For Immediate Release
Contact: Curtis Kalin 202-467-5318

March 23, 2018
 

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) President Tom Schatz issued the following statement after Congress passed and President Trump signed into law the gigantic, deficit-busting 2,232-page fiscal year 2018 omnibus spending bill:

“Instead of living up to their promises to taxpayers, members of Congress completely ignored any impulse of fiscal responsibility, while voting to give themselves a pay raise.  The fact that lawmakers had less than 24 hours to review the 2,232-page bill was an outrage.  In the House, members would have had ‘to read 195 pages an hour in order to be ready for the vote.’

“As if the process was not ugly enough, including a claim from House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) that the bill did not contain any waste, the details of the spending bill were worse.  Even in a rushed legislative environment, CAGW identified obvious examples of wasteful spending in the bill that also appear in CAGW’s Prime Cuts database, which contains 607 recommendations that would save taxpayers $336.2 billion in one year and $2.3 trillion over five years.  The omnibus boosted or maintained funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, TIGER grants, Export-Import Bank, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, renewable energy subsidies, and more.  The Department of Defense received a hefty funding hike even though it has never had a clean audit.

“The omnibus bill was a fundamental betrayal of taxpayers who expect their elected officials to live up to the fiscally conservative values and promises on which they campaigned.  The legislation follows up on the Bipartisan Budget Act, which annihilated the 2011 spending caps.  The bill sends the signal that members of Congress no longer care about fiscal responsibility and makes it impossible to tell the difference between a Republican and a Democrat.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.