Much is being made of Republicans clawing back $9 billion in federal spending. Let’s be honest, while that is good, it is not big. Having been an oversight investigator and cost cutter for Gingrich, who pushed recissions, this is symbolic.
Fact One: The Republican Congress last week passed a recissions bill – first in years – that cut unspent money for USAID and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which runs progressive NPR and PBS. That is good.
Fact Two: Truth is that the waste, fraud, abuse, misuse, and anti-American programming at these agencies should have been cut long ago.
Fact Three: Two U.S. Senators, Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Collins (R-Maine), did not go along with reclaiming that unspent money, arguing congressional authority. The argument that unspent money should be spent…is not a winner.
Fact Four: Many in the country – including these two Senators – want more transparency in how cuts happen. Truth is, Trump is operating legally under Article II, just as Ronald Reagan pushed DOGE cuts, Democrats then agreeing.
Fact Five: This $9 billion “reclaimed” or “rescinded” is just .02 percent of the federal debt, and just .56 percent of the annual federal appropriations. In other words, this is hardly spatter from a droplet of the federal expenditure level.
Fact Six: The level of waste, fraud, abuse, misuse, and misapplication of federal monies – remember five years of my life were as one of Congress’s top investigators of fraud – is a mountain to this $9 billion molehill.
That amount is one-quarter the cost of the Navy’s P8 Poseidon surveillance planes, one-fifth the Trident missile or V-22 Osprey programs, a seventh of the Navy’s F-18 E/F Super Hornet program. It is a small step, not a giant leap.
Fact Seven: From 1974 to 2000, Congress has only accepted $25 billion of a total, much under Reagan and Trump, of $76 billion in recommended rescissions. In that context, this is a highly symbolic, historically large bill, but more needs doing.
Fact Eight: President Trump wants to start with $165 billion in rollbacks for 2025, more in succeeding years. Reality is, we do not need much of what the bloated federal bureaucracies at Education, Housing, and State spend, so cuts are fitting.
Fact Nine: Even decades of cuts will only gradually reduce our Nation’s unprecedented, growing, high-interest $37 trillion in federal debt, costing us every day, slowing growth, pushing inflation, eroding global confidence.
Fact Ten: The idea of deep cuts in unwanted, unaffordable, wasteful, frequently misguided, unjustified, and unmonitored – often corrupt – bureaucracy is not only right at the federal level: It must be done at the state level also.
Fact Eleven: Maine recently had an audit that showed $2.1 billion in “questionable” contracts, sole source, no competition, given to friends and family of Democrat bureaucrats and politicians. Maine needs deep cuts too.
Bottom line: Federal spending needs to be cut, more claw-backs. Unaccountable government is immoral, runs amok, wastes, unreported corruption, spends what regular people earn and need to keep. As Maine’s next Governor, I will stop overspending, claw-back waste, and give what we get back to Mainers.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).
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