Tag Archive for: Taxpayer Spending

Trump, House GOP Chairmen Mount Unprecedented Reform Effort to Prevent Waste, Fraud in Federal Spending

/in , , , , , , , , /by

President Ronald Reagan signed a little-heralded executive order in 1981 that fulfilled his campaign promise to appoint men and women who were “meaner than a bunch of junkyard dogs” to the 33 then-newly created posts of Inspectors General (IG) to fight waste and fraud in major federal departments and independent agencies.

“We are going to follow every lead, root out every incompetent, and prosecute any crook we find who’s cheating the people of this nation,” Reagan declared. Reagan’s IGs and those who followed them in successive presidencies regularly exposed hundreds of millions of dollars in mismanagement and corrupt spending. Even so, year after year, IGs kept finding new examples of waste, fraud, and abuse. Reagan’s IG appointees included Democrat Richard Kusserow at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who, among much else during his 11-year tenure, pioneered stopping payments to dead people by comparing Social Security benefit recipients’ lists with the government’s death records.

The problem during the Reagan era and beyond was the fact that there were only a total of 74 IGs in a federal government that literally has only the vaguest idea of how many total programs it is funding. Then, in a widely quoted 2024 report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) — the investigative arm of Congress — estimated that in the years 2018 to 2022, losses to waste, fraud, and abuse likely ranged from $233 billion to as much as $521 billion.

But the same report also cautioned that “all federal programs and operations are at risk of fraud. Therefore, agencies need robust processes in place to prevent, detect, and respond to fraud. While the government obligated almost $40 trillion from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, no reliable estimates of fraud losses affecting the federal government previously existed.”

Plus, GAO said, its “estimate does not include fraud loss associated with federal revenue or fraud against federal programs that occurs at the state, local, or tribal level unless federal authorities investigated and reported it.” And the report noted that the “federal government does not know the full extent of improper payments,” that is, those made to, for example, fictional recipients or recipients receiving larger benefit checks than exceed their eligibility.

In other words, in the nearly four decades between Reagan’s junkyard dogs and the period covered by the 2024 GAO report, Washington officials really didn’t know how many federal tax dollars were actually lost every year. Even with the new estimate, officials conceded that gaps in available data across the government produced “challenges in producing fraud estimates, such as limited available fraud-related data and use of varying terms and definitions of fraud for recording data. These data gaps and variability result in information that cannot be readily compared or consolidated to determine the extent of fraud across the federal government.”

It’s now 2026, and they still don’t know for sure, but one thing has become all but certain: Far more of the federal government’s $7 trillion in annual spending than previously estimated is lost every year to professional criminal fraudsters, undeserving and even dead benefit recipients, over-priced procurement contracts, unjustified reimbursements, and numerous other ways.

That realization is driven by the results of the unprecedented efforts starting in January 2025 of President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, and others on Capitol Hill to go after waste, fraud, and abuse on a scale never before attempted and with weapons too long ignored.

Veteran federal spending analyst Cato Institute Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy Romina Boccia summarizes the state of play.

“We’ve had episodic anti-waste crusades before, like the Grace Commission in the Reagan years, post-Katrina oversight, Great Recession stimulus failures, and COVID-relief fraud investigations. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has brought broad public attention to the possibility that weak financial controls are a government-wide problem rather than a program-specific one. What makes this moment different is that the conversation is moving beyond isolated scandals toward questioning whether the federal government actually has the systems and incentives necessary to track taxpayer dollars in real time,” Boccia told The Washington Stand.

Initially, Trump depended on billionaire Elon Musk overseeing DOGE, which, among much else, uncovered the startling fact that Department of Treasury officials could not trace an estimated $4.7 trillion in federal payments because they weren’t assigned Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) tracking codes. But Musk left the government after four months of running DOGE.

Trump subsequently turned to Vance to head the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which quickly began to get results. In a May 26 statement, the White House press office listed the task force’s major accomplishments since February. Among those accomplishments are halting $260 million in Medicaid payments due to rampant fraud allegations, 11 individuals charged in a big real estate and loan fraud preying on seniors, hundreds of additional high-risk hospice and home health providers across California, and much else.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Comer, Arrington, and other House anti-fraudsters are moving multiple pieces of legislation designed to eliminate gaps in the government’s anti-waste and fraud investigative tools and upgrade executive branch operations with tougher management accountability requirements.

Comer and Arrington, for example, on April 23 introduced the “Stopping Fraudulent Payments Act” and the “Pre-Payment Fraud Prevention and Treasury Data Access Act.” Both proposals were marked up and reported by the oversight panel on April 29. They were written following panel hearings earlier in the year that focused on widespread fraud in state-administered federal programs in Minnesota and California.

The former proposal “tackles the widespread ‘pay and chase’ problem by preventing federal agencies from making payments when an agency has determined there is an elevated risk of fraud or the payment is likely to be improper. The bill also gives the U.S. Treasury new authority to return payment requests to agencies if they appear to be at risk for fraud. These reforms shift agency actions from recovery to prevention that protects taxpayer dollars,” according to a statement issued by Comer.

The latter proposal “strengthens the federal government’s financial oversight and controls by directing the U.S. Treasury to work with agencies to verify payment and payee information before payments go out the door. It reduces fraud by expanding tools like the Do Not Pay (DNP) system and ensuring federal agencies have better access to accurate data to identify improper and fraudulent payments.”

Boccia and colleague Tyler Thurman reported recently that the DNP “is under-utilized and under-equipped, and agencies are not required to respond when it flags potential errors,” and that it “has a proven track record. In a three-year pilot that gave DNP access to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Death Master File, the system identified or prevented $113.5 million in improper payments at a cost of just $4.6 million — a 23-to-1 return on investment, in the first year alone. After such remarkable success, Congress permanently authorized SSA to share its full death data with DNP.”

Boccia and Thurman also point out that DNP “screens well for deceased enrollees, but only $1.5 billion in FY 2024 overpayments were death-related. Far larger drivers of overpayments — income and financial data ($80.2 billion), employment status ($68.9 billion), and identity ($31.6 billion) — are not fully accounted for in DNP’s current databases.” The two Comer-Arrington proposals introduced in April remedy this problem. The Comer-Arrington proposals also address the fact that agencies aren’t mandated to act whenever DNP identifies an improper payment. The proposals require agencies that wish to proceed with a payment flagged by DNP to first take corrective action and verify the payment before certification.

In addition, Boccia and Thurman note, the “DNP is woefully underused. Only 4 percent of eligible programs across the federal government fully utilize DNP. Many states lack access to DNP, instead relying on outdated and fragmented data systems with significant gaps in eligibility verification.The Timely and Accurate Benefits Act (H.R. 1755) from Rep. William Timmons (R-SC) would help close this gap by expanding DNP’s availability to state agencies and requiring them to use DNP or other real-time data-matching tools for fraud prevention and eligibility determinations.”

Finally, according to Boccia and Thurman, federal departments and agencies “aren’t using the data they already have,” and they cited a Congressional Research System (CRS) report that “found that 73% of data access-related overpayments between fiscal years 2021 and 2024 — $556.6 billion — were human errors resulting from agencies failing to use the data that already existed. Ensuring administrators know how to use the tools available to them is one potential solution, and the Federal Fraud Prevention Workforce Training Act (H.R. 8428) from Reps. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) would help by establishing a training program on fraud risk management and the use of tools such as DNP for federal and state agencies administering federal programs.”

Only time will tell if the new approach produces needed results. In statement made earlier this week as he introduced legislation to reform the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, House Budget chief Arrington captured the profoundly serious need for genuine progress against all waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending, saying, “Washington’s abject failure to protect tax dollars has resulted in an unprecedented scale of fraud that threatens not only the sustainability of our safety net programs, but also the future economic viability of our nation.”

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

WATCH: President Trump cancels $29 BILLION in NGO grants on behalf of the hardworking American taxpayer

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

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

New Analysis Cites 4 Ways CBO’s Budget Baseline Always Favors Increased Federal Spending

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

Four key assumptions in the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analytical tool for projecting federal spending and revenue trends heavily distort its results in favor of continually increasing outlays and expanding government regulation, according to a new Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) analysis.

“The CBO baseline is important because it is used as the official benchmark against which legislative proposals are scored. The biases in the baseline allow the true costs of legislation to stay hidden from the public and members of Congress,” according to EPIC’s director of Budget Policy. Dickerson’s analysis was first delivered as part of the R Street Institute’s recent Virtual Federal Budget Reform Forum: Recommendations for Congress.

Dickerson points to four flaws in the baseline, three of which, in effect, make projected spending look much higher than it could otherwise be, and one of which makes tax revenues coming into the U.S. Treasury Department appear to be bigger than they actually are if Congress makes no changes in outlays or current law. The four flaws, according to Dickerson, include:

  • Discretionary appropriations are assumed to continue and grow with inflation each year. The result is a spending level authorized for one year for a specific program or agency which is assumed by CBO to continue throughout the 10-year period covered by the baseline.
  • Certain direct spending programs larger than $50 million are assumed to be extended beyond their statutory expiration. This means a program with an annual budget greater than $50 million is assumed by CBO to go on indefinitely until Congress acts to the contrary.
  • Entitlement programs are assumed to make all scheduled benefit payments, even if a program’s trust fundand financing are inadequate to do so. This means a program like Social Security and Medicare, which depend in great part upon trust funds — taxes paid into the system by employers, workers, and the self-employed — will continue paying full benefits using general revenues.
  • Excise taxes dedicated to a trust fund are assumed to be continued beyond their statutory expiration. Under current law, the federal government receives between $75 and $100 billion annually from excise levies on alcohol, gasoline, and tobacco products.

Together, the resulting bias “hides tens of trillions of dollars in spending in the baseline,” Dickerson contends. For example, of the $85 trillion in total spending the baseline projected for the 2025-2034 period, nearly 30%, or $25.5 trillion, is made up of spending not specifically authorized by Congress.

The EPIC analysis comes as Congress and Trump confront the reality that federal spending has increased more than 80% since 2015, zooming up from $5.01 trillion that year to $7.01 trillion in 2025. Entitlement spending on programs like Social Security and emergency spending related to the COVID-19 pandemic were the major drivers of the explosion in outlays.

The four flaws are included in CBO’s baseline budget tool due to requirements included in the 1985 Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control that was adopted in the first year of the second term of then-President Ronald Reagan. Legislation introduced in the 118th Congress by Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) — the No Bias in the Baseline Act — would eliminate all four of the flaws. The Virginia Republican is a member of the House Budget Committee.

Being in the center of controversy is a familiar position for CBO staffers. Most recently, House Republicans harshly criticized what they view as CBO’s chronically low projections of the positive economic impact of tax, regulation, and spending cuts at the federal level.

In its Concurrent Resolution on the 2025 Budget, for example, House Republicans noted one of the flaws pointed out by the EPIC analysis, noting that CBO “is obligated to produce an economic forecast that assumes an indefinite extension of current law, including the explosion of deficit and debt levels over the next decade. This is partly why CBO is forecasting average real Gross Domestic Policy (GDP) growth of just 2.0 percent over the next 10 years, well below the long-term trend of 3.1 percent in the United States.”

Similarly, in May 2025, when CBO released two analyses requested by House Democrats evaluating aspects of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) issued a sharply worded refutation.

“This is a smoke and mirrors tactic to try to deceive the American people into thinking that the One Big Beautiful Bill will benefit the top 10 percent at the expense of the bottom 10 percent. Ironically, the only thing Democrats are proving is that our policies are a massive success,” Arrington said.

“First, they’re not measuring economic benefits to low-income earners; they’re measuring federal resources distributed. For instance, there are fewer transfer payments to people on welfare if you prohibit illegal immigrants from accessing these programs and enact common sense work requirements to stop trapping people in dependence,” he continued.

“Second, when you allow Americans from every walk of life to keep more of their income, you lift millions out of poverty, just as we witnessed in President Trump’s first term. Democrats measure success by how many people are stuck on the welfare rolls; Republicans measure success by how many Americans are lifted off of them,” Arrington explained.

And Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who is also the number three ranking GOP member of the Senate Budget Committee, told the Senate in an April 2025 floor speech during debate on the OBBB that CBO’s baseline budget analysis incorrectly evaluates tax policies.

“There’s an inherent bias in Congress’s scoring process where tax policy is treated differently than spending policy. If tax rates are scheduled to increase, like they are right now if we don’t act, preventing that tax hike is counted as a ‘cost’ in uncollected future revenue. But many spending programs are assumed to be extended beyond their expiration, so the spending just continues and continues, unabated, which the budget rules say do not have any cost,” Crapo told colleagues on the Senate floor.

Spokesmen for Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chairman Arrington (did not respond to The Washington Stand’s request for comment. Also not responding were spokesmen for Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrats on the two congressional budget panels.

For all the controversy, Dickerson expressed optimism to TWS that needed changes are coming. “The CBO is an important resource for lawmakers. It can also be a source of frustration, particularly when CBO fails to be transparent about its scoring, assumptions, and biases. While Director Swagel has taken steps to improve CBO, more work remains to be done,” he said.

“There is significant interest on both sides of the aisle in addressing the shortcomings at CBO. The House Budget Committee has signaled that CBO oversight will be a major focus, including conducting regular oversight hearings and advancing the first-ever audit of CBO’s operations,” he added.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

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

Led by Johnson, House Completes Improbable Budgeting Sweep

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

Greenland, Venezuela, and the president’s spat with Canada may have stolen the world’s attention, but the real revelation may be what’s happening here at home. With the snow on its way and no time to spare, House Republicans accomplished what hasn’t been done since America’s top movie was “Titanic” and dial-up AOL was still cutting-edge technology: they finished a federal budget — just like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) promised they would.

For the Louisiana leader, witnessing history that hasn’t been made since 1997 had to be one of the most gratifying milestones of his speakership. With a majority as wide as a blade of grass, the idea that anyone — let alone this divided chamber — could put their heads down and unite long enough to do their most basic job is a colossal feat.

Johnson, the perennial underdog, cheered the achievement at a press conference Friday before members hit the road to beat the winter storm. “The naysayers said it couldn’t be done, but they were wrong. House Republicans just finished passing all 12 appropriations bills — restoring regular order, cutting spending, locking in Trump-era priorities, and ending Biden-era budgets. No omnibus. No backroom deals. Just hard work and results. Americans sent us here to fix Washington — and this is how it gets done. Huge credit to [Appropriations Chairman] Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and the House Appropriations team,” he said.

Holding signs that read “12 of 12!” the conservative crew that drove the effort took a victory lap. “We aren’t here for another stopgap or temporary fix,” Cole had insisted on the House floor before the final vote. “We are here to finish the job by providing full-year funding and closing out all 12 bills with certainty and direction. …These bills were written with those priorities in mind.”

When the herculean task was complete, something no oddsmaker would have predicted with Congress’s track record, Cole heaped praise on Johnson. “This speaker is the reason that these 12 bills happened,” Cole declared.

For Johnson, the vindication only builds on his already impressive legacy — not that the humble attorney would admit it. “This is a monumental achievement,” he agreed. “Despite the noise, despite our slim margins, despite the fact that most members in the House have never gone through a regular, member-driven appropriations process before, this team got it done,” he said.

Cole also touted the lower price tag of this year’s basket of funding. “Republicans set out to spend less — and total FY26 funding does just that.We committed to codifying DOGE cuts — and these bills cut waste and rein in government bloat.” He paused and added, “This is what responsible governance looks like. This measure is the product of sustained engagement and serious legislating. It advances reforms, delivers full-year funding, and reflects a Congress doing its job.”

In a rare spirit of compromise, several Democrats also joined the unlikely return to governing, supporting most packages by a surprising margin, messaging that they, too, had secured some wins. Even Democrat Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), ranking appropriator, cheered the passage. “We got the bills done, and we came out very well, and that should be proof enough that we need to make the process work,” she said.

For both sides, the eagerness to avoid another government shutdown was a powerful motivator after the political pain of last year’s. But they aren’t out of the woods yet.

The Senate, which spent the last 10 days in recess, will come back to a pile of work — and very little time to do it. Six of the 12 appropriations bills still need the chamber’s approval — including some of the most contentious budgets. But, as The Washington Times points out, Johnson did everything he could to lighten the load by splitting the six bills into two more manageable packages. With the January 30 deadline breathing down Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) neck, “Senators will have to take a big swing at passing all six bills before sending them to President Donald Trump’s desk,” Politico explains. But the fact that we’re even talking about that prospect, the outlet acknowledged, “would be a stunning feat for lawmakers and leadership — especially in such a bitterly divided Congress.”

Reflecting on last week, the speaker took his usual humble, future-looking posture. Sitting down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill,” he pointed to the high stakes of the election. “We must continue what we’ve been working on, continue to move forward. … We passed the House appropriations bills through the House … [in] regular order. [It’s the] first time in many years that’s happened,” he noted. “We’re rebuilding the muscle memory, as I like to say, and it’s a great advancement to returning power to the people and being better stewards of taxpayer funds.”

And yet, with 11 months until a very significant election, it’s still a daunting task to lead this group, Perkins noted. True, the speaker nodded. “But you know, Scripture says you don’t worry about tomorrow. You focus on the troubles of today because the day has enough. And we do that hour by hour, day by day, in faith and in prayer. We walk forward, we advance these priorities. … And we demonstrate day by day that we’re doing the right thing for the right reason. And I think the voters are going to reward that,” he predicted. “I don’t think they want the chaos and the communism that comes with today’s Democrat[ic] Party. I think they want us to continue to fulfill our promises. And that’s what we’ve done so far. That’s what we’ll do this year. And that will be rewarded at the ballot box.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

RELATED ARTICLE: Defense Watchdog’s Audit Finds 245% Increase in Remote DOD Workers after Biden Ordered Their Return to Offices

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

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

Is Somali Welfare Fraud Endemic?

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Just weeks after a bombshell report exposed billions of dollars of welfare fraud committed by Somali immigrants in deep-blue Minnesota, a new study is sounding the alarm on Somali overreliance on taxpayer-funded benefits.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), nearly 90% of Somali households with children in Minnesota receive welfare benefits. Over 80% of Somali immigrant households overall receive some form of welfare, including 54% on food stamps and nearly three-quarters (73%) on Medicaid, while 78% of Somali immigrant households who have been in the U.S. over 10 years receive welfare, compared to only 21% of native-born households.

Additionally, the CIS study found that while less than 20% of native-born adults live “in or near poverty,” over two-thirds (66.1%) of Somali immigrant adults live “in or near poverty,” as do over 80% of Somali immigrant children. Only 5% of native-born working-age adults hold no high school diploma, compared to over one third (39%) of Somali immigrant working-age adults, and while less than one percent (0.7%) of native-born working-age adults were categorized as speaking English “less than very well,” nearly 60% of Somali immigrant working-age adults fell into the category, as did nearly half (49%) of Somali immigrant working-age adults who have been in the U.S. at least 10 years.

“Among the strongest predictors of poverty are low education and lack of English-language ability,” wrote the study’s author, CIS Resident Scholar Jason Richwine. “Somali immigrants experience both of these problems at dramatically higher rates than native Minnesotans. Virtually all native Minnesotans speak English very well, for example, but 58.2 percent of working-age Somalis do not. Meanwhile, 39 percent of working-age Somalis have no high school diploma, compared to just 5 percent of natives,” he continued. “The U.S. has an extensive welfare system targeted at low-income families. Somalis in Minnesota are therefore likely to be major consumers of means-tested anti-poverty benefits…”

“Recently, some Somalis in Minnesota have been implicated in welfare fraud,” Richwine observed. “Over $1 billion has been reported stolen so far, but the scandal goes beyond money,” he added. “Minnesota’s social services have roots in the Scandinavian model, which assumes that civic-minded residents will treat aid as a safety net, not as money free for the taking. With fraud cases like these, it cannot be surprising when researchers find that culture clashes tend to degrade social trust,” Richwine pointed out. “That said, Somali welfare use would still be high even without fraud. Any population with poverty rates as high as theirs will legally qualify for extensive means-tested aid, either directly for themselves or indirectly through their U.S.-born dependents” (emphasis in original).

“The way to reduce immigrant consumption of welfare is not simply to crack down on fraud, but to reduce the number of new arrivals who have the low earnings power characteristic of Somalis,” Richwine suggested. “One of the main critiques of post-1965 immigration to the U.S. is that it has worsened the problems of poverty, school dropout, and welfare dependency. Allowing in immigrants who struggle with these problems adds to the social burden and makes helping impoverished Americans more difficult.”

The CIS report comes on the heels of an investigation by Christopher F. Rufo and Ryan Thorpe, published in City Journal, detailing widespread fraud and abuse of Minnesota’s “generous” welfare system by the state’s relatively large Somali population. Of the over $1 billion stolen through fraud schemes, several million dollars wound up being given to the Somalia-based terrorist group Al-Shabaab. “Our investigation shows what happens when a tribal mindset meets a bleeding-heart bureaucracy, when imported clan loyalties collide with a political class too timid to offend, and when accusations of racism are cynically deployed to shield criminal behavior,” Rufo and Thorpe wrote. “The predictable result is graft, with taxpayers left to foot the bill.”

According to the City Journal report, Somali immigrants in Minnesota set up fake businesses and organizations in order to collect welfare payments from housing, medical, and education programs. One Somali-run organization, the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, defrauded the Federal Child Nutrition Program of over $250 million, falsifying meal counts, doctoring attendance records, and fabricating invoices. Another Somali group would falsify autism diagnoses for Somali children in order to rob Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program of over $14 million. In the end, one in 16 Somali children in Minnesota was diagnosed (mostly fraudulently) with autism, rising to more than triple the state average. “What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never-ending,” said then-Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Joe Thompson. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor, and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fraud has not been relegated to Minnesota. Maine also hosts a relatively sizable Somali population and, according to an immigration nonprofit whistleblower, Somali immigrants have been defrauding the government there, too. Christopher Bernardini, former program coordinator of Gateway Community Services until April of this year, reported this week that Gateway Community Services, which describes itself as a “trusted resource for immigrant, refugee, and asylee communities across Greater Portland and Lewiston-Auburn” and largely serves Somali immigrants, charged taxpayers for field staff visits to low-income and disabled clients. Only those visits never occurred, Bernardini alleged.

“I just couldn’t fathom it — I thought we were helping people; I thought this was all on the up-and-up. I have a passion for helping people, and I thought that we were doing the right thing this whole time,” Bernardini said, adding that he was disheartened “when I saw how they were swindling people, when I had clients calling me to tell me their staff hadn’t shown up and I was told to bill those hours anyway. It just got worse and worse, until I started really putting up a stink.”

Gateway Community Services was founded by Abdullah Ali, a Somali immigrant who acts as the organization’s CEO and ran for president of the Somali state of Jubaland. According to the Maine Wire, Ali also raised funds for the Jubaland-Somali army, a Somali paramilitary organization.

In comments to The Washington Stand, CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan asserted, “This exposure of the massive fraud perpetrated by Somali immigrants in Minnesota has been shocking to many Americans. There have been reports of similar problems in Maine, which also has taken in a disproportionate number of Somali and other African immigrants.” She continued, “These incidents reveal a significant threat to not only loss of taxpayer-funded resources meant to assist needy Americans, but also to the integrity of our immigration programs, to public governance, and potentially to our national security.”

“Much of the millions of dollars lost in this fraud can never be recovered, as the funds were spent on luxury lifestyles, campaign contributions, and even sent abroad,” Vaughan averred. “It sucked away funding that could have been used to help real people who are struggling to support their families, instead of phantom clients of the bogus NGOs created for the scheme.” She noted that state officials in Minnesota also “stymied” investigations into the fraud, accusing those reporting the fraud and demanding accountability of racism. “This borders on outright corruption, and could signal a real erosion of ethical standards that are the hallmark of a civil and democratic society.”

“It should go without saying that American taxpayers do not want their hard-earned tax dollars earmarked for local poverty programs to become cash cows for the exploits of Third World war lords,” Vaughan added. “This episode should cause Americans to think twice about allowing mass flows of largely un-vettable immigrants from unstable, hostile, and corrupt parts of the world to enter our country and establish ethnic enclaves where they are resistant to engaging with or assimilating into the host community,” she elucidated. “Our legal immigration programs need to be updated to reflect the realities of our modern world, and to focus on admitting only those immigrants who will be self-sufficient and contribute to our country.”

Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told TWS, “Americans have lived the consequences of Milton Friedman’s warning that a country ‘cannot have open borders and a welfare state.’ It is why Americans voted for President Trump last year — to bring an end to the Biden administration’s madness.” She charged, “American taxpayers deserve to have all that stolen money clawed back.”

“In addition to the billions in welfare fraud discovered in Minnesota, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have investigated and uncovered significant immigration benefit fraud in the Minneapolis area, including marriage fraud, sponsor fraud, and fraudulent documentation,” Ries continued, noting that she “encountered Somali asylum fraud in immigration court” during her time in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Benefit fraud — whether it is welfare or immigration — makes an alien deportable. Every alien who has committed fraud should be deported.”

Multiple reports over the years have warned that Somali immigrants were likely to defraud U.S. government programs, including the immigration system itself. In November of 2008, shortly before then-President George W. Bush left office, the U.S. State Department confirmed that “refugees” from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Liberia were obtaining refugee status and residence in the U.S. fraudulently. The “P-3” refugee program, which allows refugees to seek refugee status for their spouses, unmarried children, and parents, began requiring DNA tests to ensure blood relation between refugees in the U.S. and dependents being brought into the country via the program. The State Department was “only able to confirm all claimed biological relationships in fewer than 20% of cases…” Between 2003 and 2008, when Bush halted the program due to widespread fraud and abuse, over 95% of refugees in the program came from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Liberia. The P-3 program was restarted in 2012 under then-President Barack Obama.

Former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) legal advisor Charles Thaddeus Fillinger wrote a 30-page brief in 2018 characterizing the P-3 program as “the greatest refugee fraud crisis in modern times” and “possibly the biggest blunder in immigration history.” Although Fillinger admitted that the Obama-era restart improved screening in the program, he warned, “Left unresolved was the issue of thousands of fraudulent refugees who were admitted to the United States before the suspension. In contravention of clear principle, solid evidence, and direct experience, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) continued to use the wrong screening strategy to process the pre-suspension P-3 caseload.” He continued, “Yesterday’s fraudulent refugees became today’s green card holders,

international travelers using refugee travel documents, and U.S. citizens.”

“There were other follow-on consequences,” Fillinger noted. “First, fraud of this magnitude multiplies the chances of terror. Second, significant numbers of human trafficking victims, mostly women and children, were not identified because of deficient screening. Third, legions of fraudulently-admitted refugees took full advantage of public assistance benefits.”

A more recent report, penned by Somali immigrant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, explained the widespread fraud as a product of Somali culture. “I grew up in a Somali clan-based society [where] [l]oyalty to kin was absolute. Loyalty to the nation was theoretical at best,” Ali wrote. “Anyone who knows Somali culture has long known where this would lead.” She continued:

“Amoral familism is a cultural blueprint. It assumes that resources are scarce, the world is dangerous, and survival depends on extracting maximum benefit for one’s own family. Nation-building makes no sense from that perspective. If a road is built, the question is not ‘How will this help the community?’ but ‘Which family will control access to it?’ If foreign aid arrives, the question is not how to distribute it fairly, but which family will claim control. This mindset explains why Somalia collapsed. It explains the dysfunction in Afghanistan, Haiti, and parts of North and West Africa. It explains why Minnesota now faces problems it can’t make sense of, let alone solve.”

President Donald Trump “grasps the central problem. The left does not. The moderate right refuses to,” Ali wrote. “If Minnesota wants a future that resembles Minnesota, it must make a choice. Assimilation or fracture. Cultural cohesion or cultural evasion.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

RELATED ARTICLES:

Stephen Miller Says Somali Fraud Scandal Could Create Unprecedented Milestone In US History

Senate Fraud Hearing Displays How Trump Derangement Syndrome Blinds Dems to Deep Corruption in Federal Contracting

White House Posts Proof Ilhan Oma Married Her Brother

RELATED VIDEO: Somali Muslim Hasan Mohamed to ICE agents: ‘You’re gonna get popped next time I see you’

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

Partner with The Washington Stand to bring news from a biblical worldview to readers nationwide. From now until December 31, every gift will be doubled through our year-end Challenge Match.

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.

GOP Looks to Reform Obamacare Subsidies, Address Fraud with New Legislation

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

With COVID-era Obamacare subsidies set to expire on December 31, Republicans in Congress are considering legislation that would help ease the rising costs of health care for millions of Americans. Meanwhile, experts and some lawmakers are warning that blanket subsidy expansions will only add to ballooning government debt and will not address the underlying reasons behind the continued rise in health care costs or the vast number of fraudulent Obamacare payouts.

As reported by Punchbowl News, several GOP health care proposals are currently circulating on Capitol Hill. One from Senators Bernie Moreno (Ohio) and Susan Collins (Maine) “would cap income eligibility and eliminate zero-premium plans by requiring a $25 minimum monthly payment.” Another plan from Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) would “expand HSA options.” Yet another from Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) would divert funds away from insurance companies and “ensure support to Americans is sent to them directly” through “HSA-style Trump Health Freedom Accounts.” Punchbowl reported that Scott’s plan has gained some momentum in the House through Republican Study Committee Chair August Pfluger’s (R-Texas) backing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reportedly plans to move a health care bill to the floor at some point this week, but a battle among GOP factions will likely brew over whether or not to extend Obamacare subsidies in the legislation.

Meanwhile, outrage continues to grow over the revelations that enormous amounts of Obamacare application fraud have occurred over the last several years, resulting in billions of dollars in illicit payouts. As reported by The Washington Stand, incomes weren’t verified for tens of thousands of Obamacare enrollees, resulting in over $21 billion in illicit payouts in 2023 alone, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. In addition, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board noted that “6.4 million people this year were improperly enrolled in subsidized ObamaCare plans, costing taxpayers $27 billion.”

“Republicans would be wise to remind voters that Democrats sold ObamaCare on false pretenses — e.g., it would make healthcare “affordable,’” the editors continued. “Extending the subsidies would perpetuate that fraud.”

Lawmakers like Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) agree.

“A clean extension of cost would be $400 billion,” he pointed out during Friday’s “Washington Watch.” “I think our viewers really need to understand that this is a ticking time bomb set forth by Obamacare. … [W]e’ve kept subsidizing during this entire time the health insurance industry, which is where the rise in premiums is primarily coming from. Health care costs have increased, there’s no doubt about that. But what we’re doing here is continuing to subsidize a very, very profitable health insurance industry. I think since Obamacare started, they’ve earned over $360 billion in profit alone. … What we need to do is a scaled-down response, one that’s going to be tapered out, along with other reforms that actually lower the cost of health care.”

Murphy, a former surgeon with over 30 years of experience, went on to argue that federal aid for health care coverage should be provided, but with significant reforms.

“I think there has to be a glide path,” he contended. “I think it’s bad for the American people to just immediately stop these subsidies. Remember, this is only about anywhere from eight to 12 million people. … And so we’re dealing with a fairly small population, but that fairly small population would be left out in the lurch. So what we’re talking about is scaling back the fraud. You’ve had up to six to 12 million individuals who’ve been on these plans that have never filed as claims, so we think that they’ve been fraudulently enrolled. … And the other thing is we’ve had individuals that have been paying nothing. We need individuals to pay something to register in with the system, be it $5 a month [or] 2% of their income to pay something … to be in this.”

Murphy further ticked off a number of GOP priorities that he hopes will be included in future health care reform legislation.

“[W]e have individuals in some places in this country earning $500 [to] $600,000 that are getting subsidies from the government. Those need to go away,” he emphasized. “… [W]e’re going to need to include things that start lowering the cost of care. Now, [with] Obamacare, the insurance companies did not want competition, so they outlawed something called associated insurance plans, where groups of individuals can get together and insure themselves. They didn’t want that competition. Democrats don’t want that, but we’re going to make sure that that gets put in the bill. … [P]harmacy benefit managers (PBM) reform, … site neutrality, CON reform, a lot of different things need to happen, whether they’ll be included this bill or not, but it will be part of a big initiative next year to actually lower the cost of health care.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Poll Finds Most Americans Still Don’t Know Abortion Pills Cause Most U.S. Abortions

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

Partner with The Washington Stand to bring news from a biblical worldview to readers nationwide. From now until December 31, every gift will be doubled through our year-end Challenge Match.

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.

Measure That Reopened Government Also Approved More Than 800 New Earmarks

/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

An earmark sending $375,000 to a Massachusetts dance festival launched in 1933 as “a kind of early gay utopia” is one of 862 earmarks valued at $2.4 billion included in the measure approved earlier this month by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump to end the record-breaking government shutdown.

Sponsored by Massachusetts Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, the earmark “is for K-12 students in the Berkshires to visit Jacob’s Pillow and learn about Biology, Math and Spanish through ‘choreography, kinesthetic intelligence, and critical and imaginative thinking,’” according to Open the Books, an Illinois-based non-profit government watchdog.

Earmarks are spending provisions inserted in unrelated legislation by individual senators and representatives without a vote on its merits. For many years, earmarks were sources of corruption as members used them to send tax dollars to family members, former staffers, business partners, campaign contributors, special interest groups, and others.

But thanks mainly to the efforts of former Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who exposed the costly, earmark-funded “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska in the early 2000s, Congress abandoned the practice in 2011. Coburn, who was known among his Senate colleagues as “Dr. No,” famously described earmarks as “the gateway drug to ‘Congressional Spending Addiction.” John Hart, who was then Coburn’s communications director, is now president of Open the Books.

The temptation to bring earmarks back proved too strong, however, and in 2022, majorities of both political parties in the Senate and House voted to restore earmarks, rechristened as “congressionally directed spending” and with certain reforms advocates claimed would assure no corruption.

The November 12 shutdown-ending measure only reopened the government at 2025 spending levels. Congress now has until Jan. 30, 2026, to approve a full budget for the year and avoid another costly shutdown. Three of the 12 major appropriation bills have been approved, and the remaining nine include “2,381 Senate earmarks worth another $4.7 billion and 4,408 House earmarks worth $6 billion, for a total of $10.7 billion more taxpayer dollars being considered for pet projects, according to Open the Books.

The Warren-Markey dance studio earmark supports a dance festival started by Ted Shawn and the Dance Men, according to the studio’s website. “The tall and burly Shawn and his athletic dancers were intent on challenging the image of men in dance; they forged a new, boldly muscular style while also raising their own food and constructing buildings still in use today at the Pillow,” the website explains.

The Massachusetts Democrats are not unique in using tax dollars to support controversial art projects. Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) is behind a $100,000 earmark to support the Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

“The theatre, a self-proclaimed ‘strong proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ is perhaps best known for its play Moby Dick: Then and Now, which replaces the white whale in the original novel with cocaine. Other plays include The Spirit Warrior’s Dream,” according to Open the Books. “Set in a future where America has shrunk into a single city because of climate change, the play features a protagonist who ‘believes that the America of the past is a failed idea.’ The play’s author, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, explained, ‘I thought I was writing fiction, but now, this s**t is really happening!’” Democrats are not alone in earmarking. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), together with co-sponsors Maryland Democratic senators Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks, pushed three earmarks worth a total of $1.5 million to support horse-assisted therapy.

“The Senate, to its credit, did manage to remove thousands of earmarks from members’ original requests. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) asked for 241 earmarks worth $936 million, which would have been the largest request from a single Senator since at least 2021 — and likely in all of U.S. history. Only 88 of them made it into the final appropriations bills,” Open the Books reported.

“Other senators had eye-popping requests that were also cut down. It remains unclear just how many because the Senate Appropriations Committee refused to provide members’ original earmark requests in machine-readable format, despite multiple requests from Open the Books,” the watchdog said.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Bureaucratization Of Everything Hitting Americans Where It Hurts The Most

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.

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

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

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.

RELATED VIDEOS:

Criminal Illegal Alien Lina Maria Orovio-Hernandez received MORE THAN $400,000 in stolen federal benefits

CNN’s Dana Bash Tries to Corner Tom Homan on “Alligator Alcatraz” — Instantly Regrets It

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

/in , , , , , , , , /by

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

/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

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.

Like what you’re reading? Donate to The Washington Stand! From now until June 30, your gift will be doubled to fuel bold, biblically-based reporting.

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

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

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?

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

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

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

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.

RELATED VIDEOS:

Trump Crushes Globalization: Unleashes Fear in the Elite, Champions the Forgotten

Crowd Goes Silent When Elon Musk EXPOSES new report sent to Trump and Pam Bondi

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

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Kids Are All Right: Why Young Men Are Embracing the Political Right

‘Religious Switching’ or Religious Rejection? A Wake-Up Call for the Church

‘A Mercy Moment’: Is There a Revival Brewing on Ivy League Campuses?

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’

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

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

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Transportation Dept Reviewing Grants Funding DEI, Green New Deal Initiatives

Columbia University Caves to Trump Pressure, Disciplines Agitators for 2024 Building Occupation

Trump Cuts Off Student Loan Forgiveness to LGBTQ Activists, Open Borders Groups, and Terrorists

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.