MAGA Report Cards — DOGE

208 House Republicans Just Voted to Lock In the Food-Safety Layoffs. Complaints About Contaminated Meat Had Risen 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:51:48 +0000

Last year, complaints to the federal government about contaminated meat, poultry and egg products rose by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

That happened because the people who do the inspecting had been leaving in numbers. Since the start of 2025, the FDA has laid off nearly 4,300 employees, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, about 9% of its workforce in six months.

On June 4, 2026, the House had a chance to decide what to do about that. It voted, 213 to 210, to leave it alone.

What the bill actually does

Be precise here, because Republicans dispute the word "cut," and on one point they have a case.

H.R. 8646 is the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. By the Appropriations Committee's own summary, it:

provides $26.27 billion in total — $380 million, or 1.4%, below the level enacted for 2026;
gives the FDA $7.1 billion; and
claims to increase money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service "to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors and bolster support for state inspection programs."

So this is not a bill that zeroes out food safety, and anyone telling you it is has skipped the document.

Here is the line that matters instead. It sits in the committee's own list of the bill's accomplishments, under "Safeguards American taxpayer dollars":

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

Read that in plain English. Thousands of federal food-safety staff were fired. Congress's response was not to fund those jobs back. It was to lower the budget line to match the emptier building — and to call that a saving.

That is what 213 members voted for. The staffing losses stop being an emergency and become the new baseline.

The man who quit over this said so at the time

None of this was a surprise to anyone in the building.

Jim Jones, who ran the FDA's food division, resigned in February 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that the people fired "represent the future of the agency," and that staying on would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group called his departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The consequences reached specific places. On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, because its Moffett Center laboratory was "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right — the same staffing problem, one more thing the government stopped doing.

The 188 who voted yes

Everyone below has a page on this site and is recorded voting Yea on H.R. 8646. All but one are Republicans — the clerk records Kevin Kiley of California as an independent. Grouped by state:

Alabama (5) — Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt
Alaska (1) — Nick Begich
Arizona (6) — Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar
Arkansas (4) — Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack
California (6) — David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Young Kim
Colorado (4) — Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert
Florida (16) — Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin
Georgia (7) — Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen
Idaho (2) — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher
Illinois (3) — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, Mike Bost
Indiana (7) — Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz
Iowa (3) — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn
Kansas (3) — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann
Kentucky (4) — Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer
Louisiana (4) — Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise
Maryland (1) — Andy Harris
Michigan (7) — Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett
Minnesota (4) — Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer
Mississippi (3) — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly
Missouri (5) — Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford
Montana (1) — Troy Downing
Nebraska (2) — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood
New Jersey (2) — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew
New York (6) — Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis
North Carolina (10) — Addison McDowell, Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx
North Dakota (1) — Julie Fedorchak
Ohio (10) — Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson
Oklahoma (5) — Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole
Oregon (1) — Cliff Bentz
Pennsylvania (8) — Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry
South Carolina (4) — Joe Wilson, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons
Tennessee (8) — Andy Ogles, Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett
Texas (17) — August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson
Utah (3) — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy
Virginia (5) — Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman
Washington (1) — Michael Baumgartner
West Virginia (2) — Carol Miller, Riley Moore
Wisconsin (6) — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied
Wyoming (1) — Harriet Hageman

The four who voted no

Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted against this bill. Four of them have pages here, and they deserve to be named for it:

Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania)
Rob Bresnahan (Pennsylvania)
Tom McClintock (California)
Greg Steube (Florida)

The fifth was Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has no page on this site. Their reasons were not identical and several are fiscal conservatives who vote against spending bills as a matter of course — but on this roll call, they are the Republicans who did not vote to bank the losses.

Four more Republicans did not vote at all: Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Kean of New Jersey, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Chip Roy of Texas. Not voting is not a no, and none of them are on either list above.

What the record shows

Complaints about contaminated meat, poultry and eggs climbed nearly 40% in one year, to 2,016, after the FDA shed nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900. On June 4, 2026, the House passed a spending bill that comes in $380 million under last year and, by the Appropriations Committee's own description, trims salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" rather than restoring them. It passed 213-210. Two hundred and eight Republicans voted for it, 187 of them people we track — 188 counting Kevin Kiley of California, whom the clerk records as an independent. Five Republicans voted no.

How they voted

The official record: Roll Call 205, H.R. 8646, 119th Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 2026 — On Passage, Passed 213-210. Bill details from the House Appropriations Committee. Staffing figures from UpNorthNews.

Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany Voted for a Budget That Locks In the Loss of Food Inspectors. Food Safety Complaints Had Just Jumped 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:32:57 +0000

In fiscal 2025, consumer complaints to the federal government about meat, poultry and egg products jumped by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany voted for a spending bill that leaves the agencies responsible for catching that food with the staffing losses they have already taken — and writes those losses into the budget.

The vote

The bill was H.R. 8646, the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. It passed the House 213 to 210 — Republicans 208 to 5, Democrats 4 to 205.

Van Orden voted yes. Tiffany voted yes. Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted no.

Be precise about what the bill does, because Republicans dispute the word "cut." By the Appropriations Committee's own account, the bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $26.27 billion — $380 million, or 1.4%, below what was enacted for 2026. It gives the FDA $7.1 billion, and the committee says it increases money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors.

Then there is this line, in the committee's own list of what the bill does:

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

That is the part that matters. Congress is not restoring the people who were fired. It is adjusting the budget downward to match the fact that they're gone.

The people who do the inspecting are already gone

This is the part that makes a 1.4% cut land differently than it would have in 2024.

Since the beginning of 2025, according to the federal government's own workforce data:

The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, out of a workforce that now stands at about 7,500.

Those losses trace back to the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation President Trump ordered at the start of his term. We've covered what the same push did elsewhere in the department: the USDA told more than 2,500 Washington-area employees to move across the country or find another job, and lost more than 20,000 workers along the way.

The FDA's own head of the food division, Jim Jones, quit over it on February 17, 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that continuing in the job would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda, and that the people fired "represent the future of the agency."

He was reacting in part to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had said in a November 2024 MSNBC interview, months before his confirmation, that FDA's nutrition staff should be cleared out entirely: "Their entire departments, like the nutrition department in the FDA … have to go." Jones answered Kennedy's charge that the agency is corrupt, writing that his "comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities is a disservice to everyone" — and noting that the food program is more than 99% funded by Congress, not by industry fees.

Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, called Jones's departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The FDA also stopped checking the labs that test milk

On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, according to an internal agency email obtained by Reuters. The reason the email gave was that the agency's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory "is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." It was the same staffing problem.

Be precise about this one too, because it was widely misreported as the FDA halting milk testing. It wasn't. The suspended program is a check on laboratories, not a test of milk: the FDA spikes milk samples with microbes, animal drugs and chemical contaminants, sends them to the labs that test Grade A milk, and scores whether their answers match its own. Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right.

What each of them has been telling voters

Both men represent rural districts where agriculture is the economy.

Van Orden's 3rd District runs along the Mississippi and includes some of the state's densest dairy country. He is facing Rebecca Cooke again in November.

Tiffany, who represents the northern 7th District, is running for governor. His campaign is built on affordability — on August 27 he unveiled an eight-point affordability plan whose fourth point is returning the entire state surplus to taxpayers. He has also spent the summer attacking data center subsidies while collecting money from the industry's registered lobbyist.

Neither has explained why the answer to a 40% jump in food safety complaints is a budget written around the inspectors who are already gone.

The bill now goes to the Senate, which will decide whether the FDA and FSIS staffing and funding levels in it survive into a final agreement.

What the record shows

Consumer complaints about meat, poultry and egg products rose nearly 40% in fiscal 2025, to 2,016. The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900 since the start of 2025. On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany both voted for a spending bill that comes in $380 million below last year and, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" — joining 206 other Republicans, while five voted no. The FDA has also suspended the annual program that checks whether the laboratories testing Grade A milk are getting the right answers.

Source

Van Orden and Tiffany voted for another food safety cut as FDA, USDA lose inspectors, UpNorthNews, August 28, 2026. Photo: David Goldman / AP. Vote totals verified against the official House roll call.

Trump Promised to Wipe Out the $19 Trillion Debt in Eight Years. This Week It Passed $40 Trillion.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:04:11 +0000

On Wednesday, the national debt passed $40 trillion for the first time.

That is about $117,000 for every person in this country. About $297,000 for every household. It is roughly the size of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and India put together.

When Donald Trump was sworn in the first time in January 2017, the number was $19.95 trillion. It has doubled since.

He said he would pay it off

Ten years ago this spring, Trump told the country he was going to erase the whole thing.

Reason magazine went back and checked the tape on the tenth anniversary. In a March 31, 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said this:

"We're not a rich country. We're a debtor nation. We've got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt."

The Post's Bob Woodward asked him how long that would take. "Fairly quickly," Trump said. Pressed for a real answer, he gave one:

"Well, I would say over a period of eight years."

Eight years came and went. The debt did not go down. It doubled.

What the second term has actually done

Since Trump took office again in January 2025, the debt has grown by $3.8 trillion — in nineteen months. Across both of his terms it has grown by $11.6 trillion. (For the record, it grew $8.4 trillion under Joe Biden, who never promised to erase it.)

The yearly numbers are worse than the totals suggest:

The government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in the budget year that ended last September. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that yells at both parties, put it plainly: "The federal government continues to borrow $5 billion per day."
This year is worse. Ten months in, we have already borrowed more than we borrowed in all of last year. The Congressional Budget Office now expects a $2.1 trillion deficit — $200 billion more than it thought in February.
July alone was a $432 billion hole. That is the fourth-worst single month in American history.
The group's president, Maya MacGuineas, updated her math this month: we are now borrowing "nearly $6 billion per day."

Interest on all that borrowing now costs more than $1 trillion a year. It is the second-biggest line in the entire federal budget — bigger than Medicare, bigger than the Pentagon. About a fifth of every tax dollar collected now goes to paying interest on money we already spent.

They were told the price. They voted for it anyway.

None of this was a surprise. The bill that did most of the damage was scored before anyone voted on it.

On July 3, 2025, House Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act 218 to 214. Trump signed it the next day. It extended his 2017 tax cuts, paid for part of them by cutting Medicaid and food aid, and raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion — the largest increase in American history.

The Congressional Budget Office scored it at $3.4 trillion in new debt over ten years, or $4.1 trillion once the interest on that borrowing was counted. Republican leaders spent the spring telling everyone CBO was wrong.

While the bill was still moving, Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and called the deficit projections "dramatically overstated." He said the economy would grow fast enough to make them wrong. His exact words: "we're not buying it."

CBO has now run the numbers again — this time including the faster growth Johnson was counting on. The bill costs $4.7 trillion through 2035, or $4.2 trillion over the same ten-year window it first scored.

The estimate did not come down. Counting the growth added about $125 billion to the cost, because the bill's effect on interest rates outweighed its effect on the economy.

We have seen this exact movie twice before

Here is the part that gets left out of the story most people have in their heads.

In 2017, when Republicans were selling the last round of tax cuts, they said the same thing they said in 2025. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the country, "Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the plan would "be revenue neutral for the government if not a revenue generator." Speaker Paul Ryan said they were "right there in the sweet spot."

The year after it passed, the deficit jumped 17 percent to $779 billion. Corporate tax collections fell 31 percent. CBO later figured the 2017 cuts would add about $1.8 trillion to deficits through 2028, before counting a dime of interest. The watchdog group's conclusion was seven words long: "Tax cuts do not pay for themselves."

And it had all happened before that. As CNBC noted at the time, deficits also rose after the tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Three Republican presidents, three big tax cuts, three sets of promises that the cuts would pay for themselves, three explosions of debt.

"The party of fiscal responsibility"

Republicans have run on being the careful ones with money for forty years. They spent the Obama years, as CNBC put it, relentlessly attacking him over deficits and debt. The actual record runs the other way, and it isn't close.

The A-Mark Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, lined up every president since 1981 and compared the deficit for their first budget to the deficit for their last one. Its finding, in its own words:

"The four Republican presidents since 1981 (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—who served one term) increased the federal deficit by 94%, 67%, 1,204% and 317%, respectively."

"In the two completed Democratic presidencies since 1981 (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), the federal deficit decreased by 150% and 53%, respectively."

Four for four one way. Two for two the other.

PolitiFact checked a version of this claim in 2019 and rated it Mostly True, with a fair caveat: presidents don't control the economy, recessions land on whoever happens to be in office, and a new president inherits the last one's budget.

That caveat is real. So look at the thing presidents do control — the bills they sign. There, the pattern is even cleaner. Reagan cut taxes and deficits rose. Bush cut taxes and deficits rose. Trump cut taxes twice and deficits rose both times.

One more fact worth sitting with: the last time this country ran a surplus was 2001. It was Bill Clinton's last budget.

DOGE was supposed to fix this

Trump's answer to the debt in his second term was DOGE, a cost-cutting operation he handed the job of slashing the federal workforce.

Almost all of what it went after was "discretionary" spending — the smallest slice of the budget. Around 60 percent of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year is locked into mandatory programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' care among them — that grow on their own to keep pace with the cost of living. Another $1.1 trillion is interest.

The debt went up $3.8 trillion anyway.

What this costs you, personally

This is not an abstraction about a big number in Washington. It shows up in what you pay to borrow money.

The Budget Lab at Yale ran the math in March. Federal borrowing since 2015 has pushed long-term interest rates up about 97 basis points. For a family taking out a 30-year mortgage at today's median home price, that is about $2,500 more a year — roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. A typical car loan costs about $120 more a year. A typical small business loan costs about $770 more.

Margaret Spellings, who runs the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it this way as the $40 trillion mark approached: "Federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment."

The debt hawks who voted for the debt

The tell isn't that Republicans borrowed money. Everybody borrows money. The tell is that they campaigned against borrowing right up until the vote.

Aaron Bean founded the House DOGE Caucus in November 2024 because the debt had hit $36 trillion. He called it "a wakeup call." Then he voted for the bill. The caucus stopped meeting, DOGE expired, and the debt went up $4 trillion.
Keith Self tells his constituents the national debt is "an existential threat to our Republic." He voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Steve Womack is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the debt — a former Budget Committee chairman who just introduced a bipartisan fix. His press release celebrating the $3.4 trillion bill runs about five hundred words and never mentions the deficit once.
Tim Burchett said he'd probably vote no if the bill added to the deficit. The Senate sent back a version that added about $1 trillion more. He went to the White House, got a souvenir signed by Trump, and voted yes the next day.

There is a name for a party that runs on cutting the debt and then doubles it, twice, using the same promise both times. It isn't fiscal responsibility.

Sources

Al Jazeera and Reuters, "US national debt passes record $40 trillion," August 19, 2026. Photo: AFP.
Eric Boehm, Reason, "10 Years Ago Today, Trump Promised To Eliminate the National Debt. Instead, It Has Doubled," March 31, 2026.

Black Lung Just Hit a Near-50-Year High in Appalachia's Coalfields, Including Morgan Griffith's. He'll "Look Forward to Studying Various Proposals."

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:46:16 +0000

Vonda Robinson and her husband John know a 28-year-old coal miner. He has spent about a decade underground, and he already has black lung disease.

Vonda Robinson is vice president of the National Black Lung Association. This is what she told the Virginia Mercury about the young miners now turning up sick, in its reporting on new research showing black lung among Appalachian coal miners has reached its highest level in nearly 50 years:

"It upsets me because they have small children and they're probably not going to see their children graduate high school or meet grandkids."

The congressman for that coal country is Morgan Griffith, who has represented Virginia's 9th District since 2011 and chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.

Asked where he stands on the two bills before Congress to help miners with black lung and their widows, Griffith neither endorsed nor opposed them. He emailed the Virginia Mercury that he looks "forward to studying various proposals and determining the best course of Congressional action on this issue."

Fifteen years in Congress. Miners in his district getting an incurable disease earlier in their careers than they used to. He is studying it.

What the research actually found

The numbers come from a peer-reviewed research letter from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine:

Black lung rates are back where they were in the 1970s.
A third of central Appalachian miners who have worked 25 or more years underground now have the disease.
Cases are rising among miners with less experience — meaning, as the researchers wrote, the burden "is affecting younger miners and not confined to the most experienced workers."

Black lung is incurable. It is also preventable — it comes from breathing dust, and dust can be controlled.

The reason younger miners are getting sick is that the work changed. John Robinson, a longtime miner diagnosed a little over a decade ago, described drilling through rock for years before ever reaching coal:

"It took us two and a half years to get to the coal seam. We basically breathed rock for two and a half years."

Cutting rock throws off silica — a carcinogen far more damaging to lungs than coal dust alone.

There was a rule for exactly this. It has been frozen for 16 months.

This is the part Griffith is "studying."

On April 18, 2024, the Mine Safety and Health Administration published a rule lowering the permissible exposure limit for silica dust in coal and other mines — roughly cutting it in half. The Department of Labor estimated at the time that the rule would mean more than 1,000 fewer deaths and 3,746 fewer cases of silica-related illness.

It was set to take effect for coal mines on April 14, 2025.

It never did. The mining industry challenged it, and on April 11, 2025 — three days before the deadline — the Eighth Circuit put the rule on hold. The compliance deadlines have been stayed indefinitely ever since.

Two things about how that happened:

The Trump administration did not defend its own government's rule. As the Virginia Mercury reports, the administration declined to defend the rule in court — and then petitioned the court to block the labor unions and the Black Lung Association from stepping in to defend it themselves. The miners were not allowed to argue for the standard the government had already finalized.

The industry's own lobby says it supports the lower limits. The Mercury notes that a National Mining Association spokesman told The New York Times late last year that the group is "absolutely supportive of the new lower levels." What the association argues for instead is that respirators should be enough. It did not answer the Mercury's questions.

Miners say respirators are not enough. Quenton King of Appalachian Voices explained why: in a mine loud with running drills, workers struggle to keep them on, and "if you aren't trying to have a dust-free environment, respirators will clog up multiple times in a shift."

The program that produced the research is one DOGE tried to shut down

Griffith told the Virginia Mercury that the surge in cases "merit federal attention," and pointed to federal funding for a black lung clinic in his district.

Here is the awkward part. The research letter he is responding to came from NIOSH — and NIOSH's black lung work was nearly destroyed last year.

In March 2025, DOGE announced it would end the leases on as many as three dozen MSHA field offices — the offices that inspect mines for dust. In April, nearly 900 NIOSH workers, about two-thirds of the agency, were terminated. The Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program, which sends free mobile screening clinics out to miners, stopped operating.

What brought it back was not Congress. It was a lawsuit filed on behalf of Harry Wiley, a West Virginia coal miner diagnosed with black lung in 2024. On May 13, 2025, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger ordered the program restored, and the fired workers went back.

A miner with black lung had to sue the federal government to get his own screening program turned back on.

And Griffith's position on the cuts that did it? He has said he believes the House will codify DOGE's cuts — write them permanently into law. He did not say which ones. "Some of them we will," he said. "Some of them we won't." He called many of the cuts well intentioned, and Elon Musk a "genius."

Where he does move fast

Griffith is not a man without opinions about the coal industry.

On August 7 he wrote to Governor Abigail Spanberger asking her to keep Dominion's Wise County coal plant open — a plant Dominion's own filings say will cost ratepayers at least $472 million this decade while running at a fraction of its capacity. Dominion's PAC has given him $32,500 since 2019.

So the record reads like this. Asked to protect a utility's coal plant: a letter, within days. Asked where he stands on helping miners with an incurable lung disease that is spiking in his own district: he'll study it.

This is the same pattern we found when eight school health clinics closed in his district in July and Virginia's community health centers wrote to ask him to intervene. The chairman of the House health subcommittee has a district full of health emergencies and a habit of arriving after they're over.

What the miners are asking for

Two bills. The Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act, to fix a benefits process that can take years and draws litigation from coal companies. And the Relief for Survivors of Miners Act, for the spouses left behind. Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine have carried both. Neither has passed either chamber.

Vonda Robinson says what's needed is bipartisanship, and she has been in touch with her own congressman about it. That congressman is Griffith. His answer was that he looks forward to studying various proposals.

She has also written to Vice President J.D. Vance, partly because of his family's Appalachian roots, hoping he can get Congress moving. When your own representative gives you a non-answer, you start writing to strangers.

"Trump can say 'drill baby drill,' but if we aren't taking care of our miners, there isn't going to be any drilling going on."

Griffith has been in Congress for 15 years. He runs the health subcommittee. Black lung across the central Appalachian coalfields, his district's included, is at a level not seen since the 1970s, the rule written to stop it is sitting frozen in an appeals court because the administration would not defend it, and the screening program that found the problem had to be restored by a federal judge.

There is nothing left to study.

Source

Virginia Mercury, "Black lung cases surging again in Southwest Va., Appalachia; miners blame blocked regulations" by Charlotte Rene Woods (August 17, 2026). Photo by Monty Rakusen/Getty Images.

Andrew Clyde Begged FEMA for Disaster Money in March. He Wrote the Bill That Would Let the President Keep It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:39:00 +0000

On March 19, 2026, Andrew Clyde sent a letter to the acting head of FEMA about Winter Storm Fern, which had hammered Northeast Georgia in late January. It's a good letter. He'd walked the damage himself in White, Habersham and Rabun counties, and he laid out the numbers in detail.

"The damage caused by Winter Storm Fern is simply beyond the capacity of these counties' budgets to address alone. This burden is compounded by the economic vulnerability of these communities, as the majority of the affected counties are rural and have poverty rates above the national average… They have made clear to me that without additional federal assistance, a full and timely recovery will not be possible."

Habersham County came in at $7,223,461 in eligible damage — nearly 32 times the level FEMA treats as the outer limit of what a county can absorb on its own. White County was 35 times over. Rabun County, more than 20 times.

He closed by promising: "I will use every tool available to me as a Member of Congress to advocate in a fiscally responsible way for the resources Northeast Georgians need and deserve."

Here is one of the tools he's already used.

H.R. 1180

On February 11, 2025, Clyde introduced H.R. 1180. The whole bill is contained in its title: "To repeal the Impoundment Control Act of 1974."

The Impoundment Control Act is the law that says when Congress appropriates money, the president has to spend it. If he wants to cancel some, he has to send Congress a formal request, and Congress has to agree. It's a 1974 Nixon-era law — the response to a president who decided on his own that money Congress had approved wasn't going out the door.

Clyde wants it gone. When he and Sen. Mike Lee first introduced the repeal in December 2024, Clyde called the 1974 law "unconstitutional" and said rolling it back is "one of the most effective ways Congress can help President Trump in the fight to deliver the spending cuts and government efficiency that the American people overwhelmingly voted for."

He was blunter to Fox News Digital when he reintroduced it: "I think it goes hand in hand with what DOGE is doing right now and with what the president has in mind to do, and that is to make our government more effective and more efficient."

That's not a technical claim about budget procedure. It says out loud what the bill is for: making it easier for one man to decide that money Congress appropriated doesn't get spent.

Which includes FEMA money

This isn't a hypothetical. The Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog, not a partisan outfit — has been investigating whether the administration is withholding money it was ordered to spend. It has found violations of the Impoundment Control Act again and again: at Head Start, at NIH, at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, at the Department of Energy. GAO publishes every one of those decisions.

And twice at FEMA. In a decision issued September 29, 2025, GAO found that FEMA had illegally withheld money from three programs, including $117 million from the Emergency Food and Shelter Program and nearly the entire 2022–2024 appropriation for FEMA's Next Generation Warning System.

GAO's finding:

"Currently available evidence indicates that FEMA has violated the ICA by improperly withholding, delaying, or effectively precluding the obligation or expenditure of budget authority."

That's the law Clyde wants repealed. It is the only law that made those findings possible. Take it off the books and FEMA withholding disaster money isn't a violation anymore — it's just a decision, and nobody in Habersham County gets a vote in it.

He is on both committees this runs through

Clyde is not a bystander to appropriations. By his own biography, he "currently serves on the House Appropriations and Budget Committees." H.R. 1180 was referred to the Budget Committee — the one he sits on.

So the job description is: decide how federal money gets spent. And the bill he wrote would make that decision advisory.

If Congress can't compel the money to move, then an appropriations bill is a suggestion. Clyde's own FEMA letter is an argument for why federal dollars have to reach four rural Georgia counties that can't cover the cost themselves. His bill is an argument for why the president shouldn't have to send them.

Both of those are his.

The pattern

This isn't the first time Clyde has treated the machinery that protects his own constituents as the enemy.

When Sen. Raphael Warnock warned Georgia seniors that DOGE had flagged Social Security offices in the state for lease termination, Clyde took DOGE's own denial as the answer and went after Warnock — "Senator Warnock has peddled lies and fearmongered Georgia seniors long enough" — calling the criticism part of a campaign to "distort the Administration's work."

Meanwhile, in March 2025, more than 100 Northeast Georgia residents turned out on the Gainesville square outside his district office asking him to hold a town hall. Ten days later, about 50 came back, chanting "why do you hide Andrew Clyde" — and asking, specifically, what DOGE was doing to the Social Security office in Gainesville.

He is not alone in the trade-off he's making. Ohio's Troy Balderson told a room of business leaders in February 2025 that "Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides." — and his office walked it back within a day. The difference is that Balderson at least said the right thing once. Clyde wrote the bill.

We deserve better

Everything in Clyde's FEMA letter is true. Rural counties really can't absorb a $7 million hit. Federal disaster money really is the difference between a full recovery and a partial one. He was right to write it, and Northeast Georgia should get the declaration.

But you can't spend a year arguing that the president should be free to ignore what Congress appropriates, and then send a letter asking that same president's agency, please, to spend what Congress appropriated.

Congress holds the purse. That's Article I, and it's the only real leverage a member from a rural district has when his counties need help. Andrew Clyde put his name on a bill to give it away.

Sources

Rep. Clyde Urges FEMA to Recommend Major Disaster Declaration for Northeast Georgia After Winter Storm Fern — Office of Rep. Andrew Clyde, March 19, 2026.
Rep. Andrew Clyde seeks disaster declaration in wake of Winter Storm Fern — The Gainesville Times, March 19, 2026. Photo: Scott Rogers / The Gainesville Times.

Adrian Smith Voted Twice to Defund Public Media. Eight Months Later, the Worst Wildfire in Nebraska History Tore Through His District.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:33:00 +0000

On June 12, 2025, the House voted 214–212 to claw back $9.4 billion Congress had already approved — more than $8 billion from foreign aid programs and $1.1 billion from public broadcasting. Adrian Smith voted yes. He'd telegraphed his support for days, and afterward he called it another "step toward fiscal responsibility."

Before that vote, Nebraska Public Media had told anyone who would listen exactly what the cut would cost. The organization runs most of the public TV and radio stations in the state. It stood to lose about $4 million a year — up to 16% of its entire budget. And it warned that the loss "could put essential services, including emergency alert systems, at risk."

Smith represents Nebraska's 3rd District: the rural three-quarters of the state, the part where those transmitters are often the signal you actually get. He voted for the cut anyway. Then he voted for it again on July 18, 2025, when the Senate's version came back to the House.

Eight months later, the prairie caught fire.

March 12, 2026

The Morrill Fire started that afternoon northeast of Bridgeport. Driven by high wind, low humidity and extreme drought, it raced east across the prairie and grew past 600,000 acres — the largest wildfire Nebraska has ever recorded. It burned through Morrill, Garden, Arthur, Keith and Grant counties. Three other big fires burned at the same time: the Cottonwood Fire in Lincoln and Dawson counties, the Road 203 Fire near Halsey in the Nebraska National Forest, and the Anderson Bridge Fire in Cherry County.

All of it is central and western Nebraska. All of it is Adrian Smith's district.

One person died. Gov. Jim Pillen confirmed it two days later at a briefing in Ogallala:

"One Nebraskan lost their life – Rose White. I won't go into the circumstances. Hurts a little bit, but a grandma that was trying to get away."

She was 86 years old, in Arthur County. In the same briefing, Pillen said what every emergency manager says after a fast fire: it is important that people heed evacuation warnings and orders from officials.

That only works if the warning reaches them.

Smith's own words

A week later, Smith wrote a column about the fires. He called it "the worst wildfire crisis Nebraska has ever experienced" — more than 826,000 acres, "destroying homes, infrastructure, and forcing families to evacuate with little notice."

He's right. That's what happened. Wind-driven grass fire moves faster than word of mouth, and in Morrill, Garden, Grant, Arthur and Keith counties there isn't much between you and the weather except a radio.

Which is the part of his own column Smith did not connect to his own voting card. Eight months before he wrote "evacuate with little notice," he voted to cut the budget of the organization that had just said in writing, the day before the vote, that the money at stake "underpins our statewide emergency communications."

What the money actually paid for

The rescissions package wiped out everything Congress had appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. CPB — the nonprofit that had distributed that money since 1967 — announced two weeks later that it was shutting down.

Federal money is a small slice of what national outlets like NPR and PBS run on. That was never who it was for. It goes disproportionately to the small rural affiliates that a commercial market won't support, in places like the Nebraska Panhandle. Nebraska Public Media's general manager, Stacey Decker, put it this way after the vote:

"These aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet. Federal investment underpins the journalism we produce, the educational resources we share with children and families, the remarkable stories we tell about our state."

Nebraska Public Media also carries the state's severe-weather and emergency alerts, live-streams the Legislature, and covers state government daily. Losing 16% of your budget doesn't take one of those away cleanly. It takes a little out of all of them.

Who told Nebraska what was burning

Here's the detail that ought to settle the argument.

The report of Rose White's death — the one quoted above, the one that told the rest of the state a Nebraskan had been killed — was written by Jackie Ourada and Macy Byars of Nebraska Public Media News.

The newsroom that covered the worst fire in Nebraska history is the newsroom Adrian Smith voted twice to take $4 million a year away from.

It's not that public media was the only thing working. It wasn't. NOAA's satellite fire-detection system spotted the Morrill Fire at 1:40 p.m. Mountain Time that Thursday, and the county was alerted 13 minutes later — federal infrastructure, doing exactly the job it exists to do, on the day it mattered most. In Keith County alone, a local fire chief counted about 32 fire departments coming in on mutual aid to help the volunteer crews.

Nearly all of that is public. Nearly all of it is the kind of spending that gets called waste in a press release.

This is a pattern, not an accident

Smith is not the only Republican who defunded the emergency-information system in his own backyard and then watched a disaster roll through it. In Florida, Rep. Kat Cammack introduced the Defund NPR Act in February 2025 and voted for the same rescissions package in July — and WUFT in Gainesville, home of the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network, lost about 20% of its operating funds in hurricane country.

And Smith has a habit of describing federal spending as a burden right up until his district needs it. A year after the Republican tax law passed, he wrote an op-ed telling Nebraskans the tax cuts were "working for Nebraska" — while the same law stands to cost the state up to $4 billion in Medicaid over a decade and has already stripped food assistance. He has represented the 3rd District since 2007. Nineteen years is long enough to know what a $4 million hole does to a rural network.

We deserve better

Nobody is saying a public radio budget would have saved Rose White. We don't know that, and we're not going to pretend we do.

What we know is this. The people whose job is running Nebraska's emergency alerts said it in advance, in writing, and said it again the day before the second vote: cutting this money put those alerts at risk. Adrian Smith voted for the cut twice. Eight months later the largest fire in state history swept his district, a woman died trying to outrun it, and Smith wrote a column about families evacuating with little notice.

He called the vote a step toward fiscal responsibility. In the counties that burned, it's just less warning.

Sources

Nebraska House GOP members vote to cut $9.4B federal funding from foreign aid, NPR, PBS — Nebraska Examiner, June 12, 2025.
Governor says Nebraska grandmother died in Morrill Fire trying to escape — Nebraska Examiner / Nebraska Public Media News, March 14, 2026. Photo: Courtesy of the Governor's Office.

Mike Rounds Traded a Handshake for His Vote. A Year Later, Most Tribal Radio Stations Say They'll Be Gone Within a Year.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:26:23 +0000

In July 2025, the Senate took up a bill to cancel $1.1 billion Congress had already approved for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For four tribal radio stations in South Dakota, that money was most of what kept them on the air.

Mike Rounds said he wouldn't vote for it.

Then he did — after getting a promise. Not a law. A promise.

The deal

Rounds had been holding out on Trump's rescissions package. On July 15, 2025, he said he'd vote yes after all, posting on X:

"We wanted to make sure tribal broadcast services in South Dakota continued to operate which provide potentially lifesaving emergency alerts. We worked with the Trump administration to find Green New Deal money that could be reallocated to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption."

What he'd negotiated was this: the Trump administration would move $9.4 million out of an Interior Department account to at least two dozen Native American radio stations. It was never written into the bill. Nothing in the law required anyone to send that money. It was, in the word reporters kept using, a handshake.

Two days later, at 2:18 in the morning on July 17, 2025, H.R. 4 passed the Senate 51 to 48. Rounds voted yes. Gone with it: $535 million a year in public broadcasting money Congress had already locked in for fiscal 2026 and 2027.

Four days after that, Trump endorsed him for reelection.

The endorsement

On July 21, 2025, Trump posted that Rounds is an "incredibly strong advocate for the wonderful people of South Dakota" and gave him his "Complete and Total Endorsement." Rounds shared it and thanked him: "I look forward to working with you to make America even better!"

The timing is not in dispute. South Dakota Searchlight's account of it, republished by Sioux Falls Live, ran under a headline that says it plainly — Rounds won the endorsement "after playing deal-making role in rescinding public media funds" — and its opening sentence notes the endorsement came "days after Rounds helped pass Trump's cancellation of previously approved funds for public broadcasting and foreign aid."

It was a shift. Rounds had endorsed Tim Scott, not Trump, in the 2024 primary, and skipped Trump's 2023 Rapid City rally. Trump had once said of him: "I will never endorse this jerk again." Now he had the complete and total endorsement.

The vote and the endorsement are two separate facts sitting four days apart. Readers can decide what to make of that. What isn't a matter of interpretation is what happened to the radio stations.

Somebody told him exactly what would happen

Rounds did not have to guess how this would turn out. The day after he announced his yes vote, the head of America's Public Television Stations put out a statement about the side deal he'd just made. Kate Riley, the group's CEO, said it was

"at best a short-term, half-measure that will still result in cuts and reduced service at the stations it purports to save, while leaving behind all other stations, including many that serve Native populations."

She spelled out why. CPB didn't just write checks — it paid for the infrastructure that lets small stations exist at all: the interconnection and distribution system, emergency relief grants, staff training, and programs built specifically for Native and rural service areas. Take that away and hand a station a one-year grant, Riley said, and you get "station collapse and service disruption, particularly in rural, Tribal and underserved communities."

That was July 16, 2025. Rounds voted yes anyway, at 2:18 the next morning.

The money showed up. Once.

The $9.4 million did get disbursed, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By November 2025, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had sent award notices to KILI on the Pine Ridge Reservation, KOYA at Rosebud and KDKO at Yankton, and said an award was expected for KLND, which serves Standing Rock and Cheyenne River. The amounts nearly matched what CPB would have given out, according to station sources.

But it was one-time money for one fiscal year. There is no mechanism behind it. CPB used to distribute funding on a standing basis; CPB dissolved itself in January 2026. Everything now has to be requested again, by hand, every single year, through the appropriations process — and if it isn't, it simply doesn't come.

Rounds said as much himself. Asked in April 2026 what happens next, he said:

"I continue to work with my colleagues on both committees to secure continued funding for tribal radio stations in FY 27. These radio stations are critical for communications in some of the most rural parts of South Dakota and we must make certain they have the funding needed to continue operating."

Read that again. He is describing, as ongoing work, the problem he created by voting yes. He is on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior and on the Committee on Indian Affairs. He voted to end the standing funding, then took a seat at the table where somebody now has to beg for a replacement every year.

What the stations say happens if he doesn't get it

Native Public Media surveyed the tribal stations hit by the clawback. About 36 stations in its network have been "heavily impacted." The survey's answers:

A majority said they will close within six months to a year without continued federal funding.
Some said they would shutter immediately.
About a third had relied on CPB for 80% to 100% of their operations.
The vast majority said they were considering layoffs.

"We will begin to see a cascade of closures as the years go by, starting out with immediate closures, followed by the next wave," said Loris Taylor, CEO of Native Public Media. "It's going to be a ripple effect happening across Indian Country."

John Miller manages KOYA in rural South Dakota. He's been getting ready for the money to dry up.

"I'm not really looking forward to it, to be honest with you, but just, you know, knowing that it's coming, and that we've got to be really proactive in our efforts to try to keep afloat. It's going to be hard."

"If those folks in Washington can come up with a plan that would better help us, you know, I'm for it. I just hope that when everything is said and done that we're not left to just go away."

These are not entertainment stations. On reservations that are news deserts, they carry emergency alerts, weather warnings, school closings, health advisories and election information — and they broadcast in tribal languages. Rounds knows this. It's the argument he made when he asked for the $9.4 million. He called the alerts "potentially lifesaving."

He then cast the vote that removed the funding that pays for them.

This is a pattern with Rounds, not an accident

Rounds joined the Senate DOGE Caucus in January 2025, saying he was "ready to work with my colleagues in the Senate to do our part in assisting President Trump in cutting spending, eliminating unnecessary programs and streamlining the federal government."

Within weeks, calls to his own office for help tripled as the cuts hit South Dakotans. By mid-March his staff were working 139 separate cases trying to undo the damage. By April his offices had fielded nearly 2,300 calls about DOGE. He admitted the people doing the cutting didn't understand what they were cutting: "They went in, and they basically just started unplugging stuff."

He kept defending the cuts anyway.

It's the same move he made on tariffs. He told an Americans for Prosperity luncheon crowd in Rapid City that Trump's tariffs were "of concern" and that "consumers will pay a part of that" — then voted against every Senate resolution that would have ended the tariff emergencies. State the worry out loud. Vote with Trump. Take credit for the worry.

Rounds has been in the Senate since 2015. He also doesn't hold open, in-person town halls where any South Dakotan can show up and ask him about it — in April 2025, state Democrats had to hold their own in four cities "in the absence of South Dakota's Republican senators and congressman."

What a real fix would have looked like

There was an obvious alternative available to Rounds in July 2025, and it cost nothing: vote no.

The bill passed 51 to 48. And immediately after Rounds announced his support, the Senate advanced it on a procedural vote of 51 to 50. Rounds wasn't one vote among many. He was the vote the thing hinged on, which is exactly why he had the leverage to negotiate in the first place.

He could have used that leverage to demand the tribal radio money be written into the bill. He took a promise instead.

Instead he accepted a promise that expires, on behalf of stations that don't have another source of money, and got an endorsement out of it. Now the stations are counting down and he's issuing statements about how he "continues to work" on it.

South Dakota has nine reservations. Four stations serve five of them. If the FY27 request doesn't land, the emergency alerts Rounds called lifesaving go off the air — and the vote that started it will still be on the record with his name next to it.

We deserve better.

Source

Em Luetkemeyer, "Some Republicans want to reverse GOP cuts to rural and tribal radio stations," Current / NOTUS (April 17, 2026). Photo: Kathryn Squyres / Current.

Shelley Moore Capito Was "Pretty Comfortable" With DOGE. Eight Weeks Later It Fired Everyone Who Screens West Virginia's Coal Miners for Black Lung.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:59:38 +0000

On February 6, 2025, Shelley Moore Capito was asked what she made of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency tearing through federal agencies.

"But for right now, I'm pretty comfortable with the direction that we see," she said in answer to a WV MetroNews question at a news briefing. "I think people wanted things to be disrupted and looked at in a different way." That, she said, "is what Elon Musk brings and his Department of Government Efficiency."

Fifty-four days later, DOGE fired essentially everyone at the one federal facility in West Virginia whose job is to keep coal miners from suffocating.

What happened in Morgantown

On April 1, 2025, West Virginia Watch reported that roughly 200 federal jobs were being eliminated at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health facility in Morgantown.

Cathy Tinney-Zara, president of the union local there, said all 185 bargaining-unit employees were in the reduction in force, management was put on administrative leave, and she put the total at about 210 positions. She got word at 5 a.m. that she was fired and would lose building access by midnight. She gave that interview while cleaning out an office she had worked in for more than 30 years.

"It's devastating. People will die," she said.

Officials at the facility, she said, were told the cuts were because the services there were not needed or were duplicative.

"There is no one else in the government that does occupational safety and health. There's no one else in the U.S."

The Morgantown facility runs the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program — the free, confidential black lung screening that comes to mining communities in a mobile unit. It can process as many as 5,000 chest X-rays a year from current and former miners, read by specially trained radiologists — and NIOSH is the only body qualified to certify the X-ray that lets a sick miner transfer out of a dusty job.

Take away the readers and the screening stops. Take away the screening and a miner in his thirties keeps cutting rock while his lungs fill in, and nobody tells him until it is too late to matter.

The facility's 674 mice and 37 rats — some in studies running for decades — were expected to be euthanized. The veterinarian required by law to be present had already been let go.

Who actually stopped it

Not the Senate.

It was Harry Wiley, an underground electrician in Raleigh County who had been diagnosed with black lung, who filed a class action against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On May 13, 2025, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger of the Southern District of West Virginia ordered Kennedy and HHS to restore the Respiratory Health Division and the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program.

Judge Berger wrote plainly about what was at stake for Wiley: "Remaining in a dusty job may reduce the years in which Mr. Wiley can walk and breathe unassisted, in addition to hastening his death."

The United Mine Workers of America joined a coalition of labor and safety groups in a suit of its own, charging that the administration had bypassed Congress to eliminate the programs. The mobile screening units did not roll again until July 2025. Full staffing was not restored until January 15, 2026 — nine months after the firings.

The union's press release announcing that win is titled "NIOSH Restoration is a Win for Miners, but Progress Delayed has Already Cost Lives."

"While we are glad to see these positions restored, we are disappointed these cuts were made in the first place," UMWA President Brian Sanson said.

Secretary-Treasurer Michael Phillippi spelled out the cost of the gap: freezing the labs forced a pause in enforcement of the new silica dust rule, and "within the mining industry today, we are seeing younger workers in their thirties being diagnosed with advanced black lung because they are cutting more rock than ever before. Every day those labs were empty was a day miners were left unprotected."

Capito's part in it, fairly stated

She did work to get NIOSH back. That is real and it belongs in this story. In the same release, Sanson said: "I want to thank those in and out of Congress who worked with us to get NIOSH back to full staffing, especially Sen. Shelley Moore Capito."

So give her that. Then ask the harder question, which is why a West Virginia senator was ever in the position of begging for it.

Capito is not a bystander to this agency. She chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education — the subcommittee that writes NIOSH's funding bill. She also voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man whose department carried out the firings.

And when she raised it with him, at a budget hearing on May 20, 2025 — a week after the judge had already ordered the program restored — here is how she put it:

"I support the president's vision to right-size our government, but as you and I have discussed, I don't think eliminating NIOSH programs will accomplish that goal. I encourage you to look at this closely."

Read that as a West Virginian. Her own state's coal miners had just lost their black lung screening. Her ask was not that the administration stop firing people who keep workers alive. Her ask was that this particular program be spared, while she reaffirmed her support for the project doing the firing. "I encourage you to look at this closely" is not the sentence of someone who controls the money.

She had the power before April 1, not just after. Being "pretty comfortable" in February was a choice about what she would use it for.

It is happening again right now

This is not history. On April 3, 2026, HHS published its fiscal 2027 budget request, and Safety+Health Magazine reported what is in it: NIOSH would be folded into a new National Center for Chemicals and Toxins inside the CDC, and three line items are proposed for elimination — the National Occupational Research Agenda ($120.5 million), "other occupational safety and health research" ($115.1 million), and education and research centers ($32 million).

That is roughly $268 million of occupational safety and health research on the chopping block, one year after the first attempt. NIOSH's mining research program survives the proposal; the cross-industry research agenda that surrounds it does not.

"Congress is expected to weigh in with its budget bills over the coming months," the magazine noted.

Congress, here, means Shelley Moore Capito. It is her subcommittee. She writes the bill.

The pattern is the point

We have watched this same sequence with her before. In July 2025 she cast one of the 50 votes for the budget law that takes more than $1 billion a year from West Virginia's hospitals — and a year later cosponsored a bill to keep rural hospitals from closing. Support the cut, then work the wreckage.

The NIOSH story is the same shape with a sharper edge, because here the fix did not come from Congress at all. It came from a sick coal miner with a lawyer and a federal judge who read the statute.

Capito has represented West Virginia in the Senate since 2015. She is the chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee and chair of the subcommittee that funds HHS — about as much leverage over this as any single senator gets. A West Virginian is entitled to ask why all of it was pointed at cleanup instead of prevention, and whether, with the same proposal back on her desk in 2026, anything will be different.

Source

"Department of Health and Human Services proposes trimming NIOSH programs," Safety+Health Magazine, April 8, 2026. Photo: G. Edward Johnson/Wikimedia Commons, via Safety+Health Magazine.

Derek Schmidt Says Washington Made Decisions That 'Don't Make a Lot of Sense Out in the Countryside.' He Was One of the People in Washington.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:36:15 +0000

On June 18, 2026, Derek Schmidt put his name on a bill to keep USDA offices from closing.

It's called the USDA Field Office Stability Act. Democrat Sharice Davids of Kansas wrote it, and Schmidt signed on as an original cosponsor the day she filed it, which is genuinely unusual and genuinely useful. It would bar the Agriculture Department from shutting or moving the county offices that farmers actually walk into — the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Rural Development — unless another office sits within 20 miles. It would force USDA to keep enough people on staff to keep the doors open during business hours.

Here is Schmidt explaining why it's needed:

"Many small offices are staffed by only one or two people, which means a reduction in staffing can leave the office unable to function."

He's right. That is exactly what happened. The question worth asking is who did it.

Kansas lost about a third of its USDA workforce

The numbers in Schmidt's own bill announcement are brutal. Kansas has lost more than 500 USDA employees — roughly 32 percent of its USDA workforce, the largest percentage drop in the region. Nationally, more than 24,000 USDA employees left the department after January 2025, a nearly 27 percent reduction between September 2024 and December 2025.

That did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of some vague thing called "Washington."

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition tracked the departures using federal personnel data. It found about 20,000 USDA employees gone between January 2025 and January 2026, and attributed the majority of them — around 15,000 — to the Deferred Resignation Program, the buyout push run by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Kansas shows up in that data at 559 employees lost. The number of USDA staff with more than ten years of service fell by nearly 7,000 over that year, from 45,247 to 38,291. Investigate Midwest, reporting on a separate NSAC analysis built from a Freedom of Information Act request, found the same cause: the losses came primarily after DOGE's early-retirement and deferred-resignation offers.

So: DOGE emptied the offices. Now let's look at what Derek Schmidt was saying while it was happening.

"Maturing"

In April 2025 — the month USDA gave employees one week to decide on a second round of buyouts — Schmidt went on KVOE radio in Emporia and was asked about DOGE. He said the approach was "maturing" and would become more "predictable" over time.

Not "this is going too fast." Not "somebody should check what this does to farm country." Maturing.

Seven weeks later, on June 12, 2025, Schmidt voted to make a big chunk of DOGE's work permanent. He put out a press release taking credit for it, naming "the Department of Government Efficiency," and saying he hoped the $9.4 billion clawback of money Congress had already approved would prove "a watershed."

DOGE itself shut down on July 4, 2026, with no final report and nobody willing to own the wreckage. The wreckage stayed.

Ten months later, the countryside called

By April 2026, the empty offices were a problem Schmidt could not talk around.

On April 23 he signed onto a letter with 14 other members of Congress asking USDA to fix the staffing shortages. His own press release describing that letter lays out the damage in plain language: constituents were reporting "delays in application processing, payments, and contract certifications," with conservation programs and the FSA farm loan program hit hardest. If it kept up, the letter warned, the disruption could spread across every USDA program in that division.

Talking to KWCH that evening, Schmidt put it this way:

"Sometimes decisions get made in Washington that look good on paper, but don't make a lot of sense out in the countryside in Kansas."

Read that again. Schmidt is Washington. He has been since January 2025. He was in the room, he had a vote, and when the decision was in front of him he hoped out loud it was a watershed.

The Kansas Farmers Union's executive director, Nick Levendofsky, told the same station that some parts of the state now have no USDA staff at all, so producers either drive further or give up on benefits they've already earned. On KZRG in May, Schmidt described the mechanics himself: "In a lot of these small counties, there are literally one or two people. That's the entire staff of the USDA local office. Well, if you cut one person out of it or two, you're literally left with an office that can't function." And: "In some cases, there's nobody there to do the work."

He is describing, accurately and with real feeling, the wreckage of a project he cheered.

The same offices Kansas farmers need because of his other votes

The timing is its own indictment. Kansas farmers need those FSA counters more than usual right now, and the reason is the trade war.

Schmidt voted twice in March 2025, and again that September, to keep the House from even considering a repeal of Trump's tariffs — one sentence tucked into a procedural motion, three times over. As of that October, U.S. soybean sales to China for the year stood at zero. Moody's put the Kansas economy in recession, driven largely by collapsing farm exports.

The federal answer to that has been bailout money. Bailout money is applied for, processed, and certified at exactly the county offices that no longer have anybody sitting in them.

We've seen this movie

This is now a recognizable genre. A Republican cheers the cuts, the cuts land on people back home, and the Republican writes letters.

New York's Andrew Garbarino did it with the 9/11 responders' health program — four rounds of DOGE cuts, four rounds of letters to undo them, and then a vote to make the rest of DOGE's cuts permanent. Kentucky's Andy Barr told a Lexington business crowd "don't worry about DOGE", passing along promises from Elon Musk that turned out to be wrong one after another.

The bipartisan USDA bill is a good bill. Kansas Farmers Union president Donn Teske thanked Schmidt and Davids for it, and he was right to. But it is a patch on a hole Schmidt helped cut, and it does not bring back 559 people or their combined decades of knowing which form a Kansas rancher needs.

If your congressman wanted to tell you about that, there'd be a room and a microphone somewhere. Schmidt's version of a town hall is a phone call, on a topic he picks, where the announcement said up front that he and his co-host would "not give individual tax advice." When KCUR invited all nine members of Congress from the Kansas City metro to take live questions from constituents about DOGE and tariffs in 2025, Schmidt's office was among those that never responded to the invitation.

More than 1,000 people took part anyway, in the room and on the livestream. They had questions about this exact thing.

Source

Davids, Schmidt introduce bipartisan bill to keep USDA offices open for Kansas farmers and ranchers — KWCH, June 18, 2026, and Kansas congressman urges USDA to address staffing shortages at local offices — KWCH, April 23, 2026. Photo: KWCH.

DOGE Gutted the 9/11 Health Program Four Times. Andrew Garbarino Fought Back — Then Voted to Make DOGE's Other Cuts Permanent.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:02:39 +0000

Andrew Garbarino has done real work for the people who ran toward the towers on September 11, 2001. That should be said first, because it's true, and because it's what makes the rest of this so hard to explain.

Starting in February 2025, the Trump administration and Elon Musk's DOGE took a wrecking ball to the World Trade Center Health Program — the federal program that treats the firefighters, cops, construction workers, and neighborhood residents who got sick from the dust at Ground Zero. It happened four separate times in under three months. Each time, Garbarino organized his colleagues — a letter to the president, joint statements, conversations with the administration — and got some part of it undone.

And on June 12, 2025 — right in the middle of all of it — he walked onto the House floor and voted to make DOGE's cuts to other programs permanent federal law.

What DOGE did to the 9/11 program

The Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act has kept a running record of it. It reads like a chart of a patient crashing over and over.

February 14, 2025 — the day after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary — HHS fired thousands of probationary employees and pushed thousands more into buyouts. The 9/11 program lost more than 20% of its staff, dropping from 93 filled positions to fewer than 73. That included 16 fired probationary workers and five who took the buyout. The program lost its medical benefits team leader and its Director of Research. DOGE also killed two cancer research grants — one studying disease rates among FDNY firefighters, one at Long Island's Feinstein Institute comparing cancer rates among lower Manhattan workers to a control group in Westchester.

This was a program that had just been planning to grow to 138 staff, because it had added more than 10,000 new members the year before.

April 1, 2025 — a second, bigger round. HHS fired nearly all the staff of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, including Dr. John Howard, who ran both NIOSH and the 9/11 program. Sixteen more program staff got termination notices. The cuts also wiped out the National Firefighter Cancer Registry, the program that investigates firefighter deaths, the office that certifies the respirators every firefighter and nurse in America wears, and the black lung research program for coal miners.

April 28–29, 2025 — the part that actually hurt patients. Garbarino and his New York colleagues had announced on April 5 that Dr. Howard was reinstated. HHS had told them so. It wasn't true — Howard was never properly restored as administrator of the 9/11 program, and because nobody had the legal authority to sign, the program stopped certifying new cancers and stopped enrolling new members. Three FDNY responders with cancer couldn't get certified for treatment; one of them had pancreatic cancer, and his doctor was told even an expedited request could not be approved. Roughly 1,200 monthly certifications went unprocessed. As many as 800 people waiting to enroll were stuck.

May 2, 2025 — the 16 staff were formally fired, effective immediately, notified after they'd already left for the day. Four days later, after another public uproar, the firings were rescinded.

May 14, 2025 — Kennedy admitted to the Senate that it had been a "mistake," restored 313 NIOSH positions, and confirmed Dr. Howard and the 15 remaining program staff were back.

Garbarino was in the middle of every one of those fights. The advocates thanked him by name.

Then came June 12

Four weeks after Kennedy's admission, the House voted on the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill that took $9.4 billion Congress had already approved and cancelled it, locking in DOGE's cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting as permanent law.

It passed 214 to 212.

Garbarino voted yes.

Two votes. If he had voted the other way, the bill would have failed.

Think about what he knew by then. He had spent four months watching DOGE fire the people who process a cancer patient's paperwork, and then watching cancer patients not get treated. He had learned, in the most concrete way available to a member of Congress, that "cutting bureaucracy" is a thing that happens to specific human beings with specific diseases.

He took that lesson and applied it to exactly one program: his own.

His Long Island neighbor Nick LaLota was in the same room that day. Speaker Mike Johnson pulled LaLota aside on the floor and he switched his vote to yes, and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting died by two.

It never actually got fixed

Here's the part that makes the June vote worse rather than better. The 9/11 program didn't get put right. The pressure just moved to a slower setting.

After the staff were restored, Kennedy kept a "temporary" communications pause in place that stopped the program from talking to the 9/11 community at all. He kept a hiring freeze on. He froze the research grant process. And he stalled the decisions on whether to add cardiac conditions, autoimmune conditions, and dementia to the list of illnesses the program covers — decisions that had been due in March 2025.

Senators Schumer and Gillibrand wrote about it in August 2025. Sen. Andy Kim and five colleagues wrote again in September 2025. LaLota led another letter in March 2026. Garbarino signed that one.

April 15, 2026 — more than a year after the first firings — Kennedy finally let the program fill its 37 vacancies. That's a 30% vacancy rate it had been carrying the whole time.

July 9, 2026 — Garbarino and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand led 26 bipartisan colleagues in a letter begging Kennedy to reappoint Dr. Howard, whose term was running out. The same day, it came out that of those 37 authorized positions, HHS had actually posted four.

That's the state of play eighteen months in: letters, and four job postings.

The thing a chairman could do

Garbarino is not a backbencher writing letters into the void. Since July 2025 he has been Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security — one of the most powerful gavels in Congress. He sits on Financial Services. He sits on the Ethics Committee.

A committee chairman in the majority has tools a letter-writer doesn't. He can hold a hearing. He can put a cabinet secretary under oath. He can subpoena documents.

What the record shows for the 9/11 program is letters — good letters, bipartisan letters, letters that sometimes worked. But the pattern over eighteen months is that the administration cuts, Garbarino objects, the administration partly backs off, and then does it again a different way. That cycle has now run four times on the firings and is running a fifth time on the hiring freeze.

Meanwhile, when the administration asked him to vote for its cuts, he voted for its cuts.

What this looks like from Long Island

Garbarino sells himself as the Republican who breaks with his party. He voted for the January 6 commission. He voted for the infrastructure law. He voted for the Respect for Marriage Act. He voted against Jim Jordan for Speaker three times.

Those are real votes and they cost him something.

But the pattern on money is the opposite. He held Trump's budget bill hostage for months over the state and local tax deduction, won a bigger deduction, and then slept through the vote and had to explain himself to the Speaker. He voted for that budget bill when it came back. He voted for the rescissions bill by two votes. The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff estimates that the Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts will cost nearly 34,000 people in his district their insurance — 30,657 of them on Medicaid.

He knows what these cuts do. He watched them do it to sick firefighters from his own island, in real time, for four straight months.

Then he voted for more of them.

Source

The timeline of cuts to the World Trade Center Health Program is documented by Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act, which has tracked each round of firings, reversals, and restrictions since February 2025. Photo: AP, via NY1. Vote totals from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.

One in Ten of Greg Murphy's Constituents Is a Veteran. Asked If VA Cuts Would Hurt Them, He Said: "No, I Can't Guarantee Anything."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:48:36 +0000

On March 3, 2025, CNN's Brianna Keilar asked Greg Murphy a simple question: could he guarantee that veterans' benefits and care would not be affected by the cuts the Trump administration was making at the Department of Veterans Affairs?

His answer, as The Hill reported, was five words long.

"No, I can't guarantee anything."

He then explained why that was acceptable:

"But the whole purpose, again, of restructuring is to make sure that that agency is efficient."

Murphy is not a random backbencher on this subject. He sits on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. And he told Keilar exactly what his district looks like:

"Look, I care for our veterans. One out of 10 constituents of mine are veterans. It's a real issue in eastern North Carolina."

He's right about the district. North Carolina's 3rd takes in Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and the Marine Corps Air Stations at Cherry Point and New River. Camp Lejeune is the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast.

So a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, representing Camp Lejeune, was asked whether the people who live around those bases would be hurt. He said he couldn't promise they wouldn't. And he said the cuts should go ahead.

"Short-term pain"

Keilar asked what he was hearing from constituents. Murphy acknowledged the calls were coming in:

"Sure, sure. I mean, we're hearing voters. A lot are calling our offices, of course. They're calling all Republican offices, voicing concerns."

And then:

"Is there going to be short-term pain? Is there going to be some issues? Absolutely, and this is what happens with restructuring. But we have to get government back to doing what it's supposed to be doing, and that's working for the people."

At the moment he said that, the VA had cut about 1,400 employees the previous Monday, after roughly 1,000 in February. VA Secretary Doug Collins had also announced the cancellation of up to 875 contracts, then paused that effort a day later after an outcry from veterans' groups.

Collins's position at the time was firmer than Murphy's. "These moves will not hurt VA health care, benefits or beneficiaries," he said. "In fact, Veterans are going to notice a change for the better."

The Secretary guaranteed it. The congressman on the oversight committee wouldn't.

What actually happened

On July 7, 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it was on track to shed nearly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — about 17,000 gone between January and June, and another 12,000 expected by September 30. The department got there through a governmentwide hiring freeze, deferred resignations, early retirements and ordinary attrition.

Collins had originally floated cutting around 80,000. The 30,000 figure was the walk-back.

Thirty thousand people is not a restructuring. It is tens of thousands of workers gone in nine months, at an agency whose central problem — the one Murphy himself named in that CNN interview — is that veterans wait too long for appointments.

Here is what Murphy said the real failure was:

"But the real issue is also when somebody can't get benefits and they've put off their doctor's appointments for eight or 10 months when they can't get care. That is where an agency has failed."

He is describing a staffing problem. His answer was to cut staff.

This is not hypothetical anymore

What a shrunken VA looks like in practice is already on the record elsewhere. In March 2026 the VA announced it was closing the only clinic in McMinnville, Tennessee, because a contractor couldn't keep it staffed — sending about 1,840 veterans to clinics 45 minutes away or farther. We wrote about what the congressman there did about it, which was to say he'd had no warning, and then to announce the clinic had been saved.

That is the model. Nobody votes to close a clinic. The staff just stop being there, and one day the doors don't open.

Murphy has a real advantage over most of his colleagues here: he is the only actively practicing physician in Congress, as we've written before, and he knows what happens to a patient who can't get an appointment. He said so on television. Then he called the consequences short-term pain.

The parts he does show up for

To be fair to the record, Murphy does constituent work on veterans. He has hosted a North Carolina constituent to testify before the VA Committee, and he runs an annual Veterans History Project event in the district.

None of that is the same as oversight. Oversight is what a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee does when an administration announces it is removing tens of thousands of people from the agency he's supposed to be watching. On March 3, 2025, Murphy was handed the microphone and asked to hold the line for the one in ten of his own constituents he'd just described as veterans.

He said he couldn't guarantee anything, and moved on.

Sources

House Republican says he 'can't guarantee' staff cuts won't impact veterans, The Hill, March 3, 2025
Republican 'Can't Guarantee' Trump-Backed Budget Cuts Won't Hurt Veterans, Newsweek
VA to reduce staff by nearly 30K by end of FY2025, Department of Veterans Affairs, July 7, 2025

The VA Tried to Close McMinnville's Only Clinic. Scott DesJarlais Found Out When Everybody Else Did.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:26:41 +0000

In the first week of March 2026, word got out that the only VA clinic in McMinnville, Tennessee was closing. The clinic confirmed it to WSMV on Wednesday, March 4; the Tennessee Department of Veterans Services announced it that Saturday. About 1,840 veterans got their primary care and mental health care there. The VA said it would shut the doors on May 31.

The congressman who represents McMinnville learned about it the same way everybody else did.

Scott DesJarlais wrote to VA Secretary Doug Collins on March 9. Here is what he told him:

"My office received no notice prior to the public disclosure that this facility was facing staffing shortages or that these shortages would lead to the shuttering of this important VA Outpatient Clinic in my district."

He went further. The clinic's leaders, he wrote, "did not consult with or inform my staff or myself about the issues facing this Clinic, and the answers they gave as to why this was happening and the information they have provided to the community have been woefully inadequate."

DesJarlais has represented Tennessee's 4th District since 2011. He is a physician. By his own account he once worked in a VA hospital. And more than 46,000 veterans live in his district.

Nobody called him.

What closing it would have meant

The nearest alternatives were the VA clinics in Tullahoma and Cookeville — both about 45 minutes away by the VA's own estimate, and 36 and 45 miles away by Military.com's. Roughly 200 veterans would have been sent to Nashville, Chattanooga, or Murfreesboro instead.

For a lot of the people who used that clinic, an hour each way isn't an inconvenience. It's the end of their health care.

Gary McComis, a Marine veteran, put it plainly to WSMV: "You depend on it. You got a lot of veterans that this is our only insurance, the only health insurance we have."

Kris Gore, who spent twenty years in the National Guard, told the same station: "We have to get this out into the community. We have to start doing something about this."

The VA's reason should have been a red flag years ago

The clinic was never staffed by the VA. It was run by a contracted staffing company, and the VA's own account of what went wrong is damning: the contractor "was unable to consistently staff the facility," and over five years the average patient had their assigned provider swapped about twenty times. Only 79% of patients said they trusted the clinic — below the VA's national average.

Twenty changes of provider in five years. That is not a sudden crisis. That is a facility that had been failing veterans for half a decade, in a district represented the whole time by a doctor who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.

The VA has an answer for why nobody told him, buried in the same FAQ: "pre-decisional information was shared ahead of schedule leading to confusion and misinformation within the local community," and the system had "anticipated informing Veterans in mid-March via phone calls, appointment letters, and at the March 20 town hall." In other words, the decision leaked before anyone had been told — the congressman included.

He says nobody told him. That may well be true. It is not obviously better than the alternative.

What he was doing while the VA shrank

Here is the part that doesn't appear in the press release.

Through all of 2025, DesJarlais was one of the loudest cheerleaders for shrinking the federal government. He sat down for a February 2025 interview on his own channel to talk up the House budget and DOGE. On April 2, 2025, he posted on X that the Labor Secretary was "working hard to root out waste, fraud and abuse by returning $1 BILLION in unused COVID funds," with three applause emoji and a link to a Fox News story headlined "Trump Labor Department secures eye-popping sum to return to taxpayers amid DOGE push."

While he was posting that, the VA was losing people. On July 7, 2025, the department announced it would shed nearly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — about 17,000 already gone between January and June, and another 12,000 expected by September 30. The mechanism was the governmentwide hiring freeze, deferred resignations, early retirements and attrition.

The VA has not said the McMinnville contractor's failure was caused by any of that, and we're not going to claim it was. What we will say is this: you cannot spend a year celebrating a campaign to make the federal government smaller and then act astonished when a federal health facility in your district can't find anybody to work in it.

DesJarlais didn't vote against any of it. He cheered it. Then he wrote a letter demanding to know why nobody warned him.

The victory lap

On May 14, 2026, DesJarlais announced that the clinic would stay open after all.

"After a multitude of meetings with Secretary Collins and the VA, I am excited to announce the McMinnville VA Clinic will be staying open."

Good. Genuinely — that's the right outcome, and his office worked for it.

But read on in the same statement:

"Under Secretary Collins' leadership the VA has been focused on ensuring our Nation's heroes get the best care possible that meet their needs and expectations."

That is DesJarlais praising the leadership of the same VA that, nine weeks earlier, he said had given his constituents answers that were "woefully inadequate" and had never bothered to pick up the phone.

The May release does mention the March letter — once, as "a formal letter and series of phone calls" — and never says a word about what it actually demanded. The March letter demanded accountability. The May release handed out thank-yous. Nothing in between explains what actually changed — not how the clinic will be staffed, not who is providing the doctors, not what happens when the contractor fails again. The VA simply reversed itself, and the congressman announced it.

Why nobody in McMinnville got to ask him about it

There was a public meeting about the closure. The VA held it on March 20. DesJarlais did not hold one.

That is not a one-off. According to a July 2025 op-ed by Victoria Broderick — who ran against him as the Democratic nominee in 2024, and so is hardly a neutral party, though he has never disputed the specific claim — DesJarlais has not held an in-person town hall since 2013. She wrote that he declined an invitation to one in Murfreesboro in June 2025.

Thirteen years is a long time to go without standing in a room and letting 46,000 veterans ask you a question.

Three weeks after the clinic reversal, DesJarlais got back to the work he does most: on June 4 he read out his subcommittee's piece of the defense bill, authorizing "full funding" for nuclear weapons modernization and a "historic increase" for the Space Force. The eleven weapons contractors whose programs that bill funds have given his campaign $94,000 this cycle.

The clinic in McMinnville stayed open because a contractor's failure finally got embarrassing enough to make the news. Not because anyone in Washington was watching.

Sources

Tennessee Lawmakers Concerned Over Planned VA Clinic Closure, Military.com, April 10, 2026 (photo: McMinnville VA Clinic, VA.gov)
DesJarlais Voices Concern to VA Secretary Over Closure of McMinnville Clinic, March 9, 2026
McMinnville VA Clinic Transition, VA Tennessee Valley Health Care

Michael Cloud Wrote a Bill That Would Abolish Every Federal Agency on a Timer — Including the Ones That Warn Texas About Hurricanes

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:08 +0000

There is a certain kind of bill that never gets a vote and still tells you everything about the person who wrote it.

On January 16, 2025, Michael Cloud introduced H.R. 489, the Federal Agency Sunset Commission Act of 2025. It is twenty-six pages of machinery for one idea: put an expiration date on the entire federal government.

Here is the core of it, in the bill's own words.

A new 13-member commission would submit to Congress "a schedule for review by the Commission of each agency that lists the date of abolishment for each agency."

That date "shall occur at least once every 12 years."

And then:

"Each agency shall be reviewed and abolished according to the schedule created pursuant to this section and approved under section 9, unless the agency is reauthorized by the Congress."

Read the default. The agency ends. Congress has to affirmatively act to save it. If Congress does nothing — if it's mid-shutdown, mid-fight, mid-recess, or simply too gridlocked to move a bill, which is the normal condition of this Congress — the agency is gone.

The escape hatch is designed not to work

The bill does allow a delay. An agency's abolishment date "may be extended for an additional 2 years if the Congress enacts legislation extending such date by a vote of a supermajority of the House of Representatives and the Senate."

The bill’s definitions section puts a number on "supermajority": two-thirds of each chamber.

Think about what that sentence does.

Under Cloud’s bill, buying the National Weather Service two more years requires more votes than declaring war. A simple majority of the House and Senate is enough to send troops into combat. It would not be enough to give the Food and Drug Administration two more years.

Every agency in the government, on a rolling twelve-year clock, with a supermajority required just to hit snooze.

Which agencies

The bill doesn’t name any. That’s the point — it applies to "each agency," which its definitions section takes from section 105 of title 5: every cabinet department, every government corporation, every independent establishment, plus every federal advisory committee. No exception is written into the bill for anything. The schedule is left to the commission.

So the clock would run on the ones Cloud’s own constituents in the Coastal Bend depend on. The National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service, inside the Commerce Department, on a coast that gets hit. FEMA, inside Homeland Security, which shows up after. The Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the ship channel at the Port of Corpus Christi. The Social Security Administration, an independent agency with a date of its own, which mails checks to retirees in Victoria and Corpus Christi every month. The Bureau of Reclamation, inside Interior, whose grant program Cloud himself has been working to open up for a Corpus Christi desalination plant while the city's reservoirs run low.

That last one is the tell. In May 2026 Cloud announced that the Bureau of Reclamation had lifted the $30 million cap on the grant program that could help fund a desalination plant for his water-starved district — up to $120 million was suddenly on the table.

Good. That is a congressman doing his job. It is also a federal agency doing something only a federal agency can do — and it is on the list his bill would put a termination date on.

Who signed it

The original cosponsors are Byron Donalds, Scott Perry, Beth Van Duyne, Mary Miller, Josh Brecheen, Eric Burlison, Barry Moore, Randy Weber, Lauren Boebert and Anna Paulina Luna.

Cloud filed it on January 16, 2025 — four days before the inauguration, in the same weeks the Department of Government Efficiency was being stood up. He was then appointed to the House Oversight Committee's new DOGE subcommittee.

We know how that experiment ended: DOGE expired on July 4 with no final report and no proven savings. Elon Musk promised it would cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. What it claimed at the end was $215 billion, unverified.

The Sunset Commission bill is the same theory, made permanent and automatic. Instead of one temporary office deciding what to cut, a standing commission sets a death date for everything, forever, and the burden falls on Congress to prove each agency deserves to keep existing.

The real objection

You can believe the federal government is too big and still see the problem here.

Congress already has every tool this bill claims to need. It writes the budget every year. It can abolish an agency any day it wants, with a simple majority. It can restructure, defund, merge or investigate. Cloud sits on the Appropriations Committee — he is personally one of the people who does this.

What H.R. 489 changes is not Congress's power. It's the default. Right now, when Congress is too dysfunctional to act, agencies keep working: checks go out, forecasts get issued, inspections happen. Under Cloud's bill, when Congress is too dysfunctional to act, agencies die.

That is a bill written by someone who has looked at how badly Congress functions and decided to make that dysfunction the deciding force in American government.

The people it would fall on are not bureaucrats in Washington. They are the retiree in Victoria waiting on a Social Security check, the family on the Gulf Coast watching a storm cone, and the city of Corpus Christi trying to get a water plant built before the reservoirs run dry.

Sources

Bill text of H.R. 489, the Federal Agency Sunset Commission Act of 2025, introduced January 16, 2025, via the Government Publishing Office. Texas Tribune, "Corpus Christi declines to seek grant for new water plant", June 30, 2026. Photo: Official congressional portrait.

Laurel Lee Told Floridians DOGE Put "$700 Back in the Pocket of Every American Taxpayer." Congress's Own Auditor Just Took the Numbers Apart.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:07:05 +0000

On March 21, 2025, Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida posted this to her campaign account:

"Huge WIN for taxpayers! Spending cuts have saved a whopping $115 BILLION—that's $700 back in the pocket of every American taxpayer!"

She was passing along a claim from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency — the running tally DOGE published on a web page it called the Wall of Receipts.

On August 6, 2026, the Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog, the agency that audits the federal government on behalf of the House and Senate — published its findings on that web page.

They are not good.

What the auditors actually found

The GAO's report (GAO-26-108615) opens with the number and then dismantles it:

"As of July 7, 2026, the Wall of Receipts reported savings of $110 billion across contracts, grants, and leases, but some savings estimates are incorrect or lack supporting evidence."

The specifics are worse than the summary:

Grants. "For grants, DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings." Ninety-six percent.
Contracts. "DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate the majority of savings associated with the contracts reported as terminated."
Leases. Of the 264 leases on the list, 108 were already in the process of being terminated before DOGE even existed — savings someone else had already booked, recorded as DOGE's work.
The starkest example. DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings from a Defense Health Agency contract for IT services at more than 700 military treatment facilities. In the GAO's words: "in the end, no action was taken to terminate the contract, or to reduce scope, value, or funding. Thus, no savings were achieved."

And when the auditors asked DOGE to explain the methodology, the report says U.S. DOGE Service officials did not respond to requests for information.

The Wall of Receipts hasn't been updated since January 1, 2026. It was still live, unchanged and undisclosed, as of July 7, 2026.

The part of Lee's post that was never true even on DOGE's own numbers

Set aside whether the $115 billion was real. Look at the second half of her sentence: "that's $700 back in the pocket of every American taxpayer."

Nobody got $700. There was no rebate, no credit, no check. Not one dollar of DOGE's claimed savings was returned to any taxpayer.

Divide a large number by the number of taxpayers and you get a per-person figure. That is arithmetic, not a refund. Lee is a lawyer and a former circuit judge — she is entirely capable of telling the difference between money in someone's pocket and money in a press release. She told her constituents it was in their pocket.

She never walked it back. She's still selling it.

The GAO found that DOGE never once went back and explained its math. The Wall of Receipts launched in February 2025, and since then, the report says, "there have been no updates on the site to shed additional light on the cost savings methodology or to disclose any data limitations."

Lee didn't revise anything either. She was in early and stayed in.

In December 2024, before DOGE had done a thing, she posted that she was "looking forward to working with the Department of Government Efficiency" to get the country "back on the right fiscal track." In April 2025 she went on Fox Business to praise DOGE's "critical" push and call it a "tremendous opportunity."

And on May 29, 2026 — a year after Musk left, with the receipts already in question — she was back on Fox Business for a segment the network titled "President Trump and Elon Musk were willing to make the hard decisions, Rep Laurel Lee says."

Ten weeks later, the GAO explained what those hard decisions were actually worth on paper.

What the "hard decisions" cost people in her district

Here is what makes this more than a bookkeeping story.

Four days after Lee's "$700 back in the pocket" post, the Washington Post reported on what was happening inside the agency that mails out Social Security checks. Its March 25, 2025 story by Lisa Rein and Hannah Natanson opens like this:

"The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts."

In field offices, the Post reported, managers were answering the phones themselves because so many employees had been pushed out. And the agency no longer had any system for monitoring how customers were being treated — that office had been eliminated as part of Musk's cost-cutting.

Those aren't abstractions in Florida's 15th District. They're the daily experience of the retirees, widows and disabled workers who make up a large share of the people Lee represents, and who have no alternative when the phone line stops working.

The trade Lee endorsed and advertised was this: real disruption to services people depend on, in exchange for a savings number that the government's own auditors now say was calculated by a method DOGE would not explain, on grants where 96% of the math couldn't be verified, including $1.7 billion booked on a contract nobody ever cancelled.

What we're owed

Every member of Congress gets things wrong. What separates a mistake from a problem is what you do when the evidence arrives.

The evidence arrived on August 6, 2026, from the least partisan institution in Washington, addressed to Congress. Lee sits on the Committee on House Administration and chairs its Subcommittee on Elections; she is not a bystander to how Congress oversees the executive branch.

The honest move is simple: say plainly that the $115 billion figure she amplified didn't hold up, that nobody got $700, and that a claimed saving on a contract that was never cancelled is not a saving. Her constituents would understand that. They've read a receipt before.

Sources

DOGE Wall of Receipts: More Transparency Needed on How Savings Are Derived from Contract, Grant, and Lease Terminations (GAO-26-108615) — U.S. Government Accountability Office, August 6, 2026
DOGE's "wall of receipts" riddled with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, congressional watchdog says — CBS News, August 6, 2026. Photo: Associated Press.

Ken Calvert Wrote an Op-Ed Cheering DOGE. Then His Constituents Set Out an Empty Chair for Him, Two Weeks Running.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:22:35 +0000

There is a particular way of holding office that goes like this: take the loudest possible public position, then arrange your calendar so that nobody can ask you about it.

Ken Calvert has been representing part of Riverside County since 1993. In February 2025, as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was firing federal workers by the thousands and cancelling grants across the country, Calvert sat down and wrote an opinion piece for the Orange County Register. The headline was not subtle:

"DOGE is doing what must be done to protect taxpayers"

It ran on February 12, 2025. He closed by predicting that "the hyperbole and dramatics from the left will only grow more frantic" as DOGE kept working.

Eight days later, on February 20, his own constituents showed up outside his Palm Desert district office. "Some demonstrators tried to speak with Congressman Ken Calvert at his Palm Desert office," KESQ reported that afternoon, "but it appeared he wasn't there."

"It's just another day in paradise"

That week, across the country, Republican members of Congress were getting an earful. Politico reported on February 24, 2025 that town halls in red districts had turned into shouting matches over Musk and the firings — and that almost none of the Republicans involved had changed their minds.

Calvert was among them. Politico reported that he saw protesters gather at his Palm Desert office and said it didn't change his support for Musk:

"I'm used to it. It's just another day in paradise."

That is a genuinely remarkable thing to say about people who drove to your office to tell you they're frightened about their health care and their jobs. Not "I hear them." Not "I disagree, and here's why." Just: I'm used to it.

The empty chair

The protests didn't stop. By late March, constituents in Palm Desert had started holding what they called "empty chair" town halls — a public forum with a chair set out for the congressman who wouldn't come.

On March 23, 2025, KESQ News Channel 3 covered the second straight week of them. The organizer, Jared Milrad, who lives in Calvert's district, said he was worried about what was coming for Social Security, Medicaid and Medi-Cal.

"We organize an empty chair town hall to encourage our Congressman to come forward and hear from his constituents," Milrad said. "Unfortunately, it's our second week doing this event. He hasn't come to our town hall yet."

The station asked Calvert's office for a response. Here is the full list of things his team offered instead of an in-person town hall:

telephone town hall meetings held "last year"
a Veterans Service Organization Roundtable
a Senior Resource Fair
visits with city leaders in the Coachella Valley about "their federal priorities"
a roundtable with Riverside County healthcare leaders
campaign-season telephone town halls and "events throughout the district regularly"
a promise of "additional telephone town halls and other events with constituents"

Every single item on that list is an event where Calvert controls who is in the room, or where there is no room at all.

A telephone town hall is not a town hall. Nobody can see how many people are waiting to speak or who got skipped. Nobody can stand up. Nobody can follow up when the answer doesn't answer the question. The person running the call decides which callers get on the air, and no one outside can ever know what was screened out. That is the entire appeal of the format — and Calvert is far from the only one who has figured that out. In Arkansas, a 90-year-old woman stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for 52 straight weeks asking for the same thing, and got telephone town halls instead.

Who he wasn't in the room with

It's worth being specific about who was on the other side of that empty chair, because "constituents are upset" is easy to wave off.

In the district Calvert represented at the time, according to the California Budget & Policy Center's February 2025 fact sheet:

84,800 residents relied on CalFresh — California's food assistance program — bringing $195 million a year in grocery money into the district
93,916 children — about 70.6% of the kids in the district — were eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school
96,330 tax filers claimed the Child Tax Credit, worth $220 million to families there
46,200 filers claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, worth another $106 million
60.3% of renters were paying more for housing than they could afford

Those are the households on the receiving end of "waste, fraud and abuse." They are the ones who wanted twenty minutes and a microphone.

The appropriator who cheered on the people taking away his own power

Here is the part that should bother even people who liked DOGE.

Calvert doesn't just sit on the House Appropriations Committee. He chairs its defense subcommittee — one of the most powerful spending jobs in Congress. Appropriating money is the specific constitutional power the House holds over the executive branch. It is, quite literally, his job.

DOGE's whole method was to stop spending money that Congress had already voted to spend, without asking Congress. And Calvert, the appropriator, wrote a newspaper column saying he was "pleased that President Trump is empowering people to audit these organizations."

He then backed it with votes. On June 12, 2025 and again on July 18, 2025, Calvert voted for the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill the House first passed at $9.4 billion, and which became law cancelling $9 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting. He voted to take back money his own committee had appropriated, at the request of a White House that had simply decided not to spend it.

An institution's power doesn't get taken from it. It gets handed over, by people like Calvert, who found it more convenient to be on the winning team than to defend the job they hold.

He's got a new district now, and still no room to stand in

In 2026, California's new congressional map drew Calvert into the same district as fellow Republican Young Kim, forcing two sitting incumbents to run against each other in a redrawn 40th District that sweeps from Orange County suburbs into Riverside County.

Which means a very large number of people who will be represented by Ken Calvert if he wins have never had a chance to ask him anything at all.

They can watch his television ads. They can read his op-eds. They can call a phone number and hope they get picked.

What they can't do — what people in his district have been asking to do since February 2025 — is stand up in a room, in front of their neighbors, and make him answer out loud.

Thirty-three years in Congress. The chair is still empty.

Sources

Ken Calvert: DOGE is doing what must be done to protect taxpayers — Orange County Register, February 12, 2025
'Congress works for us' – Protest in Palm Desert over Elon Musk — Luis Avila, KESQ News Channel 3, February 20, 2025
House Republicans unfazed by protests: 'We're moving forward with the cuts' — Ally Mutnick and Lisa Kashinsky, Politico, February 24, 2025
Community demands answers from Rep. Calvert at town hall — Shay Lawson, KESQ News Channel 3, March 23, 2025. Lead photo: KESQ.

Speaker Johnson Pulled Nick LaLota Aside on the House Floor. He Changed His Vote, and $1.1 Billion for Public Broadcasting Died by Two.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:21:05 +0000

On June 12, 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson was about to lose.

The House was voting on H.R. 4 — the White House's request to cancel $9.4 billion Congress had already approved and appropriated. Most of it, $8.3 billion, was foreign aid: global public health, disaster relief, hunger programs. The rest, $1.1 billion, was two years of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the body that sends federal money to local public radio and TV stations.

It was the first time Congress had ever formally voted on Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. And it was failing.

Nick LaLota had voted no.

Then, as CNN reported from the floor:

"Then he pulled aside Rep. Nick LaLota, a New York centrist, who had just voted no. With the vote still open, several minutes of tense conversation followed before LaLota ultimately went to change his vote. Within seconds, the package of spending cuts narrowly passed."

The final tally was 214 to 212. LaLota is recorded as a Yea.

Two votes. His was one of them.

What he says he got

Reporters asked him what changed in those minutes. He wouldn't say.

"I had some conversations with the speaker that raised my level of confidence that will put this and future issues in the right trajectory," LaLota told CNN — while declining to offer specifics of the conversations, or any promises on SALT.

SALT is the state and local tax deduction — the cap on how much of your property and state income taxes you can write off on your federal return. It is the signature issue of Long Island's Republicans, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with foreign aid or public radio.

So the trade, as far as anyone was allowed to know, was this: LaLota supplied the deciding vote to cancel money for global AIDS programs and public broadcasting, and in exchange he received a raised level of confidence about an unrelated tax negotiation.

He was not the only New Yorker in the huddle. Rep. Mike Lawler, another suburban New York Republican working the same tax issue, was in the conversation with Johnson and also agreed to vote yes. Two Republicans in all had pressed no and then switched: LaLota, and Nebraska's Don Bacon.

Texas Rep. Chip Roy posted the obvious question to X right after the vote: "Real question on the $9B rescissions package that narrowly passed – is how expensive were the 2 original no votes who flipped to yes…?"

We still don't know. LaLota has never said.

Four Republicans held. One of them was from New York.

The vote wasn't unanimous on the Republican side, and this is the part that makes the "I had no choice" defense impossible.

Four Republicans voted no and stayed no: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Mike Turner of Ohio, and Mark Amodei of Nevada. Malliotakis is a New York Republican in a swing seat, facing the same Speaker, on the same night, with the same leverage available to her.

She held. He didn't.

And LaLota's first instinct was hers. He had already pressed the button for no. He knew what was in the bill. What changed wasn't the bill.

Then he did it again

Five weeks later the Senate sent back its version, and the House had to act one more time.

On July 18, 2025, LaLota voted Aye on H.Res. 590, the rule that carried the Senate's amended package to final passage. That one went 216 to 213.

The Senate had put the global AIDS money back on its way through — the $400 million PEPFAR line came out, and the enacted law bars any of the remaining global health rescission from touching "HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria, Nutrition, or Maternal and Child Health" — which is what brought the package down from $9.4 billion to $9 billion. It did not put back a dollar of public broadcasting: the CPB clause is word for word what the House sent over.

Trump signed it on July 24, 2025. Every dollar for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through fiscal 2027 was gone.

What that did to Long Island

On August 1, 2025, CPB announced it was winding down. Most of its staff were terminated at the close of the fiscal year on September 30. Its president, Patricia Harrison, noted it was the first time in nearly 60 years that Congress had refused to fund it, and described what the money had bought:

"Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country."

Note emergency alerts. CPB was the conduit for the federal grants that keep local stations' warning equipment running — which matters on a barrier-island district that takes hurricanes.

Here is who that hit in NY-01.

WLIW-FM, 88.3 out of Southampton, is Long Island's only NPR station — it's the East End's, and it produces The Long Island Daily along with local coverage of towns like Riverhead. It sits inside LaLota's district.

WSHU, whose signal reaches eastern Long Island through repeaters, told its listeners that "this year, WSHU received over $350,000 in federal funding" — money it says is "roughly equivalent to 2.5 pledge drives," and which paid for NPR programs, music royalties, satellite interconnection, and emergency alert systems. The station called the rescission "the strongest threat to public media that we have ever seen. It is quite literally unprecedented."

That is what LaLota's switched vote bought, on the way to a tax conversation he wouldn't describe.

The design of the cut is upside down

The argument for defunding CPB is always about NPR's newsroom in Washington. That's not where the money mostly goes.

As NPR reported when CPB folded, the network relies on direct federal funds for "only a small portion of its budget." Its approximately 1,000 member stations "receive a heftier portion of their operating revenue through CPB" — and the ones in rural and poor areas lean on those grants hardest.

So the cut barely dents the thing the complaint is about, and it lands squarely on the local station. In Michigan, John Moolenaar called defunding public radio "a win for the American people" and took $1.6 million from WCMU, the station in his own district serving 42 Michigan counties. In Oklahoma, Tom Cole accepted an award for protecting public broadcasting in 2016 and then cosponsored the bill that shut its funder down — including his own tribe's radio station. In Florida, Kat Cammack wrote the Defund NPR Act and then voted for the package that cost the station housing Florida's statewide storm-alert network about 20% of its funding.

LaLota's version is different in one way, and it isn't a flattering one. Cammack, Cole and Moolenaar believed in the cut. LaLota didn't — he voted against it. He then reversed himself in the middle of the vote for something he wouldn't name.

The pattern on Long Island

There's a version of this argument that says: fine, that's how the sausage gets made, and he was fighting for Long Island taxpayers on SALT.

Except look at what the fight has actually produced. LaLota's neighbor Andrew Garbarino spent months as one of five Republicans holding Trump's budget bill hostage over the SALT deduction — and then slept through the vote when it came at 6:54 in the morning. The tax break is the thing Long Island's Republicans talk about constantly. It's also the thing they keep trading other people's programs away for, and then not showing up for.

And LaLota's own accounting of the June 12 trade never got any more specific than "a raised level of confidence."

He voted no because he thought the cuts were wrong. Then he made them law. When his constituents asked what he got, the answer was that he'd rather not say.

Long Island still doesn't know the price. It knows the bill: the public radio station in Southampton, and the emergency alerts, and $9 billion Congress had already promised.

We deserve better.

Source

House GOP narrowly approves $9.4 billion package of DOGE cuts — Sarah Ferris, CNN, June 12, 2025, with contributions from Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly. Roll calls: House Roll Call 168 (June 12, 2025) and House Roll Call 203 (July 18, 2025). Photo: CNN.

Kat Cammack Wrote the Defund NPR Act. The Public Station in Her Own District — Which Runs Florida's Storm Alert Network — Lost $1.2 Million a Year.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:29:20 +0000

Florida's 3rd Congressional District covers Gainesville, Ocala and the rural counties around them. It is hurricane country — Kat Cammack's own congressional website keeps a standing hurricane preparedness section for constituents, with its own sub-page of agricultural resources.

It is also home to WUFT, the public radio and television operation at the University of Florida — and to the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network, the statewide storm-alert service housed there.

In February 2025, Cammack introduced a bill to defund public radio. Five months later she voted for the package that gutted the whole system. Here is the sequence.

February 2025: the Defund NPR Act

On February 26, 2025, Cammack and Sen. Jim Banks introduced the Defund NPR Act, H.R. 1595. It amends the Communications Act to ensure "no federal funds, direct or indirect, support NPR, including dues or programming purchases."

Note the phrase direct or indirect. That's the part that reaches local stations. The bill text bars federal money from supporting NPR "including through the payment of dues to or the purchase of programming from the organization by a public broadcast station using Federal funds received by the station" — so a station could no longer spend a dollar of its federal money on NPR dues or on Morning Edition.

Her case for it was about coverage she didn't like:

"For too long, NPR cherry-picked its coverage in favor of its majority Democrat listeners… Federal funds shouldn't be available to NPR."

Banks was blunter: "Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund NPR's liberal propaganda."

The bill did not mention storms.

June and July 2025: the votes that did the damage

Cammack's own bill didn't need to pass. A different vehicle did the work.

She voted Yea on H.R. 4, the Rescissions Act, on June 12, 2025, and Aye again on July 18 on the resolution that sent the Senate's version to final passage. That package clawed back roughly $9 billion Congress had already approved — including $1.1 billion for public broadcasting through fiscal 2027.

On August 1, 2025, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it was shutting down. Most staff were terminated at the end of the fiscal year. CPB's president, Patricia Harrison, noted it was the first time in nearly 60 years that Congress had refused to fund it, and described what CPB had paid for:

"Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country."

Emergency alerts. CPB was the conduit for the federal grants that keep local stations' warning equipment running.

What it cost her district

WUFT is licensed to the University of Florida, in Cammack's district. The Independent Florida Alligator reported in November 2025 what the cuts did to it:

$1.2 million a year in federal CPB money, gone
About $470,000 more lost when Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed state public-broadcasting funding
Together, roughly a 20% cut to operating funds

WUFT has held on so far by burning reserves through fiscal 2026, cutting part-time staff hours and station-funded travel, with no full-time positions eliminated yet. The Florida Public Radio Emergency Network, housed at WUFT, was spared the state veto.

So far, so good is not a plan. It is a station spending its savings while it looks for a long-term answer — and it is the station that houses the emergency network the rest of Florida's public radio system leans on when a storm comes ashore.

Who actually loses public radio

Cammack's argument is about NPR's newsroom in Washington. The money doesn't mostly go there.

As NPR reported when CPB folded, the network itself relies on direct federal funds for only a small share of its budget. Its roughly 1,000 member stations get a much heftier share of their operating revenue through CPB — and stations in rural and poor areas rely on those grants in particular.

So the design of the cut is upside down from the complaint. If you dislike national NPR's editorial choices, defunding CPB is the least efficient possible way to punish them: NPR barely notices, and the transmitter in a rural county goes dark.

That is also, as it happens, the group of people Cammack represents.

She is not the only one, but she wrote the bill

Plenty of Republicans voted for the rescissions package. Tom Cole accepted an award for saving public broadcasting in 2016 and then cosponsored the bill that shut its funder down — including his own tribe's radio station.

The difference with Cammack is authorship. She didn't just vote for someone else's cut. Five months earlier, she put her name on a bill whose entire purpose was to sever federal support from public radio, "direct or indirect."

Most Americans disagreed with her, including most of her own party's voters: a Harris Poll conducted for NPR in July 2025 found 66% of Americans support federal funding for public radio — 58% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats.

She does her town halls by telephone. In April 2025 more than 100 constituents held an in-person one without her and addressed an empty chair; her office called it a "political stunt." Three weeks later she told the same station that "recently in-person town halls are all about the theatrics" and that on a telephone town hall "we call 75,000 people at a single time."

Source

Corporation for Public Broadcasting says it's shutting down — Scott Neuman and Frank Langfitt, NPR, August 1, 2025, and WUFT lost millions in funding. Here's what the changes mean. — The Independent Florida Alligator, November 10, 2025. Photo: Getty Images via PBS NewsHour.

Erin Houchin Went on National TV to Say DOGE Was a Threat to Bureaucracy, Not Democracy. DOGE Expired With No Report, No Proven Savings, and 18 People Laid Off in Bloomington.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:58:29 +0000

In February 2025, when DOGE was firing federal workers faster than courts could rule on it, Indiana's television stations went looking for reaction from the state's members of Congress.

Erin Houchin gave them a clean quote.

"Bureaucrats in Washington are now making decisions that they've never been elected to make; DOGE is uncovering some of this."

That's what she told Fox59, which noted that several members of Indiana's delegation "said they stand behind DOGE's mission full stop."

Not all of them did. In the same story, fellow Indiana Republican Jefferson Shreve said he had questions about DOGE's approach and its pace: "People that give their service to our government at any level need to be communicated with fairly, timely, in a reasonable fashion."

Houchin went the other way. On February 13, 2025, she appeared on NewsNation's Morning in America. The network headlined the segment "DOGE is a threat to bureaucracy: Rep. Erin Houchin," and summed her up this way: "Houchin also says the Department of Government Efficiency is a threat to bureaucracy, not democracy."

Her vote is the reason the cuts happened

On June 12, 2025, the House took up H.R. 4, the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the bill cancelling $9.4 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting.

It passed 214 to 212.

Houchin voted yes. In a two-vote margin, every yes is the deciding one.

Two days later she posted about it, celebrating that the House had "passed the first round of DOGE rescissions—cutting $9.4 billion in reckless, unnecessary spending", and singling out the cuts to USAID for praise.

When the Senate sent it back — $400 million lighter, after senators voted to spare the global AIDS program PEPFAR — the House needed one more vote to finish the job. On July 18, 2025, H.Res. 590 passed 216–213 — a rule written so that agreeing to it also sent the cuts to the president's desk. Houchin voted aye on that too.

What "reckless, unnecessary spending" meant in Bloomington

Bloomington is the largest city in Houchin's district. It is home to Indiana University, and to Indiana Public Media — WFIU radio and WTIU television.

Those stations lost about $1.33 million a year in federal funding, roughly 11% of their budget, when the money Houchin voted to cancel disappeared and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting began winding down. That came on top of about $450,000 a year in state funding that had already been eliminated.

On May 16, 2026, Indiana Public Media announced it was laying off 18 people — 4 full-time and 14 part-time — effective July 15. It also outsourced its master control operations. "Like many public media organizations across the country, we are facing a significant financial challenge that requires us to adjust how we operate for long-term sustainability," executive director Mike Arnold wrote to staff.

Across Indiana, the same reporting put the federal cut to the state's 17 public stations at up to $13 million.

This is the recurring shape of the rescissions vote: the member votes for a number in Washington, and a station in their own district finds out what the number meant. In Michigan, John Moolenaar called defunding public radio "a win for the American people" — and WCMU, licensed to a university in his district and serving 42 Michigan counties, lost 19% of its budget.

Then DOGE just ended

DOGE's charter expired on July 4, 2026.

There was no final report. No accounting. The budget director told a hearing, "We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report," and the White House would not say whether DOGE had officially folded or already had. Elon Musk, who promised at a 2024 rally that DOGE would cut at least $2 trillion, was long gone. The final claim was $215 billion — about 3% of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year. Against that, the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service estimated that in fiscal 2025 alone — back when DOGE was still claiming $160 billion in savings — the paid leave, the rehiring of mistakenly fired workers, and the lost productivity DOGE caused would cost taxpayers $135 billion. Federal spending went up. We wrote the obituary here.

So the ledger on Houchin's position reads like this. The thing she defended on national television as a threat to bureaucracy rather than democracy produced no report, no verified savings, and a $9 billion cut that took $1.33 million a year and 18 jobs out of the public media operation in her own largest city.

The rest of the bill she voted for

Houchin has been in Congress since 2023 and sits on the Rules, Budget, and Energy and Commerce committees — three of the places where a member has real leverage over what the House does.

She used that position to vote for the 2025 budget bill as well. In her district, an estimated 22,748 people are projected to lose health coverage as a result — 11,748 from Medicaid and 11,000 from the Affordable Care Act — according to the Joint Economic Committee.

When Hoosiers wanted to ask her about any of it, they had to improvise. In April 2025, after she paused some of her regular office hours in Bedford, the Indiana Democratic Party held a town hall for her in Bloomington with an empty chair and a sign bearing her name. About 80 people came. The state party said her office never answered its emailed invitation.

DOGE is gone. The people it cost their jobs are still here.

Sources

Houchin's DOGE comments come from Fox59 (February 2025) and NewsNation's Morning in America (February 13, 2025), both linked above. The votes are public record on the House Clerk's site — Roll Call 168 and Roll Call 203, also linked above. The Indiana Public Media layoffs were reported by the Indiana Daily Student on May 16, 2026. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Only Ph.D. Scientist Representing Purdue Called the Federal Audit Long Overdue. Then NSF Cancelled $5.9 Million in Purdue Grants.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:58:24 +0000

There are not many scientists in Congress. Jim Baird is one of them.

He earned a bachelor's and a master's in animal science at Purdue, and after Vietnam he went on to a doctorate in monogastric nutrition from the University of Kentucky. He served on the advisory council for Purdue's Dean of Agriculture. All three of his children are Purdue graduates. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and he co-chairs the Congressional R&D Caucus.

And Indiana's 4th Congressional District contains Lafayette and West Lafayette — which means Purdue University is his constituent.

If any Republican in the House was positioned to defend federal research money, it was this one.

Here is what happened instead.

What happened at Purdue

In April 2025, the Purdue Exponent went out and talked to the graduate students and faculty living through the first months of the administration's research cuts. The paper reported that "almost $170 million worth of Purdue's NIH and NSF funding may be on the chopping block" — two agencies that are, as the story put it, "responsible for doling out almost two thirds of the federal money appropriated to research."

The students were not subtle about what it felt like. One Ph.D. student, Izaak Gilchrist, told the paper:

"No one knows whether a future in science is even feasible in this country anymore."

"We are in graduate school to prepare for a career in science, and then (the cuts and layoffs are) opening up this whole question of, will there be careers in science in the United States?"

Another student, Montse Robles, said she had come from Mexico because "it was always a huge deal for me to do a Ph.D. here," and was now thinking about leaving for Europe. Nationally, nearly 2,000 scientists had signed an open letter on March 31 describing "a climate of fear" in the research community.

This is a newspaper published on the campus in Jim Baird's district, describing his district's largest research institution, in the field he holds a doctorate in.

The receipts: 13 grants, $5,917,472

You don't have to take the students' word for it. The National Science Foundation published its own list of terminated awards — a spreadsheet of every grant the agency killed, with the recipient and the obligated dollar amount.

Purdue University appears on it 13 times, for a combined $5,917,472 in cancelled research money, as of the list's June 5, 2025 export. Among the projects terminated:

$1,500,000 — a knowledge-graph warehouse for neighborhood information
$721,716 — a career-award study on the mechanisms of dehumanization
$644,957 — engineering education for sustainability
$555,089 — a long-term study of identity development in Black science students
$513,506 — a career award on reducing bias in engineering assessments
$349,516 — engineering research on diversity, equity and inclusion
$336,877 — research on reducing racially biased beliefs through genetics education

Eight of the 13 came out of NSF's engineering and STEM education directorates. These are not line items in a budget document. They are people — graduate students on assistantships, postdocs, lab technicians — whose salaries stopped.

What Baird said while it was happening

In March 2025, as the cuts were landing, WISH-TV asked Baird about the Department of Government Efficiency. He told them that an audit of the entire federal government for waste, fraud and abuse was long overdue, and treated DOGE's recommendations as proof the cuts were needed.

Separately, when Fox59 canvassed Indiana's delegation and found several members standing "behind DOGE's mission full stop," what Baird offered was the national debt and not much else:

"I am concerned about our indebtedness. We've been concerned about that for quite some time, and apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that."

That's what he told Fox59. Apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that. A scientist watching the machinery of American science get taken apart, describing it as a bookkeeping method.

DOGE itself is gone now — its charter expired on July 4, 2026 without a final report. The grants it helped cancel did not come back.

He knows exactly what the numbers are

This is the part that's hard to explain away.

In June 2025, Baird appeared at a Capitol Hill briefing — in his capacity as R&D Caucus co-chair, alongside Democrat Bill Foster — on what proposed NSF cuts would do to community colleges and STEM training. As Forbes reported it, NSF was facing cuts of up to 56 percent, with a 75 percent cut to the agency's STEM education directorate, if Congress followed the administration's proposed budget.

He introduced the NSF and USDA Interagency Research Act that same month. He shows up to the briefings. He knows the numbers.

And the President's budget request keeps coming back for more. In April 2026, the administration asked Congress for $4 billion for NSF — a 54% cut from the enacted level, and proposed funding STEM education at $428 million, another 54% cut.

Baird has not stopped any of it.

The part where he takes the credit

On April 28, 2026, Baird's office put out a press release with this headline: "Congressman Baird Announces Purdue University to Gain Over $2.7 Million in Research Under USDA Reorganization."

Read what he's actually celebrating. Purdue picked up a research project worth $2.701 million and seven Agricultural Research Service employees — because the USDA was decommissioning the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the department's flagship research campus in Maryland. Baird's statement:

"Purdue University and the State of Indiana continue to solidify their standing as the premier location for agricultural research and opportunity. As a farmer and lifelong Hoosier, I am pleased to see the USDA expanding opportunities in Indiana as the agency refocuses on its core mission…"

Expanding opportunities. A federal research center was being shut down and its pieces scattered, and the co-chair of the R&D Caucus described the scattering as an expansion because seven jobs landed in his district.

Do the arithmetic on his own district. NSF cancelled $5.9 million of Purdue research. Baird's press release claims $2.7 million of salvage from a shuttered federal lab. He put out a statement about the $2.7 million. Search his press page for the $5.9 million and there is nothing there.

This is a familiar pattern on this site. Robert Aderholt chairs the subcommittee whose bill eliminates the adult job training program, the youth job training program and the jobs program for low-income seniors — and announced $22 million for rural hospitals back home out of that same bill. Cut it in Washington, cut the ribbon at home, and hope nobody puts the two next to each other.

Why this one stings more

Most members of Congress have never run a lab, never written a grant proposal, never sat on a university advisory council.

Baird has done all three. He knows what a terminated award does to a graduate student in year four. He knows that the research pipeline he came up through — a land-grant university, a doctorate in animal science, a career in agricultural extension — was built with exactly the kind of money now being cancelled.

He also isn't hearing about it, because he doesn't put himself in rooms where people can tell him. His constituents say he refuses to hold public town halls, and when 13News asked his office about holding any, it got no answer. In late March 2025 — the same weeks the Exponent was interviewing frightened graduate students a few blocks away — more than 250 of his constituents packed the West Lafayette Public Library and held a town hall without him, chanting "Where is Jim?"

He wasn't there. He was in Washington, calling the audit long overdue.

Source

Trump cuts leave Ph.D. researchers, professors questioning future — Ronak Mohanty, The Purdue Exponent, April 22, 2025. Photo: The Purdue Exponent.

Jen Kiggans Called DOGE Cuts 'So Necessary.' Then Her Own District Lost 70 Contracts With Veteran-Owned Businesses.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:52:07 +0000

Jen Kiggans chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Her job, by title, is watching for things that hurt veterans and calling them out.

In November 2025, Politico published a count of what DOGE had done to veteran-owned businesses. Two-thirds of every contract DOGE cancelled at the Department of Veterans Affairs that year was with a veteran-owned company. At least 550 veteran-owned businesses nationwide were hit.

Virginia's 2nd District — Kiggans's district, built around the Navy in Virginia Beach and Hampton Roads — lost at least 70 contracts among veteran-owned businesses. More than any oversight chair would want in her own backyard.

Her statement to Politico:

"As a veteran, I am troubled any time a veteran-owned business is impacted by budget cuts. I am actively working to review and reverse these cuts."

That's a fine sentence. The problem is everything she said before a reporter counted.

What she said while it was happening

Kiggans didn't discover DOGE in November 2025. She was there at the start.

In December 2024, before Trump had even taken office, she publicly praised a "productive first meeting" with Elon Musk and DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy, the Virginia Mercury reported.

In February 2025, as mass firings hit Virginia — one of the largest concentrations of federal employees in the country — she called the cuts "so necessary." That was said while the workers being cut were struggling to find new jobs.

Later that year, on the John Fredericks Show, she told laid-off federal workers that there were other jobs out there and that they needed to "go out and get them."

That is not a person who was blindsided. That's a person who watched it happen to her own district for eleven months and cheered.

$8.3 million, and who it was for

The contracts weren't the whole of it. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress cited by the Mercury, DOGE terminated more than $8.3 million in grants and leases tied to Virginia's 2nd District — including funding connected to veterans' services and facilities, and programs serving military families.

Hampton Roads is not a district where that's an abstraction. It's a district where the Navy, the shipyards, the VA and the contractors around them are the economy. Kiggans knows this better than almost anyone in Congress; she's a former Navy helicopter pilot married to a former F/A-18 pilot.

The businesses on the other end of those cancelled contracts were run by people like the ones Politico interviewed: a nine-year Navy veteran who started walking dogs after losing his translation business, a ten-year Army veteran who furloughed half their staff, another who considered selling a car to make payroll. Two of them would only speak anonymously, afraid the government would retaliate against what was left of their business.

Some of the cancelled VA contracts had been helping register cancer patients and provide health care support to veterans. The VA says that work is now done in-house.

The oversight chair who didn't oversee

Here's the part that should bother her constituents most.

Kiggans has a gavel. She runs the subcommittee that exists specifically to investigate the VA and hold it accountable, and she has used it plenty — hearings on VA bonus payments, on mental health policy, on the Hampton VA Medical Center.

When the largest disruption to veterans' services in years came from her own party's White House, what her constituents got was a statement, issued after a reporter did the counting. She has not pointed to a hearing she called on it, a letter she sent, or a contract she got restored.

"Actively working to review and reverse these cuts" is the sentence a member reaches for when there is no formal action to name. If any of those 70 contracts came back, her office hasn't said so.

The politics arrived on schedule

By December 2025, even Elon Musk was calling DOGE only "somewhat successful" and saying he wouldn't do it again. The Virginia Mercury asked Kiggans for an interview about her support for the program and sent her a list of detailed questions about its impact on her district.

A spokeswoman said she was not available. The questions, she never answered.

Virginia's 2nd is rated a toss-up — the only one in Virginia, by the nonpartisan Inside Elections. In November she faces Elaine Luria, the retired Navy commander she unseated in 2022, who won the Democratic primary on August 4, 2026.

That's the timeline, laid end to end: praise DOGE in December 2024, call the firings "so necessary" in February, tell the fired to go get other jobs, absorb 70 contract cancellations and $8.3 million in lost grants, issue a sympathetic statement when Politico calls, decline the interview when the Mercury calls, run for re-election.

The cost of "efficiency" in a Navy town

There's an argument to be made for cutting wasteful federal contracts. It's not a crazy position, and plenty of veterans hold it.

But the argument only works if the person making it is willing to look at what actually got cut and say whether it was waste. Kiggans has never done that. She endorsed the cuts in the abstract, and when the specifics landed on veteran-owned businesses in her own district, her response was that she was "troubled."

Being troubled is not oversight. It's a feeling. Her constituents gave her a gavel.

Source

DOGE had a cutting spree. 550 vet-owned businesses felt it. — Politico, November 22, 2025, and Musk's doubts about DOGE spotlight political risks for U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans — Virginia Mercury, December 17, 2025. Photo: Francis Chung / POLITICO.

Cliff Bentz Told CNN He'd Cut His Own Staff to Save Taxpayer Money. A Month Earlier, His Office Outspent Every Other Member of the House on Inauguration Weekend.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:44:39 +0000

In February 2025, as DOGE was firing federal workers by the thousands, Cliff Bentz went on CNN and told Jake Tapper he was willing to cut his own congressional staff to help.

"I think everybody has to step up. The Constitution requires that we protect our nation for posterity. We're not doing it," he told Tapper. "I'm doing the constitutional hard work of trying to figure out how to shrink our budget down to a point that is somehow sustainable and if that requires that kind of reduction of our staff, so be it."

He said it on The Lead on February 21, 2025 — a month after the inauguration, as the Capital Chronicle later noted in its reporting on his office's books.

One month earlier, his office had spent more taxpayer money on travel over Trump's inauguration weekend than any other office in the U.S. House of Representatives.

$20,750 for one long weekend

The Oregon Capital Chronicle went through the quarterly disbursement reports every House office is required to post, and published the numbers on August 7, 2025.

Between January 17 and January 22, 2025, Bentz's office reimbursed four staffers — his chief of staff and three Oregon-based field representatives — about $20,750 for hotels, meals and rideshares.

For comparison:

	Amount
Bentz's office, inauguration weekend	$20,750
Average House office that weekend	$2,546
Bentz's office, lodging alone (Jan 19–22)	$16,300
Average House office that reimbursed lodging	$4,500

That's six times the average for total travel and more than three times the average for lodging. His office outspent the next-highest office in the entire House — a Texas Republican's — by nearly $2,800, and that office was covering nine staffers to Bentz's four.

Oregon's three Democratic House members also attended the inauguration. Their offices billed taxpayers $264, $311, and $755.

One Bentz staffer alone was reimbursed $6,250 for four days of hotels. Two others billed $3,128 each; the chief of staff billed $3,775.

Bentz's spokesperson, Alexia Spentzas, told the Capital Chronicle that some of the cost came from an annual in-person staff planning session in January that "overlapped with the opportunity to attend the inauguration of the 47th president," and that extra district staff came to Washington because more than 1,000 constituents had requested inauguration tickets.

She would not say which staff were included, how many people, or where any of them stayed.

Kate Titus, executive director of Common Cause Oregon, told the paper she'd expect a party to spend somewhat more on its own president's inauguration — "That said, the spending you've identified does seem shockingly high."

The Malheur Enterprise got there first

Three months before that, the newspaper in Bentz's own back yard had already gone through his books. In an editor's note published May 7, 2025, Les Zaitz of the Malheur Enterprise laid out a pattern.

Bentz uses his taxpayer-funded office budget to cover the rent on his Washington, D.C., home — which Congress permits, and which not every member chooses to do. In April 2024 that came to $2,580 for the month. In September 2024 it was $2,349.

In those same months, his campaign — donor money — was paying for stays elsewhere. The September bills included $338 at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, $1,294 at the Coeur d'Alene Resort, a self-described luxury golf and spa resort, and $381 at the Churchill Hotel. In July 2024, his campaign reported $7,784 for "travel/event" at Black Butte Resort in central Oregon. Zaitz put that last number in local terms: more than seven weeks of income for the average Malheur County household.

Congressional records also showed his chief of staff, who is paid well over $150,000 a year, staying in $700-a-night hotels while on public business. The average nightly rate in Oregon is about $154.

The Enterprise sent Bentz the document listing his 2024 travel costs and offered him the chance to explain any of it or point out an error. He didn't respond — not to that, not to a request for receipts, not to specific questions. His communications director's answer was that his expenses are reviewed by House officials and that he is "fully compliant" with internal rules.

Nobody said the spending was against the rules. That's the point. It's allowed, and he did it, and he won't discuss it.

What "shrink our budget" meant back home

Bentz represents Oregon's 2nd District — most of the state east of the Cascades plus Jackson and Josephine counties. It is not a wealthy district. Nearly 58,000 households there — one in five — rely on SNAP to buy groceries. Almost half of those households include someone 60 or older.

While his office was billing $6,250 for one staffer's four days of Washington hotels, DOGE was cutting thousands of federal jobs — including many in Bentz's own district, as the Capital Chronicle noted. Bentz's public position on all of it was that everybody has to step up.

He carried that through to the votes. He voted for the budget bill that cuts Medicaid in a district where 70% of children are covered by it through the Oregon Health Plan, and where an estimated 36,246 people are projected to lose Medicaid coverage.

Asked by OPB how cutting a program that already reimburses providers 60 cents on the dollar would improve outcomes for anyone, his answer was that "we need to get rid of some of the things that have been abused by states such as Oregon — and I mean abused."

Abuse is a strong word from a member of Congress who charges the public for his rent and won't say who the $6,250 hotel bill covered.

He's not the only one

This is a well-worn shape. In Florida, Mike Haridopolos praises DOGE for exposing waste — after a community college paid him $152,000 in public money for a 175-page double-spaced manuscript that existed in a single copy. The austerity is always for someone else's line item.

What makes Bentz's version sting in eastern Oregon is the scale of the gap. His office spent more than fifteen times what Oregon's three Democratic House offices spent combined on the same weekend — and a month later he made the case for firing federal workers, on national television, as a matter of constitutional duty.

Bentz has been in Congress since 2021. He is Oregon's only Republican in Washington. When two Oregon newsrooms asked him to explain his own spending, he answered neither one himself.

Source

Oregon's US Rep. Cliff Bentz outspent every House member on Trump inauguration weekend — Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle, August 7, 2025. See also Les Zaitz's editor's note in the Malheur Enterprise, May 7, 2025.

Mike Haridopolos Wants Spending 'in the Sunshine.' A College Paid Him $152,000 for a Book With One Copy.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:02:40 +0000

In April 2025, Mike Haridopolos sat down with the Florida outlet The Floridian to talk about DOGE and what he had learned about government waste back home in Tallahassee. His line was a good one:

"When you put government in the sunshine and spending in the sunshine, people spend smarter this way."

He said it again a few different ways in the same interview. "We are the government in the sunshine, [and] we also need to have spending in the sunshine." Transparency Florida, he explained, lets you see everything — contracts, salaries, how the money moves.

Fine. Let's put some spending in the sunshine.

$152,000. One book. One copy.

While Haridopolos was a Florida state senator, Brevard Community College paid him $152,000 to write a book about Florida government.

The Associated Press went looking for it. What the college had bought was a 175-page, double-spaced manuscript titled Florida Legislative History and Processes — and the single existing copy could only be read in person, at the college's administration office.

The AP reported that the manuscript did not come close to meeting the contract's call for a publishable, textbook-quality work, and that much of it was Haridopolos's own advice on how to run for office.

The college's president at the time of the story, Jim Drake, defended it: "I thought that the book was a very fine piece of work as a primer in the political process." He was less sure about the arrangement itself, saying he wasn't familiar with a case "in which where is a leave given over an extended period of time unless the research purpose is so compelling."

The AP also surfaced why a community college wanted a sitting legislator on the payroll in the first place. In a 2005 memo to the board of trustees, Drake's predecessor Thomas Gamble wrote that Haridopolos's "roles in the Florida Legislature have provided unique access to both houses in Tallahassee."

Unique access. That was the product.

Haridopolos did not return the AP's calls or answer its e-mails for that story.

Then they put it on Kindle

Days after the story ran, Brevard Community College uploaded the manuscript to Amazon and listed it for $9.99.

The Miami New Times did the arithmetic on March 2, 2011: at $9.99 a copy, the school "needs to sell only a little more than 15,215 copies to make its money back." At the time of that story, the book ranked 45,340th on Amazon's paid Kindle list.

Haridopolos's defense was that this is simply what academics do:

"What you do as a college teacher is you do three things, you teach, you write, and you publish."

Most college teachers who write and publish do not receive $152,000 of public money for a manuscript that exists in one copy in an administrator's office.

It helped end his Senate campaign

This was not a story that blew over.

Haridopolos was running for the U.S. Senate in 2012 against Bill Nelson, and by the summer of 2011 the campaign was coming apart. His second-quarter fundraising fell to about $900,000 from $2.5 million the quarter before. His campaign manager and a senior adviser both left. He was facing a deposition over allegations — which he denied — involving payments to former state Republican Party chairman Jim Greer.

And the book kept coming up. A University of South Florida political science professor, McKee, who named it to WFSU as one of the problems, put the campaign's collapse this way: the more exposure Haridopolos got, the less viable he looked.

On July 18, 2011, he dropped out of the Senate race, saying the responsibilities he was managing on both fronts were in conflict.

Fifteen years later he is in Congress, and the story is not part of the standard biography.

Why an old story still counts

Because he keeps bringing it up himself.

A man who took six figures in public money for a book almost nobody could read is now one of the members telling Floridians that the answer to government waste is transparency and a cost-cutting task force. He praised DOGE by name. He held up Florida's spending website as the model.

Meanwhile, the actual cuts made in DOGE's name landed on people who never had a $152,000 contract for a one-copy book to fall back on. In Florida, DOGE cut more than $53 million in grants from Florida State University alone. And the task force he praised expired on July 4, 2026 without a final report, having promised $2 trillion in savings and claimed $215 billion.

There is a version of "spending in the sunshine" that means every public dollar gets scrutiny, including the ones that went to you. There's another version that means you get to point at somebody else's grant.

Haridopolos has told us which one he practices. We had to read the AP to find out.

We deserve better.

Sources

"Fla. politician's deal: 1 book, 1 copy, $152K," Associated Press, February 28, 2011.
"You Can Now Buy Mike Haridopolos's Crappy Book for $9.99 on Your Kindle," Miami New Times — Kyle Munzenrieder, March 2, 2011.
"Why did Haridpolos drops out of Senate race?" WFSU — Sascha Cordner, July 22, 2011.
"Haridopolos Talks DOGE: 'When You Put Spending in the Sunshine, People Spend Smarter'," The Floridian — Grayson Bakich, April 8, 2025. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Rob Wittman Wrote an Op-Ed Demanding 'a Scalpel, Not a Sledgehammer.' One Month Later He Voted to Hand Over the Sledgehammer.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:01:57 +0000

On May 11, 2025, Rob Wittman published an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch pushing back on the chaos coming out of Washington. It was, by the standards of his party at that moment, a brave thing to write.

Here was the line everybody quoted:

"We need to pursue targeted savings – not reckless cuts. That means using a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, when it comes to rightsizing the federal workforce or realigning federal spending."

Virginia Mercury columnist Roger Chesley wrote about it under a headline that captured the mood: Wittman's scrutiny "needs company from other Republicans." Chesley's first question was blunt: what took you so long?

Wittman's emailed answer was that he'd been at it from the start:

"I've spoken up from the beginning."

He listed what he had done:

"I called for a compassionate approach to federal workforce reforms, raised concerns after mass layoffs at the Department of Education, and advocated for Virginia's research institutions to continue receiving federal funding."

"I've shared personal stories from Virginia's First District directly with cabinet secretaries and White House officials to ensure the human impact of these policies is fully understood."

Chesley took him at his word and closed with the obvious test: "The proof, though, will be how everyday Americans are affected."

Here's the proof.

What he did next

On June 12, 2025, the House voted on the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the bill that cancelled $9.4 billion Congress had already approved and promised, and wrote DOGE's cuts into permanent law. It passed by two votes, 214–212.

Wittman voted yes.

Just after midnight on July 18, the House voted again to send the final version to the president. It passed 216–213.

Wittman voted yes again.

That is not a scalpel. Cancelling money Congress had already committed — with no line-item review of what each cut would do — is the definition of the sledgehammer he had just written a newspaper column against.

The op-ed was May 11. The first vote was June 12. One month.

Virginia paid more than almost anybody

This matters more in Virginia than in most states, and Wittman knows it better than most members.

More than 341,000 federal employees lived in Virginia as of 2023, according to Census Bureau figures Chesley cited. The commonwealth's economy is built on federal payrolls, federal contracts, and the towns that grew up around them.

In January 2026, the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO published an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data that put a number on it:

Virginia had a net decline of 23,500 civilian federal jobs through November 2025.
That single year wiped out six years of federal job growth in eleven months.
On top of that, Virginia companies filed layoff notices covering nearly 7,000 more workers — an increase of about 70% over 2024.

Bob McNab, who chairs the economics department at Old Dominion University, explained what those numbers mean in practice:

"On average, each federal government employee earns about 1.6 times the average private sector employee. If we include benefits, that ratio climbs to two. So, Virginia losing 23,500 federal government jobs last year is roughly the equivalent of losing 47,000 private sector jobs."

He added that there is no quick fix: Virginia would need to add 2,000 jobs a month just to catch up, and even then, "the deficit between when they were fired and replaced is still there."

The job losses contributed to Virginia losing its ranking as the No. 1 state for business in the country.

The op-ed was the alibi, not the position

There is a way to read Wittman's May column charitably: he saw the damage coming, said so publicly, and then got rolled by his leadership.

The trouble is that he wasn't rolled. He had two chances, five weeks apart, on a bill that passed by two votes and then by three. On the first of them, a single member changing his mind would have tied the vote and killed the bill. He was, in the most literal sense, in a position to stop it.

Eric Scorsone, executive director of the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, told the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism that the shock caused by the layoffs may cause problems for the economy in the long term, and offered the one hope available: more military spending. "Virginia has really relied on the federal government," he said. "It has been a good deal, quite frankly. But that's kind of going away."

Wittman is vice chairman of the full House Armed Services Committee and chairman of its Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. If anyone in Congress was positioned to protect Virginia's federal workforce, or to trade a vote for it, it was him.

And this is the second time we've written this sentence about him

The same month he was publishing his op-ed about reckless cuts, Wittman was also telling Chesley that "Virginia's vulnerable populations" were "protected in the Medicaid portion of the reconciliation bill." He had already signed a letter promising not to support any bill cutting Medicaid coverage. He voted for that bill too.

Two issues, one method: publish the concern, collect the credit for independence, then vote with leadership when the roll is called.

Ohio's Troy Balderson ran the same play on the same bill and got caught inside 24 hours. Wittman's version had a longer fuse and a bigger bill attached — 23,500 Virginia jobs, and counting.

He was right in May. He voted the other way in June and July. Virginians got the sledgehammer.

Source

The op-ed quotes and Wittman's emailed responses come from Roger Chesley's May 16, 2025 Virginia Mercury column, Va. GOP congressman's scrutiny on federal cuts, job losses needs company from other Republicans. Photo: Christopher Tyree / Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism.

Ron Estes Is the Congressman in Charge of Protecting Social Security. He Told Newsmax He Was Looking Forward to What DOGE Would Find.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:54:52 +0000

In January 2025, House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith named Ron Estes chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security.

That is not a ceremonial post. It is the single job in the House of Representatives whose entire purpose is to watch over the Social Security Administration — the agency that sends a check every month to more than 71 million Americans. When the agency stops working, the subcommittee chairman is the person Congress has designated to do something about it.

Two months into the job, with DOGE already inside the agency, Estes went on Newsmax to explain his priorities.

"Efficiency"

Newsmax's March 18, 2025 write-up opens like this:

"The new chair of the House Social Security Subcommittee, Ron Estes, R-Kan., told Newsmax on Tuesday that his focus is on making the Social Security Administration more efficient and that he also looks forward to any discoveries the Department of Government Efficiency uncovers in aiding that effort."

Here is what Estes himself said on the air:

"My first goal is to make sure that we have good operational efficiencies — that the processes work — that when somebody retires, they're able to get enrolled; if unfortunately their spouse dies, they're able to get the survivor benefits; if they're disabled, that they're able to get those benefits."

"We want to make sure that the agency works well. And so that's our first process: making sure that there's efficiency and that we don't have improper payments or waste, fraud, and abuse in there."

Read that list again, because it is a good list. Retirement enrollment. Survivor benefits. Disability benefits. Those are the three things the agency does that people cannot live without.

Now look at what happened to them.

What DOGE actually did

Estes wasn't a bystander watching this happen to him. He'd signed up early. In November 2024 he joined the DOGE Caucus. In December 2024 he published an op-ed welcoming it:

"With Trump back in the White House as of Jan. 20 and Musk and Ramaswamy heading DOGE, there's hope that Republicans in Congress will have allies in reforming our government."

The "allies" got to work. Between January and November 2025, the Social Security Administration lost 6,645 employees — more than 11% of its workforce, according to a January 2026 analysis by Molly Weston Williamson at the Center for American Progress. She calls it the largest one-year drop in SSA staff in the agency's history.

It wasn't spread evenly, either. In 33 states the agency had at least 10% fewer staff in fiscal 2025 than the year before. Some individual field offices lost a quarter of their people or more.

The federal employees' union put the ratio in plain terms: by June 2025, one SSA staff member was left to serve every 1,480 beneficiaries.

That is the "efficiency" Estes said he was after — an agency doing the same work for the same 71 million people with thousands fewer people to do it.

The subcommittee chairman's job description

There is a specific reason this matters more for Estes than for the average member.

Any of the 435 members of the House can complain about a federal agency. The chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee has tools nobody else has. He can hold hearings. He can subpoena documents. He can put the Commissioner of Social Security under oath in public and make him answer for a wait time. He can hold a bill hostage. That is the whole point of the gavel.

Estes had that gavel the entire time this was happening. He had also, in December 2024, publicly welcomed the people doing the cutting as "allies." When the largest one-year staff loss in the agency's history was underway, the chairman charged with overseeing that agency was on cable television saying he looked forward to what DOGE would turn up.

And then there's what happened to the data

Staffing was only half of it. The other half was the agency's files — the Social Security numbers, birthdates and parents' names of essentially every American who has ever had one.

In August 2025, the agency's own chief data officer went public. Charles Borges, who had held the job since January 2025, disclosed to Congress that DOGE staff had placed a live copy of the Social Security data of more than 300 million Americans in a "vulnerable cloud environment" that circumvented the agency's standard oversight.

SSA's answer was that the data was "walled off from the internet" and that it was "not aware of any compromise."

Three days later, Borges resigned. He called it a constructive discharge, writing to the commissioner that the agency's actions against him made his duties "impossible to perform legally and ethically," and describing "exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear."

Then, in a court filing dated January 16, 2026, the Justice Department confirmed a version of it. A DOGE staffer had shared Social Security data through Cloudflare — a service, in the filing's words, "not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA's security protocols." Agency officials didn't know it had happened. And because the server sits outside SSA, the agency cannot determine what was sent, or whether it's still there.

Buried in the same filing was something else. In March 2025, a political advocacy group approached two DOGE members at the Social Security Administration and asked them to analyze state voter rolls — with the stated aim, per the filing, of finding "evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States." One of them signed a "Voter Data Agreement" in his official SSA capacity on March 24, 2025. Nobody at the agency reviewed or approved it. SSA discovered the arrangement in November and made two Hatch Act referrals in December.

Every one of those events happened inside the agency Ron Estes was appointed to oversee. He welcomed the people who did it as "allies" three months before the first of them.

The bill for all this comes due in 2032

The other half of Estes's record on Social Security is the money.

He voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill. Sen. Ron Wyden, citing the Social Security actuary's own numbers, said in August 2026 that the bill "plundered Social Security to the tune of $168 billion" — and moved up the date the trust fund runs dry.

That date is now the fourth quarter of 2032, per the trustees report released in June 2026 and reported by CNBC. When it arrives, benefits get cut across the board unless Congress acts.

So the chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee voted for a bill that pulled the deadline closer, while the agency that administers the program was being hollowed out on his watch.

Meanwhile his colleagues are lining up behind a plan to hand the whole question to a 13-member commission whose recommendations Congress would have to vote on without being allowed to amend a word.

What Kansans get

Kansas's 4th District covers Wichita and most of south-central Kansas — a lot of retirees, a lot of people on disability, a lot of small towns where the nearest Social Security office is already a drive.

When a field office loses a quarter of its staff, nobody sends a letter announcing it. You find out when you call and stay on hold, or when the appointment you need is six weeks out, or when a survivor benefit that should take weeks takes months and the bills don't wait.

Estes told Newsmax he wanted to make sure that "when somebody retires, they're able to get enrolled." He had the gavel that could have made that true. He used it to cheer on the people cutting the staff who do the enrolling.

Source

Estes's remarks are from Nick Koutsobinas's March 18, 2025 report, Rep. Estes to Newsmax: Social Security to Focus on Efficiency.

Congress Holds the Purse Strings. Tom Cole's Plan Was to Ask Elon Musk Nicely Over Bourbon.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:50:58 +0000

On March 20, 2025, Tom Cole held a town hall for his constituents in Oklahoma's 4th District. It was on the telephone.

Most of the hour went to one subject. NOTUS reporter Em Luetkemeyer, who listened in, wrote that the majority of questions Cole faced were about DOGE — Elon Musk's operation, which was then tearing through federal agencies and cancelling contracts and leases across the country. Callers asked about Social Security. They asked about the Indian Health Service. They asked about federal offices closing in Oklahoma and people losing their jobs.

One caller asked the question that actually matters:

"I'm very concerned about Congress's constitutional duties, that those are being taken over by DOGE. I would like to know what steps you're willing to take to make sure that the constitutional duties of Congress remain with Congress, and not with the executive branch."

Cole is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Deciding how federal money gets spent is, quite literally, his job. The Constitution gives that power to Congress, and inside Congress it runs through his committee.

Here is his answer:

"I try to do it by pretty aggressively defending congressional power. I think there's a lot of things out there that you hear that may or may not be true."

Elsewhere on the same call, he described what defending congressional power looked like in practice.

The method: call DOGE and complain

Cole told the callers that when DOGE went after something in his district, his office picked up the phone.

"We've found, at least, if you work it just like you would any other government agency, they can be pretty responsive."

His example was a Social Security office in Lawton, Oklahoma, that had shown up on a list of terminated contracts. His staff flagged it. DOGE reversed it.

"We think this is a bad decision. And [DOGE] relooked at it and they agreed so. But this is where members have to be pretty aggressive and engaged."

That is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee describing his relationship with an unelected outfit that was cancelling spending Congress had approved: he asks, and sometimes they say yes.

NOTUS also noted that The Atlantic had reported that week that Cole met with Elon Musk over cigars and bourbon, and advised him to consult lawmakers before making cuts. Cole's read on how that went, as he told the magazine:

"So far, I've found them to be good to their word."

He also urged constituents to "have confidence in the country's institutions."

What actually happened in his district

Confidence would have been easier if the cuts had stopped.

In February 2025, several employees at the National Weather Center in Norman — inside Cole's district — were fired as part of the mass federal layoffs. On March 3, DOGE listed for termination the lease on one of the four buildings used by the Radar Operations Center, the hub where technicians and researchers maintain and improve the country's weather radar. Those are the facilities that keep tornado warnings working in a state that gets a lot of tornadoes.

Cole assured the callers on his March 20 telephone town hall that DOGE could be talked round — his example was a Social Security office in Lawton, not either of these. Then, through the summer, he kept promising. At a Norman chamber of commerce event, he said of the National Weather Service offices in Norman: "You're going to be fine in our bill. We're going to protect it." He said the National Weather Center "is not going anywhere, and it's going to be fully staffed and maintained."

But in the same reporting, Cole acknowledged the limit of his own promise: control of the grants lies with the executive branch. The spending plan the appropriations subcommittee produced still cut $380 million from NOAA. NOAA supplies roughly 20% of the University of Oklahoma's research funding and supports more than 900 jobs in the area.

So the chairman's answer to an agency being dismantled was to negotiate with the people dismantling it, one project at a time, and hope the rest held.

And he wouldn't show up

Meanwhile, his constituents were trying to get in the same room with him.

A group in Norman called Women in Action for All held a rally outside Cole's office. "We had about a hundred women there, and we had signs and that sort of thing," chair Rhonda Stock said. They delivered a letter, written by a retired OU history professor, asking Cole to hold a town hall.

When that didn't work, they organized one without him: a "Non Cole Town Hall" at the Moore Public Library on April 9, 2025, where former Oklahoma Gov. David Walters and former Senate president pro tempore Cal Hobson would take the questions people wanted to ask their congressman.

Cole's communications director, Olivia Porcaro, explained his absence: "Due to the congressman's busy schedule, he will not be in attendance at the event."

Stock said the group's biggest worry was the National Weather Center. "Oklahoma needs it desperately," she said. "People just need warnings about the weather."

Cole's official website still lists exactly one kind of town hall: telephone town halls. On the phone, staff choose which callers get through. Nobody gets to follow up. Nobody gets to look him in the eye.

He did face people in person that year. On July 30, 2025, he met constituents at Sonny's Cafe in Purcell — where, as The Oklahoman documented in a photo gallery, a handful of people held a small demonstration about half a mile away.

The thing he could have done

There was a straightforward option available to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee: refuse to move the cuts.

He did the opposite. In June and July 2025, Cole cosponsored the Rescissions Act of 2025 and voted for it twice — the bill that cancelled spending Congress had already approved, $9.4 billion of it in the version the House passed in June. His own office called it a vote "in Favor of Rescinding Wasteful Spending." That bill did not ask DOGE nicely to reverse anything. It wrote DOGE's cuts into law.

You cannot spend the spring telling constituents you are "aggressively defending congressional power" and spend the summer voting to hand that power away.

Ohio's Troy Balderson tried a version of the same two-step and got caught doing it in the space of a single day. Cole took a few months. The result was the same.

Twenty-three years in Congress. The most powerful spending gavel in the House. And when the people of Norman wanted to ask him about the weather center in their own backyard, he sent word that he was busy — while telling reporters that Elon Musk had been good to his word.

Source

The town hall quotes come from Em Luetkemeyer's March 20, 2025 report for NOTUS, Rep. Tom Cole Says DOGE Is 'Pretty Responsive' to His Concerns, produced in partnership with Oklahoma Watch. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP.

Tom Cole Won an Award for Saving Public Broadcasting. Then He Helped Kill It — Including His Own Tribe's Radio Station.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:49:57 +0000

In February 2016, America's Public Television Stations handed Tom Cole its Champion of Public Broadcasting Award.

The citation was not vague. APTS president Patrick Butler said Cole's "extraordinary leadership" was "instrumental" in getting $445 million in level funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into the House spending bill — "the first time in five years the House has proposed anything but a zero for public broadcasting."

And Butler singled out one specific thing Cole protected:

"Chairman Cole helped ensure critical funding for the public broadcasting interconnection system that makes it possible for public television to serve everyone, everywhere, every day, for free, including the Native American nations of Oklahoma."

Cole accepted the award and said he looked forward to "helping them continue to serve, inform and edify communities in every city and state across the nation."

Nine years later, he helped shut the whole thing down.

What happened in 2025

In June 2025, the White House sent Congress a package asking it to cancel $9.4 billion it had already approved and promised. The bill became the Rescissions Act of 2025. Buried in it was $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — two full years of funding for public television and radio stations, money Congress had already voted for and stations had already built budgets around.

By then, Cole was chairman of the entire House Appropriations Committee, and the bill was referred there the day it was introduced. His committee never marked it up. Five days later the Rules Committee sent it straight to the floor instead, and the House voted to take it up 213–207 — every Republican but one, Cole included.

Then the full House passed it, 214–212, and passed it again in final form, 216–213. Cole's own office put out a release headlined "Cole Votes in Favor of Rescinding Wasteful Spending." The Appropriations Committee he chairs issued another one celebrating the bill's passage.

Trump signed it on July 24, 2025. Eight days later, on August 1, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it was shutting down.

He was asked about it directly

A week before the committee vote, Deadline's Ted Johnson asked Cole whether his past support for public media had changed. Cole's answer:

"No, but I have an up-and-down vote. So, I mean, there's always going to be things in here that you prefer not be, but they are. And so, again, we are going to look at the package and vote accordingly."

That is a striking thing for the chairman of the Appropriations Committee to say. Cole is not a backbencher stuck with somebody else's bill. He runs the committee that writes the spending bills. He was a cosponsor of this one. "I have an up-and-down vote" describes the position of a person with no power over what's in the package — and that is not Tom Cole's position.

It is also a reversal of what he used to say. Seven years earlier, when Trump's first administration tried to zero out CPB and Cole led the subcommittee that funded it, he told Variety — as Deadline recounted — that he came from "probably the reddest state in the union," and that given "the range of services it provides, the quality of programming and the points of view it expresses," the money paid for itself. He called going after public broadcasting "nickel and dime-ing things" when it came to the deficit.

Then he voted for the nickel-and-diming.

Who actually lost the money

Cole's home-state group Friends of OETA had urged him and the rest of the Oklahoma delegation to oppose the package, calling it "absolutely the wrong policy tool at the wrong time" and warning it would "throw the PBS system into chaos by reneging on commitments already made."

Here's what it cost Oklahoma. More than $6 million in public broadcasting money for the state was at risk, with more than $1 million of that going to Oklahoma's NPR stations: KGOU in Norman, KOSU in Oklahoma City, KWGS in Tulsa, KCCU in Lawton, KUCO in Edmond — and KCNP in Ada, which is owned by the Chickasaw Nation.

Tom Cole is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation. He is the longest-serving Native American in the history of the U.S. House.

The damage was real and it was fast. KOSU executive director Rachel Hubbard told Mvskoke Media the cut landed 23 days into her station's fiscal year: "In terms of cash money, it's specifically $311,000." She estimated the real annual hit closer to $500,000 once you count things CPB used to buy for the whole system, like music licensing. KGOU said it lost about $215,000 — roughly one-seventh of its budget. KGOU general manager Dick Pryor said replacing everything CPB provided, including the satellite links, would run his station more than $295,000 a year.

Those satellite links are not a nice-to-have. Pryor described what they do:

"It's so important for us to be able to maintain service and capability to provide news, information, emergency alerts, severe weather warnings, any kind of emergency notifications from the President... because many of those rural counties, cities, live in news deserts where there isn't really any other source of information."

Rural Oklahoma. Severe weather warnings. That is the audience.

The tribal stations

The part APTS praised Cole for in 2016 — service to the Native American nations — is exactly the part that got hit hardest.

The Associated Press reported that 59 tribal radio stations receive CPB funding, and that Native Public Media expected about three dozen of them to be the first to go dark. Those stations reach more than 1.5 million people.

Loris Taylor, CEO of Native Public Media, has written that for many of those communities the station "may be the only source of locally relevant news, emergency alerts, public safety announcements, language preservation, health information and election coverage."

Francene Blythe-Lewis, CEO of Vision Maker Media, put the numbers plainly: "For Indian Country in general, 80% of the communities are rural, and their only access to national news, native story sharing, community news, whatever it is, is through PBS stations or public radio." Her estimate if the money went away: "a good 90% of those stations will cease to exist."

Hubbard, at KOSU, pointed out that the loss reaches stations far past the ones with an NPR logo: "There are fees associated with satellite systems that a lot of really rural tribal stations and stations that have transmitters in rural areas like Nowata County... The Cherokee Nation is an example because they are dependent on the public radio satellite system."

The bigger pattern

Cole is not the only Republican who cast this vote and then went quiet about who it hit. Michigan's John Moolenaar called defunding public radio a "win for the American people" — while the station in his own district lost 19% of its budget. Ohio's Troy Balderson told business leaders that "Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides." and then voted for the same package.

What sets Cole apart is that he had the gavel. He chaired the committee. He had spent years telling anyone who asked that this money was worth keeping, and he had a plaque on the wall saying so.

When the moment came, he described himself as a man with nothing but an up-or-down vote — and the Chickasaw Nation's radio station lost its funding along with everyone else's.

Source

The award citation quoted here is APTS's own February 23, 2016 press release, APTS Presents Champion of Public Broadcasting Award To Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole. Photo via Getty Images, from the Associated Press report on tribal radio stations.

Moolenaar Called Defunding Public Radio 'a Win for the American People.' It Took $1.6 Million From the Station in His Own District.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:40:06 +0000

On June 12, 2025, John Moolenaar put out a press release with a headline that told you exactly how he wanted the vote remembered: "Moolenaar Votes to Cut Wasteful Spending."

The bill was the Rescissions Act of 2025. It did something Congress had not done since 1992 — it took back money the government had already promised to spend. Lawmakers had voted for that money. The president had signed off on it. Communities had built budgets around it. And then Congress reached back in and took it away.

Here is what Moolenaar said about it in his own press release:

"Today's legislation is a win for the American people because it addresses the broken status quo in Washington and cuts billions of dollars in wasteful spending. Michigan residents work hard, and they expect their tax dollars to be used responsibly, not spent on international projects which have no impact on their lives, or clearly biased news coverage of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

"Clearly biased news coverage." That's the whole argument. That's what he told Michigan residents their money was being wasted on.

Now let's look at what the money actually was.

$1.1 billion, and 1,000 local stations

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is not a newsroom. It's a pass-through. It takes federal money and sends most of it out to local television and radio stations — the ones with a transmitter in your county and a handful of employees in your town.

The bill cancelled $1.1 billion meant to fund CPB for the next two years, on top of $7.9 billion cut from other programs, most of it foreign aid. NPR itself gets only a small slice of its budget directly from the federal government. Its roughly 1,000 member stations get a much bigger slice.

Even some Republicans said out loud that the math didn't work. Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei, talking to reporters the day of the final vote:

"If you're mad at the editorial people, that's fine. But you shouldn't be mad at the stations. And, oh, by the way, you ought to look at where those stations are, because it's a lot of Trump country, and they're not the problem. And so cutting them off of funds doesn't seem very well thought out."

Moolenaar wasn't persuaded. He voted yes on the first House passage on June 12, which squeaked through 214–212. Five weeks later he voted yes again on the final vote that sent it to the president, 216–213. Trump signed it on July 24, 2025.

On January 5, 2026, CPB's board voted to dissolve the organization entirely, 58 years after Congress created it. Board chair Ruby Calvert named the cause: "Congress eliminated all funding for CPB, leaving the Board with no way to continue the organization or support the public media system that depends on it."

The station he defunded is in his district

Here is the part Moolenaar's press release didn't mention.

WCMU Public Media is licensed to Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant. Mount Pleasant is in Isabella County. Isabella County is in Michigan's 2nd Congressional District — Moolenaar's district. He has a district office up the road in Clare.

WCMU covers 42 Michigan counties and more than 2 million people, most of them across the rural middle and north of the state, where there is no local TV bureau and often no daily paper left.

General Manager Rick Westover put the damage in plain numbers:

"For WCMU, this is roughly $1.6 million for each of those two years. For WCMU, this is a cut of about 19% of our annual budget."

Nineteen percent. Gone in a single vote, from a station that had built its budget assuming the money Congress had already approved would actually arrive.

Westover watched it happen live:

"It was certainly disheartening. I was up in the middle of the night to watch that vote by vote by vote, and just hoping that the work that had been done through an advocacy group was enough to see us through."

At the end of December, on WCMU's own program, he said the same thing more bluntly: the loss was "roughly 19 to 20% of our operating budget, we rely on our donors more than we ever have before."

When Westover spoke to Epicenter in October, the station had no plans for staff cuts or layoffs. That is not because the cut was painless. It's because listeners in Moolenaar's district dug into their own pockets to cover what their congressman took away — donations up 77.7% year over year, revenue per donor up 48.8%.

That's the real trade. Moolenaar called it a win for taxpayers. What it actually did was move a bill from the federal government onto the people who listen to the station, in the counties he represents.

"Clearly biased news coverage"

The people who lose here aren't NPR executives in Washington. NPR CEO Katherine Maher, right after the final vote:

"Public funding has enabled the flourishing of a uniquely American system of unparalleled cultural, informational, and educational programming, and ensured access to vital emergency alerting and reporting in times of crisis — all for about $1.60 per American, every year. Parents and children, senior citizens and students, tribal and rural communities — all will bear the harm of this vote."

Emergency alerting matters a lot in the 42 counties WCMU covers. When the power and the cell towers go down in rural Michigan, the thing still working is a radio transmitter. North Carolina Rep. Alma Adams made exactly that point on the floor, describing Hurricane Helene: "Widespread power, cellular and internet outages meant that for thousands of North Carolinians, public radio was how they received their news."

And here's the small, telling detail. Westover's description of what the station does:

"We're impacting people's lives every single day with new information. We're teaching their kids … We're providing lifelong learning to folks that you know might not have another outlet."

That is the "clearly biased news coverage" Moolenaar said Michigan's tax dollars shouldn't pay for.

It's worth remembering that WCMU is also the newsroom that covers him. When roughly 200 constituents packed an "empty chair" town hall at the Isabella County Commission on Aging in March 2025 after Moolenaar declined to show up, WCMU reporters were there to write it down. His communications director's explanation, given to that same station:

"Congressman Moolenaar will not be participating in any event sponsored by a radical (George) Soros-funded group with the sole purpose being for him to be heckled, screamed at or threatened."

A congressman who won't take questions in person, defunding the local newsroom that shows up when he doesn't.

This is what "cutting waste" looked like

Moolenaar was not alone, and the pattern is familiar. Ohio's Troy Balderson told a room of business leaders that "Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides." — and then voted for this same package four months later. The rescissions bill cancelled spending Congress had already voted for, at the president's request, and House Republicans lined up to do it.

They were told to call it DOGE savings. DOGE itself was quietly shut down without ever producing the promised accounting. What's left of it in mid-Michigan is a public radio station running 19% short, kept alive by its own listeners.

Moolenaar got his headline. WCMU got the bill.

Source

WCMU Public Media faces funding cuts but finds strength in donors — Sarah R. Adams-Slominski, Epicenter Mt Pleasant, October 9, 2025. Photo courtesy WCMU Public Media, via Epicenter Mt Pleasant.

"Don't Worry About DOGE": Andy Barr Passed Along Elon Musk's Promises to a Lexington Business Crowd. Every One Was Wrong.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:10:16 +0000

On March 19, 2025, Andy Barr stood at a podium at a Commerce Lexington Public Policy Luncheon at the Hyatt Regency. Protesters lined High Street outside. He didn't mention them.

Someone in the room asked about the cuts coming to University of Kentucky research funding. Barr's answer, as reported by the Kentucky Lantern, rested entirely on what he said Elon Musk had told him "face to face":

"Don't worry about DOGE with respect to meritorious investments. We're going to continue to fund those."

He named two specific things his own city would be worried about: NIH funding for UK's Markey Cancer Center and the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging — the university's Alzheimer's research center.

He passed along a second Musk assurance too: that Musk was not pursuing broad reductions in the federal workforce.

And he explained the notorious email demanding federal workers list five things they'd accomplished that week. Musk, Barr said, was doing "just a pulse check" to find out if there's "a human being behind those numbers and in many cases there are not."

Sixteen months later, we can check all three.

Claim 1: Don't worry about UK research funding

He was already too late.

A month before that luncheon, UK President Eli Capilouto had said publicly that the NIH's move to slash the "indirect cost" rate — the money that pays for lab space, equipment, and research staff — from as much as 54% down to 15% would cost the university dearly. Louisville Public Media reported on February 11, 2025 that UK expected to lose at least $40 million in health research funding over the next year, against an average of $159 million a year in NIH awards over the prior five years.

Capilouto said the policy "will cost UK tens of millions of dollars annually," and named what it hits: cancer, heart disease, children's health, Alzheimer's, and opioid use disorder.

That is, almost word for word, the list of things Barr told the room not to worry about.

By June 2025, Markey's own director was writing publicly about it. In an op-ed in the Northern Kentucky Tribune, Dr. B. Mark Evers wrote that "the proposed 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health would delay cancer clinical trials, reduce lifesaving screening programs and eliminate research opportunities just when breakthroughs are accelerating." He noted Markey holds more than $37.5 million in NIH funding supporting over 370 research projects.

Barr's answer to a question about all of this was a secondhand reassurance from a man who does not run the NIH.

Claim 2: No broad reductions in the federal workforce

This one has a number.

Federal News Network reported on January 1, 2026, citing Office of Personnel Management data:

"The Trump administration's efforts to reduce staffing across agencies resulted in the loss of more than 317,000 federal employees governmentwide. It's a 13.7% decrease compared with September 2024 workforce numbers."

More than one in every eight federal employees, gone in a year. Against those departures the same report counts 68,000 new hires, leaving a net staffing decrease of about 10.8%. Either way, that is the definition of a broad reduction in the federal workforce.

Barr told a room full of Lexington business leaders the opposite, on Musk's word, nine months before the count came in.

Claim 3: "In many cases there are not" a human being

This is the ugliest of the three, and it deserves to be read exactly as Barr said it. Asked about the "what did you do last week" email, he described it as a pulse check to see whether there's "a human being behind those numbers and in many cases there are not."

He was telling a business audience that a large share of federal employees don't exist. He offered no evidence, and none has surfaced — those 317,000 departures were real people leaving real jobs. Many of them are the people who inspect food, process Social Security claims, and staff VA hospitals.

What DOGE actually turned out to be

Barr wasn't a bystander to this. He sits on the congressional DOGE Caucus, and after voting to lock in more than $9 billion of DOGE's cuts in June 2025, he said: "My message to DOGE is simple: keep the cuts coming."

DOGE, meanwhile, expired on July 4, 2026 — the termination date in Trump's own executive order — with no final report and nobody willing to account for it. It had promised $2 trillion in savings and claimed about $215 billion, a number that never held up. And when the Government Accountability Office tried to audit those savings, DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent" of the grant savings it claimed.

The man whose face-to-face assurances Barr relayed to Lexington left the administration months later. The assurances stayed on the record.

The empty chair

The reason this matters is what happened three days after that luncheon.

Barr had refused an invitation to a town hall in his own hometown. A Lexington group, Gathering for Democracy, had asked repeatedly; his staff said he wouldn't come. Barr told reporters he'd learned during Trump's first term that "live in-person massively attended town halls were shouting contests where people were really not respectful."

On March 22, 2025, more than 900 Kentuckians filled the Kentucky Theatre, and speaker after speaker took three minutes each at a microphone beside a chair with Barr's name on it.

His campaign's response called it "a liberal group's attempt to stage a shouting match in Lexington," and said "these organized, often paid, efforts by a small group of liberal activists across the country to disrupt this mandate for change won't work." He later described his own constituents' turnout as "manufactured outrage by paid activists."

Asked by reporters about the protesters outside the Hyatt, Barr said: "Obviously, democracy is alive and well... In fact, we are living in a vibrant democracy."

He is not alone in this. In Kansas, Roger Marshall has gone more than 500 days without holding an open town hall — and when constituents delivered boxes of petitions asking for one, his office called the bomb squad.

Here's the through-line. Barr will stand in front of a paying business luncheon and repeat, uncorroborated, whatever the richest man in the world told him over a handshake. He will not stand in front of 900 of his neighbors and take a question. One of those rooms could have checked his facts.

Source

Barr says don't worry about Trump and Musk, but declines chance to reassure upcoming town hall — by Jamie Lucke, Kentucky Lantern, March 19, 2025. Photo: Kentucky Lantern photo by Kevin Nance.

Aaron Bean Co-Founded the DOGE Caucus Over a $36 Trillion Debt. It's Now $39.9 Trillion — and He Voted for the Bill That Grew It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:53:54 +0000

On November 19, 2024, Aaron Bean and Rep. Pete Sessions launched the Congressional DOGE Caucus. Bean's founding statement was about one number:

"Our national debt has surpassed a staggering $36 trillion and should be a wakeup call for all Americans. We must take action to avoid diving headfirst off the cliff of fiscal ruin. I'm thrilled with President-elect Trump's appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE."

He was right about the number. The Treasury Department's Debt to the Penny records the total public debt on November 19, 2024 as $35.99 trillion.

As of August 6, 2026, that same Treasury ledger puts it at $39.89 trillion.

The debt Bean founded a caucus to fight has grown by roughly $3.9 trillion in the twenty months since he founded it.

He didn't just fail to stop it. He voted for it.

The caucus Bean co-chairs published a platform in January 2025 with eight principles. Principle three:

"The national debt is a threat to our nation's economic strength. Members of the Congressional DOGE caucus are dedicated to finding ways to cut spending, not increase it."

Six months later, on July 3, 2025, Bean voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It passed 218–214, with every Republican but two voting yes.

The Congressional Budget Office's final score of that bill, released July 21, 2025, found it would "increase the budget deficit by $3.4 trillion over the 2025-2034 period" and "increase the number of people without insurance by 10 million in 2034."

$3.4 trillion added to the deficit. From the man whose caucus platform says its members are "dedicated to finding ways to cut spending, not increase it."

You cannot found a caucus about the debt, vote for the single largest deficit increase of the decade, and then keep citing the debt as your reason for existing. Bean does exactly that. In December 2025, he told Fox News: "We're still $38 trillion in debt, that's growing."

It's growing partly because of his vote.

The caucus stopped meeting

Bean's caucus was pitched as bipartisan. It didn't stay that way long.

On February 5, 2025 — less than three months in — Rep. Val Hoyle of Oregon announced she was quitting it. Her statement was not subtle:

"It is impossible for us to do that important work when unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his lackeys are set on burning down the government—and the law—to line his own pockets and rip off Americans across the country who depend on government services to live with dignity."

By December 2025, Fox News reported that the caucus's meetings "have since wound down." Bean's own comment to the reporter is the whole story:

"DOGE is alive. It certainly is not on the front burner as it needs to be."

He said he hoped to hold more meetings "just to let everybody know DOGE is not dead." The specific idea he floated for restarting the caucus was unused federal office space: "I'm not saying it's mismanaged, I'm just saying it's not the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars to maintain all this space where people still work from home."

That is what a $2 trillion promise had shrunk to by the end of 2025 — a possible meeting about empty cubicles.

The thing he built a caucus to support no longer exists

Bean's caucus page still carries a note explaining that it is "separate from the DOGE Service, which operates through the Office of the President and is advised by Elon Musk," and directs readers to DOGE.gov.

Musk's tenure ended without ever reaching the $2 trillion he promised, as Fox News noted in the same story. And DOGE's charter expired on July 4, 2026 — the termination date written into Trump's own executive order. There was no final report and no accounting. It had promised $2 trillion in savings and claimed roughly $215 billion, a number that has never held up: the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service estimated the paid leave, rehiring, and lost productivity DOGE caused would cost taxpayers $135 billion in fiscal 2025 alone.

The savings claims themselves were never verifiable. GAO auditors found DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings" for grants.

Bean was still telling reporters "DOGE is alive" seven months before its charter ran out.

His bill to make DOGE permanent went nowhere

In March 2025, Bean signed on as the lead cosponsor of H.R. 2006, the DOGE Act, sponsored by fellow Florida Rep. Cory Mills — legislation to write DOGE permanently into federal law. Bean's office announced it as "Bean, Mills Introduce Bill to Codify DOGE."

It picked up 8 cosponsors total. It was referred to the House Oversight Committee on March 10, 2025, and in the seventeen months since, it has had exactly zero further action.

He also filed the "DRAIN THE SWAMP Act," which would require every federal agency to move 30 percent of its Washington headquarters staff out of the capital region. That went nowhere either.

What did pass, Floridians paid for

The one piece of the DOGE agenda that actually became law was the clawback of money Congress had already approved. Bean voted for the Rescissions Act of 2025, which cancelled roughly $9 billion that had already been appropriated for foreign aid and public broadcasting. He voted for the $9.4 billion House version 214–212 in June 2025, then again to send the final version to the President's desk, 216–213, in July — $400 million smaller, after the Senate put back the money for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria programs.

That's the ledger. A caucus that stopped meeting. A bill with eight cosponsors and no hearing. One law that cancelled money for public broadcasting. And a national debt $3.9 trillion higher than the day he said it was a "wakeup call."

He won't take the question in person

If you want to ask Bean how the DOGE Caucus is going, you'll have a hard time finding him.

When constituents organized their own town halls in Fernandina Beach in the spring of 2025 — during the height of the DOGE firings — Bean announced he "will not be attending any of the fake 'town hall' meetings sponsored by the Democrat Party and their cohorts," even though the organizer said the events were open to everyone. More than 200 people came to the first one. Neither Bean nor any staffer showed up, and he had not held an in-person town hall since the Trump administration took office.

He does hold monthly telephone town halls. Critics, the Fernandina Observer reported, "contend the questions are pre-screened and that not all participants are afforded the opportunity to interact with the congressman."

Bean's own DOGE Caucus platform ends with an eighth principle: "Engaging with the American people is necessary to ensure our success."

Source

"DOGE is not dead," defiant House caucus leader declares in push to revive Musk-era cuts — Fox News Digital, December 8, 2025. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images, via Fox News.

Troy Balderson Said 'Not the President, Not Elon Musk. Congress Decides.' His Office Took It Back the Next Day.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:50:49 +0000

In February 2025, Troy Balderson stood in front of a room of business leaders from Westerville, Ohio, and said something almost no House Republican was saying out loud.

Trump's executive orders, he said, were "getting out of control." Trump and Elon Musk were exceeding their authority. And then this, as the Columbus Dispatch reported it:

"Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away. Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides."

It was the right answer. It is, in fact, the answer written into Article I of the Constitution.

It lasted about a day.

The walk-back

By February 21, The Hill was reporting that Balderson's office said his remarks had been "mischaracterized."

His spokesperson's clarification:

"Without congressional action, there is no certainty from one administration to the next. Congressman Balderson supports President Trump's efforts, but Congress must do its job to make his executive actions permanent."

Read that again, because it inverts the thing he'd said.

The Dispatch quote was about authority — that only Congress may decide whether a federal department exists. The clarification is about durability — that Congress should ratify what the president already did so it can't be undone later.

Balderson posted the same line on X himself: "It's up to us on Capitol Hill to make permanent his executive actions, ensuring continuity in public policy from one administration to the next."

So the position went from "Congress decides" to "Congress signs off." Twenty-four hours, no vote required.

Then came the actual test

Talk is easy to walk back. Roll calls aren't.

Four months later, the House took up H.R. 4, the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill that cancelled $9.4 billion Congress had already voted to spend on foreign aid and public broadcasting, at the president's request. It is the purest possible version of the question Balderson had raised in Westerville: when Congress appropriates money and the president decides not to spend it, who decides?

On June 12, 2025, Balderson voted Yea. It passed by two votes.

When the Senate sent back a narrower version on July 18, he voted Aye again to finish it.

The man who said "Congress decides" voted twice to let the president un-decide.

And on the Education Department specifically

The department he named in Westerville is the cleanest test of all, because Congress did eventually put its position in writing — and then didn't act on it.

We've documented that story: Congress wrote down that dismantling the Education Department without a law was illegal, passed the funding bill anyway, asked for briefings it never received, and started drafting new laws to make the dismantling legal after the fact.

Balderson has never introduced a bill to stop it. To his credit, he is not among the 37 Republicans who signed the one-sentence bill to abolish the department outright. But not signing that bill is a low bar for someone who told a room full of constituents that this was Congress's call and nobody else's.

He said Congress decides. Congress didn't decide. He voted with the people who took the decision away.

Why an Ohioan should care about a process fight

This can sound like inside baseball. It isn't.

When the president can cancel spending Congress approved, the money your representative "secured" for your district stops being a commitment and becomes a suggestion. Balderson sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and is vice chairman of its Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee — a job whose entire purpose is checking the executive branch.

He has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 6% lifetime score, and he ranks #297 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding, with $40,000 from American Electric Power and $39,000 from Marathon Petroleum — companies his own committee regulates.

Ohio ranks 35th of 50 on the measures we track, and its Republicans in Congress voted to make Medicaid, food aid and jobs worse. Balderson was one of them.

He isn't taking the question

Constituents have been trying to ask him about this in person. In Knox County, organizers invited him to a town hall on August 23, 2025; he declined, and they held it without him, inviting the audience to submit the questions they would have asked. A Columbus Dispatch letter writer put it more directly: "Rep. Troy Balderson is ducking and dodging us. We'll hold a town hall anyway." In Athens County, residents who showed up got a meeting with his staff, not him.

The one time he did say the quiet part in a room in Ohio, his office spent the next day explaining he hadn't meant it.

We deserve better.

Source

Ailia Zehra, "Troy Balderson: Congress must 'do its job' to make Trump executive actions permanent," The Hill, February 21, 2025, reporting on and following up the Columbus Dispatch's account of his Westerville remarks. Roll calls from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.