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President Donald Trump entered the Oval Office on a mission to reduce waste in the federal budget — what I call “spending porn.”
He’s made a great start through the early work of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
There’s a problem, though.
While the president can temporarily pause much bloated spending through executive orders, only a vote of Congress can make those cuts permanent.
The Senate should pounce on this opportunity like a ninja. But the clock is ticking: My colleagues and I have only 10 days before our first chance slips away.
The Trump administration has already identified a breathtaking amount of waste.
Under former President Joe Biden, our federal government agreed to spend $3 million on an Iraqi version of “Sesame Street,” $3 million on circumcisions and vasectomies in Zambia, $500,000 on electric buses in Rwanda and $67,000 to feed insect powder to children in Madagascar.
You read that right. Insect powder.
It wasn’t all bugs, though. A group of male prostitutes in Haiti got $3.6 million to run free pastry-cooking classes, cyber cafés and “dance focus groups.”
These spending decisions make Americans want to jump out of a moving car.
Biden bureaucrats also approved over $1.1 billion to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed nonprofit that provides grants to National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, and their affiliates.
There may have been a time decades ago when Americans needed public broadcasting to get the news. Today, Americans have thousands of free news and entertainment options — yet only NPR and PBS get $1.1 billion from taxpayers.
When a country has racked up more than $36 trillion in debt, choosing to fund unneeded and biased public broadcasting is cell-deep stupid.
Biden’s spending decisions weren’t just wasteful; they were dangerous.
For example, his government agreed to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the World Health Organization, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Each of these entities has used taxpayer dollars to harm American interests.
The WHO parroted Chinese Communist Party talking points during the coronavirus pandemic, putting American lives at risk.
The UN Human Rights Council granted membership to China, Russia, Venezuela, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and several other authoritarian countries that hate America.
UNWRA is the worst offender. Its officials have had ties to Hamas for years. A dozen UNWRA staff members allegedly participated in the Oct. 7 attacks that resulted in the murders of more than 40 Americans.
Yet the UN continues to collect American tax dollars while funding UNWRA.
Congress isn’t blameless in this spending mess. The national debt doesn’t hit $36 trillion without the legislature’s complicity.
However, Congress only allocates money into general funding buckets for the president’s team to distribute. We don’t always get to pick which programs receive funding.
No member of Congress voted to spend $4.4 million on the Melanesian Youth Climate Corps.
Nor did we approve spending $833,000 on services for transgender people, sex workers and their clients in Nepal.
The Biden administration made those decisions — and the American people thoroughly rejected them in November.
Trump delivered on his promises to expose the spending porn in Washington. Now, Congress must get off the sidelines.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the Executive Branch to spend the money Congress allocates each year — even though Congress allocated that money when Biden was in office and Democrats controlled the Senate.
The only way a new administration can permanently halt previously appropriated spending is if the president asks Congress to rescind that money.
President Trump did just that. In his initial rescission request, made in May, he asked Congress to rescind roughly $8.3 billion from wasteful foreign-aid programs and $1.1 billion from public broadcasting.
All the president is asking us to do is cut the spending porn from the budget.
The House of Representatives already approved these spending cuts. It’s the Senate’s turn now — and we must move quickly: The Impoundment Control Act only gives Congress 45 days to approve a rescission request.
We need to get this to the president’s desk by July 18.
If my colleagues still think this spending is necessary, they should vote no on his request.
But here on planet Earth, the American people know they could be spending this money far better than the deeply weird, woke bureaucrats they’ve already voted out of office.
John Kennedy represents Louisiana in the US Senate.