’s Senate sponsor in the last Congress was then-Senator J.D. Vance.

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferences,” “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” as well as a memo from the Office of Personnel Management firing DEI officials and closing DEI programs.

9. R.899: “To terminate the Department of Education”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) reintroduced a bill “To terminate the Department of Education” (H.R.899).

Conservatives have proposed eliminating the U.S. Department of Education since its founding under President Jimmy Carter, which was widely seen as a kickback to teachers unions for dependably supporting Democratic candidates. President Ronald Reagan campaigned on eliminating the agency and repeated his desire to shutter the Education and Energy departments during a televised address on September 24, 1981. “Education is the principal responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and State governments. By eliminating the Department of Education less than two years after it was created, we can not only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children,” said President Reagan.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” agreed Massie, who supports a strict constructionist reading of the U.S. Constitution. “Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: As of this writing, President Trump has not yet signed a much-anticipated executive order closing the Department of Education. (Experts question whether a Cabinet-level position established by legislation can be abolished by executive order.) However, he has repeatedly stated his hopes of closing the department.

10. H. Res. 9: “Resolution reaffirming that the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court”

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) reintroduced his “resolution reaffirming that the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court” (H. Res. 9). President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute, creating the ICC, shortly before leaving office on New Year’s Eve 2000 but never submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification, as required by the Constitution. Article 125 of the Rome Statute states that it is “subject to ratification, acceptance, or approval by signatory” nations. In 2002, President George W. Bush said the U.S. had no intention to join the body.

The ICC created international controversy last November when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes against Palestinians, including starvation and the intentional targeting of civilians. On February 6, President Trump sanctioned the ICC via executive order.

The latest resolution, which does not have legally binding authority, expresses the sense of Congress that the U.S. “does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.” It also formally condemns the ICC’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, and it proclaims America’s “unwavering support for the State of Israel and its right to defend itself and its leaders from unwarranted international legal actions.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court”

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.

Trump Admin. Goes to War over Court Order Blocking DOGE from Treasury Dept.

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The Trump administration is challenging a federal court order blocking the government’s efficiency agency from accessing U.S. Treasury records. U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer issued a temporary restraining order on Saturday, barring the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from having “access to Treasury Department payment systems or any other data maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information.”

DOGE has been tasked by President Donald Trump with investigating and auditing federal agencies and departments in order to identify and eliminate wasteful spending and fraud. Last week, the agency gained access to Treasury Department payment system records after Acting Treasury Secretary David Lebryk, a 35-year Treasury bureaucracy veteran who had been blocking DOGE’s access, was placed on leave. However, a coalition of 19 Democratic attorneys general — representing the states of New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin — filed a complaint asking that DOGE continue to be denied access to the Treasury.

Engelmayer received the Democrats’ complaint and, without seeking arguments from the president and his attorneys, temporarily blocked the president “from granting to political appointees, special government employees, and any government employee detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department access to Treasury…” The judge further ordered that Trump and his administration be “restrained from granting access to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees” to anyone outside the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Services and “restrained from granting access” to any such records to “all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department…” The order also demands that DOGE employees who have already been granted access to Treasury records destroy all copies they have obtained of those records.

The Trump administration was given until Tuesday evening to file a response, with the Democratic attorneys general being given until Thursday evening to file a follow-up response. However, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted a response almost immediately, asking for the order to be dissolved. “On its face, the Order could be read to cover all political leadership within Treasury — including even [Treasury] Secretary [Scott] Bessent. This is a remarkable intrusion on the Executive Branch that is in direct conflict with Article II of the Constitution, and the unitary structure it provides,” the DOJ memorandum stated. It continued, “There is not and cannot be a basis for distinguishing between ‘civil servants’ and ‘political appointees.’ Basic democratic accountability requires that every executive agency’s work be supervised by politically accountable leadership, who ultimately answer to the President.”

“A federal court, consistent with the separation of powers, cannot insulate any portion of that work from the specter of political accountability,” the DOJ explained. “No court can issue an injunction that directly severs the clear line of supervision Article II requires. Because the Order on its face draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction, it should be dissolved immediately.”

Although the agency conceded that the Trump administration is “in compliance with” the court order and its stipulations, Trump and his allies have vowed to combat the court’s overreach and even hinted at the possibility of ignoring the court’s order if it is not dissolved or adjusted in a timely manner. When asked about the court order on Sunday, Trump himself said, “We’re talking about fraud, waste, abuse, and when a president can’t look for fraud and waste and abuse, we don’t have a country anymore.” He added, “We’re very disappointed with the judges that would make such a ruling.”

Vice President J.D. Vance issued a stern statement on the subject over social media. “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal,” he observed. He concluded, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller called Engelmayer “a radical left judge” in an interview Sunday. He said of the court order, “This isn’t just unconstitutional. That ruling is an assault on the very idea of democracy itself.” He continued, “Donald Trump is engaging in the most important restoration of democracy in over a century by saying that we are going to restore power to the people through their elected president and his appointed officers.”

Miller added, “That is the only way we can have true democracy in this country.” The Trump counselor continued, “But this nonsense where we have rogue, unelected, unaccountable, and previously un-fire-able bureaucrats who do whatever the hell they want with no one telling them and no one controlling them, we’re not going to let that happen anymore.”

Commenting on the controversial court order, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) declared, “The elected president of the United States should be allowed to function as such.” He continued, “No federal court should replace the president’s team with Deep State bureaucrats.”

Trump ally and Article III Project founder Mike Davis, commented, “These DC uniparty judges are shockingly insulated from Real Americans in Real America. They are arrogant and delusional enough to believe they are saving America from Trump.” He added, “Even though Trump campaigned on doing precisely what he’s doing. And won a decisive electoral mandate.” In comments published by The New York Times, Davis clarified, “President Trump is not stealing other branches’ powers.” He continued to say that Trump “is exercising his Article II powers under the Constitution. And judges who say he can’t? They’re legally wrong. The Supreme Court is going to side with Trump.”

Despite the complaints of Democrats, several department heads in the federal government have welcomed DOGE’s efforts to identify and eliminate waste and fraud. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem insisted on Sunday that she is “absolutely” comfortable with DOGE auditing DHS records. “This is essentially an audit of the federal government, which is very powerful and needs to have happened,” she said, adding that American citizens “can’t trust our government anymore” after years of waste and fraud being covered up.

Department of Defense (DOD) Secretary Pete Hegseth also welcomed DOGE audits in a Sunday interview, adding that Trump is “correct that American taxpayers deserve to know exactly how and where their money is spent.” He stated, “We welcome Elon Musk and DOGE coming into our department to help us identify additional ways in which we can streamline costs, fast-track acquisitions, cut waste, cut tail to put it to tooth.” Hegseth continued, “We know in a world where America is $37 trillion in debt, resources will not be unlimited. Every dollar we can find that isn’t being spent wisely is one we can put toward warfighters. So we welcome DOGE at DOD. We will partner with them, and it’s long overdue.”

Prior to the fracas surrounding its audit of the Treasury, DOGE has investigated several other federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which Trump ordered almost completely shut down after the DOGE team discovered and exposed rampant waste and the funding of left-wing projects and programs across the globe. Trump announced last week that DOGE will also audit the Pentagon and the Department of Education. Shortly afterwards, DOGE chief Elon Musk announced, without elaborating further, that the Department of Education “no longer exists.”

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. ©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 Zeroes in on $150 Billion Spent on Illegal Immigration in Single Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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

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

‘Kamala Harris Is Running a Giveaway Campaign’: Economist

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As presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris approach their first debate on Tuesday, their campaigns have unveiled economic policies that seem in some ways diametrically opposed — and only one could stimulate “robust economic growth,” a leading economist has warned.

Harris has proposed imposing price controls on food, undoing the Trump tax cuts of 2017 by raising the top tax rate to 39.6%, hiking corporate taxes and capital gains taxes to 28%, giving first-time homebuyers $25,000, and doubling down on Obamacare by raising taxpayer-funded subsidies for those who buy their plans from the exchange.

She also proposed one tax cut to benefit small businesses. “I want to see 25 million new small business applications by the end of my first term,” said Harris last week. “So, part of my plan is we will expand the tax deduction for startups to $50,000.”

In a speech at the Economic Club of New York last Thursday, former President Trump proposed unleashing the power of the free market by maintaining the 2017 tax cuts and further slashing the corporate tax from 21% to 15%, cutting red tape, protecting U.S. manufacturing by raising tariffs on imported goods, clawing back all unspent funds from the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, and making more jobs available to U.S. citizens by deporting illegal immigrants who lower wages and compete for jobs.

Both candidates agree on ending federal taxation on tips, a policy first proposed this presidential race by Trump and parroted by Harris.

“Kamala Harris is running a giveaway campaign,” Paul Mueller, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm last Thursday. “Of course, the Biden administration has been trying to cancel various forms of student debt for years now. And her approach, I think, to stimulating the economy is more of what we’ve seen over the past four years, which is extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending. It’s not really an organic growth within the economy.”

Artificial stimulus raises prices, a major problem over the course of the Biden-Harris administration. “When you subsidize people’s ability to buy things — whether that’s higher education or health care — and we give people money in the form of loans or grants or scholarships to do that, what it does is boosts demand. And so what we see over time in both of those areas is rising costs. The cost of higher education has grown much faster than everything else in the economy. The rate of increase for health care has increased very rapidly,” Mueller stated. “And so this $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers, while it sounds nice, it’s actually going to continue to put upward pressure on the price of housing overall.”

The entire amount of the subsidy is “actually going to be eaten up by rising prices,” Mueller noted.

Even a putatively pro-business tax policy like a small business tax credit could backfire. “There are a lot of small business owners who maybe will close down their existing business and start a new one just to get the tax credit,” Mueller warned.

On the other hand, “President Trump’s agenda” has the potential to spur “robust economic growth” in an organic way, said Mueller. “He has talked about wanting to roll back regulations.”

Mueller noted he opposed Trump’s tariff policy, “and, then, he hasn’t really addressed runaway government spending. And the more money that is spent by the federal government, the less money there is for people in the private sector to spend on their businesses, their houses, their projects.”

Backholm suggested the greatest vacuum in economic dialogue involves America’s $35 trillion national debt. “So far, we are not seeing a lot of politicians raise their hand and say, ‘I’m the guy that’s going to give you less so we can save the future.’ I think that might be what we need. We’re not getting that from anybody at this point.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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