|
Dear Friend –
Should projects paid for with your tax dollars include a public price tag?
Let me know what you think:
Call it SwineCraft. Pigs were trained to play video games…with your tax dollars.
More money was sunk into creating a giant underwater touchscreen that can be used to play games like Whack-a-Mole…for dolphins!
When it comes to spending in Washington, it’s all fun and games.
Wasting is your money is literally a joke to the Senate Majority Leader, who just announced another $400,000 will be spent on a comedy center in his home state of New York. They’re laughing all the way to the bank…at taxpayers’ expense.
There’s nothing funny about it, especially when you consider the government is more than $31 trillion in debt and the Senate is doing absolutely nothing to trim Washington’s out-of-control spending, which is infested with waste.
Like the millions of dollars being spent by multiple agencies to cook up crickets and other creepy critters into edible insect entrees for human consumption. Bug Appétit!
Unexplainable expenditures like these really bug taxpayers, yet they keep popping up because no one really knows where the trillions of dollars being doled out every year by Washington are actually going. And that is entirely intentional.
Biden’s budgeting is a lot like Whack-a-Mole. He keeps digging the country deeper in the hole while doing everything he can—including ignoring the law—to hide Washington’s waste so it doesn’t get whacked.
A law passed over a decade ago requiring that taxpayers be given a list of every single government program with the cost of each has still not been completed.
Likewise, another provision mandating that many of the projects paid for with your tax dollars include a public price tag disclosing the cost is also not being enforced.
And a law I authored requiring every infrastructure project that is behind schedule or $1 billion over budget be publicly disclosed is—you probably guessed it—behind schedule and still not completed.
How can we eliminate what we can’t even see?
For these reasons, I am giving my March 2023 Squeal Award to President Biden for keeping taxpayers in the dark about how he is spending your money.
And since this is Sunshine Week, the annual celebration of openness in government, I am introducing legislation to shine more light on Washington’s spending decisions. My Cost Openness and Spending Transparency (COST) Act will require all projects paid for with your tax dollars to display the costs. To make sure that happens, projects would be regularly reviewed and taxpayers themselves would be provided a process to squeal on those who may still be trying to play hide-and-seek with how they are spending your money.
Squeal Award: President Biden
For more updates on what's happening in Washington, D.C. and Iowa, be sure to 'Like' my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and Instagram @SenJoniErnst, and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Thank you!
|