Press Releases

On the rescissions package:

“Obviously there’s a lot of work we need to do. One out of five dollars that the government spends is borrowed, so we’ve got a lot of things we need to look at. As you said, the rescissions package here was the first time in decades that a president has requested that discretionary spending be pulled back. That, ‘Hey, we don’t need to spend everything that was appropriated a year or longer ago, and focus on specific areas.’

“If you look through what’s in that rescissions package, the things that we were particularly pulling out, things like funding for NPR. They wanted to fund drag queen programs for children and programs talking about animals need to have their own pronouns … PBS had programs talking about white privilege. 

“We all heard earlier this year all of the horror stories coming out of USAID in terms of the money that was being wasted around the world. Things like $3 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam and $70,000 for a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion musical in Ireland. I don’t know why Ireland would want to have a DEI musical, but, if they do, the Irish taxpayers ought to pay for it and not American taxpayers. 

“It’s great to do this rescissions package. [I was] glad to hear Speaker Johnson reiterate today that we need to be doing more of this as we look at all of the discretionary spending that comes out of the federal government, and what do we do going forward. We’ve got a lot of work to do, not just on a discretionary side with rescissions, but obviously some of those automatic spending programs as well.”

On other areas of the federal government that may be right for rescissions:

“When we look across the discretionary course, the spending has grown so great since before Covid. If you look at going back to I believe 2019, our tax revenue has gone up. It’s gone up 46% or so, so we’ve got a lot more tax revenue coming in after we passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. 

“What we’ve seen is spending’s gone up 70%. Some of that was temporary spending, or should have been temporary spending in Covid, but now it’s gotten baked in and it’s continued on grant programs and other areas across multiple programs. We’ve got so many programs at the federal level that are redundant. You may have four or five different programs in two or three different agencies that are designed to target the same issue. So we’ve got lots of areas to look at that. 

“DOGE did a great effort earlier this year in identifying some of those areas, but we need to have a constant look at that in terms of where do we spend money, where should we be spending money, and does it make sense to spend dollars at this point, particularly when we’re borrowing one out of five dollars that’s being spent.”

On the tone of Democrats’ messaging to their voter base:

“[Democrats] really are [tone deaf.] They don’t have a positive message. They don’t have something that they want America to be for. Basically the Democrat party has become a party of socialists. They’re looking at, ‘How can they make the government spend and dictate what other people do?’ 

“For example, we look at the One Big, Beautiful Bill, I could talk about so many great provisions there. But their message out of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, that they oppose, is because they wanted to make sure that illegal immigrants got Medicaid. They wanted to make sure that people didn’t have to work at all for the Medicaid dollars that would be given to them to provide for their healthcare, [for] even as little as 20 hours a week, working in a job or getting an education or even in a volunteer role. And so, as they get more strident trying to talk against commonsense things, the American public is turning against them. 

“When you look at the polling data that’s out there right now, of all Americans, [there is] 72% opposition to Democrats and the positions they’re taking in Congress. Even among Democrats, there’s a majority, 52% of Democrats are not happy that Democrats in Congress are not doing what should be done for America.”

On Congressman Estes’ op-ed on the One Big, Beautiful Bill:

“We talk a lot about the One Big, Beautiful Bill. There’s just so much positive things in there. A lot of it was centered around the tax provisions that we needed to extend after 2017, that were going to expire this year, and the results of provisions around border security and defense. But if you really peel some of the layers back and look at some of the details, there's a whole lot of pro-family and pro-life provisions in there. 

“What we really wanted to do is make sure that, for example, Medicaid funding was used not by Planned Parenthood to provide abortions. I mean we should have Medicaid to actually help people preserve and protect life and not end it. We wanted to make sure that families could raise their children … So we focused on increasing the Child Tax Credit for families and indexing it for inflation. We increased a tax credit for adoption for people to adopt families. That’s so important now when we see the birth rate dropping down to 11.7% per thousand. We need to have a continual growth in population to make sure that America continues to grow. 

“You look at provisions like employer-funded childcare provisions. We wanted to make sure those were available. Permanent family and medical leave to help people who maybe have a temporary illness or an issue with their family. We wanted to make sure after these disastrous years of Bidenflation that people were able to raise their families and have the income to provide for their family.”