Democrats’ push to massively expand Medicaid over the past several years has turned the program into something nearly unrecognizable.
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As Elon Musk and his tech team urge their fellow Americans to become “domestic auditors” to help rein in federal spending, people have been encouraged to use the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov website to identify and track government finance.
But usaspending.gov is wrong on the biggest picture, RealClearInvestigations found.
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As the Trump administration is homing in on how trillions of tax dollars are being misspent, the Government Accountability Office is set to report to Congress about wasteful spending in Medicaid, improper payments to federal program beneficiaries, and outdated information technology systems.
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The Trump administration is moving to take back $20 billion for a green grantmaking program that the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rushed to obligate in its final days.
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It was President Ronald Reagan who famously said, “as government expands, liberty contracts.”
Like with so many other things, Reagan was ahead of his time with this commonsense observation. A vast unchecked bureaucracy is indeed a direct assault on individual liberty — and tens of millions of Americans are adversely affected by it each and every day.
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Tennessee U.S. Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) said he would like to see the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) come out “guns blazing” to identify and cut wasteful federal spending.
Burchett was appointed last week to serve on the U.S. House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency.
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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the federal government’s budget will have a deficit of $1.9 trillion in Fiscal Year 2025, which runs from October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025.
Furthermore, it predicts that the deficit will continue to increase. CBO says that by FY 2035, the federal government’s budget deficit will be $2.7 trillion.
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) met with billionaire Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy on Capitol Hill on Thursday to discuss how the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will work to root out and cut unnecessary spending within the federal government.
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The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the incoming Trump administration is accepting applications for individuals looking to root out unnecessary spending in government.
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President Joe Biden’s State Department paid a public university to train a cohort of “master trainers” in India who will then go on to train more than two thousand people to become “LGBTQI+ allies,” according to a government spending database.
Washington State University received (WSU) $15,000 from the State Department in July 2023 to hold a three-day workshop aimed at training 30 individuals with the goal of them eventually training 2,500 people to become “LGBTQI+ allies” and to develop a “better understanding of diversity and inclusion,” according to a federal spending database. The trainings took place in India between Sept. 25 and Sept. 27, according to the university website.
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Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, guest host Aaron Gulbransen welcomed Mayor Glenn Jacobs of Knox County to the newsmaker line to give his stance on the Second Amendment and the out of control federal spending.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
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Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael and attorney Gino Bulso in studio to discuss the important piece of legislation signed into the law by Governor Bill Lee yesterday regarding the 10th Amendment
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
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The dust has barely settled from the contentious midterms, and the battle lines are already being drawn for the next legislative fight in Washington: the debt ceiling. With the nation at unprecedented levels of indebtedness, the choice in this fight is a stark one: a path toward stability or fiscal Armageddon.
If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the following facts about America’s finances.
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Tennessee leadership approved $115.5 million more in federal spending on projects related to coronavirus recovery.
Tennessee’s Financial Stimulus Accountability Group approved funding for several projects, including more than $51 million to purchase a new retirement management computer program, $32.2 million toward a new Food and Animal Sciences Center at Tennessee State University and $19.4 million to increase the child-care capacities of programs for the Department of Human Services.
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Wednesday morning on The John Fredericks Show, host Fredericks welcomed (R-VA-8) Morgan Griffith to the show to discuss the southern border crisis, inflation, and the Putin blame game.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed David Williams, head of Taxpayer Protection Alliance to discuss out-of-control inflation and who is responsible for it.
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Inflation is running rampant, federal spending is out of control, gas prices are at an all-time high and Americans are pessimistic on the future outlook of the economy. So what is President Joe Biden’s solution?
He has released a budget proposal that includes 36 tax increases on families and businesses totaling $2.5 trillion over the next decade. Alarmingly, this includes 11 tax increases on the oil and gas industry, taxes that will put a burden on households.
The budget doesn’t even include all the tax increases being pushed by Democrats because the budget omits the cost of tax increases within their stalled multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better Act. Instead of detailing these tax increases, the Biden budget includes a placeholder asserting that any new spending will be fully offset.
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Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers updated residents of the state on his latest efforts to spend more than $4 billion given to the state from coronavirus relief funds.
According to the governor, $1.3 billion has been directed to economic initiatives, roughly $1 billion for “community building,” and more than $500 million for education and child care.
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After its major cities raked in more than six billion dollars from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan for COVID-19 relief, Ohio will once again be flush with federal cash.
The state is expected to receive more than$10 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is meant to be spent on rebuilding roads, bridges and other public structures, according to reports.
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Tense negotiations have continued for months on Democrats’ proposed several trillion dollars in federal spending, leading to major changes for the plan. Notably, Democrats now say the $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure”plan will likely end up closer to $2 trillion, though that figure still remains too high for many lawmakers.
At the same time, President Joe Biden has still been unable to rally Congress around a method to actually pay for the proposal, which Biden claims will add nothing to the national debt.
Democrats’ separate, roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill appeared set to pass in recent weeks, but some progressive Democrats withheld their support fearing that giving up their votes would cost them leverage in making sure the larger reconciliation bill is passed and signed into law.
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This week’s Golden Horseshoe goes to a broad sweep of federal agencies for a systemic lack of transparency that is hampering efforts to monitor many billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief spending, according to a report by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.
The PRAC was established in 2020 by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to “promote transparency and conduct and support oversight” of more than $5 trillion in pandemic relief funds.
In a report released Wednesday, the watchdog details its difficulty in determining how funds are being spent due to federal agencies’ poor reporting on the government spending website, USAspending.gov.
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Over the course of the pandemic, federal overspending has exploded even by Congress’s lofty standards. While trillion-dollar deficits were a cause for concern before 2020, spending over just the last two years is set to increase the national debt by over $6 trillion. It’s bizarre, then, that the only thing that members of opposing parties in Congress can seem to work together on is fooling the budgetary scorekeepers with phantom offsets for even more spending.
In total, the bipartisan infrastructure deal includes around $550 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure to take place over five years. Advocates of the legislation claim that it is paid for, but they are relying on gimmicks and quirks of the budget scoring process to make that claim.
Take the single biggest offset claimed — repurposing unused COVID relief funds, which the bill’s authors say would “raise” $210 billion (particularly considering that at least $160 billion have already been accounted for in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline). Only in the minds of Washington legislators does this represent funds ready to be used when the national debt stands at over $28 trillion.
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As the U.S. Senate prepared to approve a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill Friday, Congressman Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN-3) advised against expanding the legislation to include non-infrastructure spending at an added cost of over $2 trillion at least.
The bill passed by a vote of 66 to 28, with 16 Republicans joining all Democrats in favor.
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Wildly excessive federal spending is causing major inflation and shortages, which may lead to a recession and perhaps a financial crisis. Despite the evidence of inflation, Congress is proposing to spend $3.5 trillion on top of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill passed earlier this year and the intended $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. For comparison, federal revenue is only expected to be $3.8 trillion this year.
Evidently, the Democratic Party and President Joe Biden have adopted Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to the peril of every American citizen. MMT, which is similar to Keynesian economics, says that the U.S. should not be constrained by revenues in federal government spending since the government is the monopoly issuer of the U.S. dollar. MMT is a destructive myth that provides cover for excessive government spending. And it’s not modern, since reckless government spending has been around for thousands of years.
Embracing MMT is similar to providing whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. We know the outcomes will not be good.
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As President Joe Biden promotes his several trillion dollars in proposed federal spending, Republicans and small businesses are raising the alarm, arguing the taxes needed to pay for those spending plans are a threat to the economy.
The House Ways and Means Committee met Thursday to discuss infrastructure development and in particular the impact of proposed tax increases to pay for it. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, the ranking member on the committee, argued that only 7% of Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill goes to infrastructure and that raising taxes would incentivize employers to take jobs overseas.
“As bad as the wasteful spending is, worse yet, it’s poisoned with crippling tax increases that sabotage America’s jobs recovery, hurts working families and Main Street businesses, and drives U.S. jobs overseas,” Brady said. “We cannot fund infrastructure on the backs of American workers.”
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As the U.S. climbs out of a once-in-a-century pandemic, rising prices have led to increasing worry that rapid inflation could be just over the horizon.
Americans have already witnessed higher prices in the past few months, with everything from gasoline to lumber to basic home items jumping in cost. The increases, partially fueled by non-existent interest rates and record government spending, could lead to inflation that the U.S. has not seen in decades, experts say.
“In the short term, consumers can expect to see rising prices across the board,” Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a columnist at The Washington Post, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I expect in the next few months people will be getting sticker shocked in virtually all aspects of their life.”
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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed President of the Independent Women’s Forum Carrie Lukas to the newsmakers line to explain her article in Newsweek which defines the problems for parents in Joe Biden’s American Families Plan.
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The federal budget deficit hit an all-time high of $3.1 trillion in the 2020 budget year, more than double the previous record, as the coronavirus pandemic shrank revenues and sent spending soaring.
The Trump administration reported Friday that the deficit for the budget year that ended on Sept. 30 was three times the size of last year’s deficit of $984 billion. It was also $2 trillion higher than the administration had estimated in February, before the pandemic hit.
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The U.S. budget deficit hit an all-time high of $3 trillion for the first 11 months of this budget year, the Treasury Department said Friday.
The ocean of red ink is a product of the government’s massive spending to try to cushion the impact of a coronavirus-fueled recession that has cost millions of jobs.
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The U.S. national debt now exceeds the size of America’s total gross domestic product and the milestone may have been met as early as June, according to a Friday New York Times report.
America’s federal debt stands at around $26.6 trillion — an approximate $7 trillion increase since 2016, according to fiscal data from the Treasury Department. Total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) was just over $19.4 trillion at the end of June, according to a July 30 release from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
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