H.R. 8646 passed 213-210 on June 4. It comes in $380 million below last year and, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" — the nearly 4,300 FDA and roughly 900 meat-inspection jobs already gone. 188 members with a page on this site voted yes. Four voted no.
Two executive orders stripped collective bargaining from 84.4% of the unionized federal workforce. A bipartisan bill to restore it passed the House 231-195 — every Democrat for it, 195 Republicans against — and the Senate has sat on it for eight months.
ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on gloves that deliver painful electric shocks — ten times what Susan Collins points to as the de-escalation reform that justified her vote. Here are the 201 Republicans with report cards on this site who voted for the money.
Food, rent, electricity, healthcare - in America we should be able to afford these basic necessities of life without going bankrupt.
David Kustoff has supported the current administration's tariffs and other policies which have led to:
Half of all Americans struggling to afford groceries
47% struggling to afford their utility bills
47% struggling to afford healthcare
48% struggling to afford housing
1 in 4 Americans saying they have skipped a medical checkup due to affordability
23% skipping a prescription dose
Gas prices skyrocketing
Kustoff represents West Tennessee, where Tennessee’s soybeans are mostly grown. After China stopped buying American soybeans in May 2025, the University of Tennessee estimated nearly $110 million in soybean losses for the state that year, and net losses expected to top $360 million across Tennessee’s four main row crops. The head of the Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council said of farmers: "They don’t even break even."
We are feeling this directly in our wallets. What is David Kustoff doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.
We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.
David Kustoff disagrees:
He voted to cut more than $1 trillion in federal health care and food assistance as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"
He voted to let ACA tax credits expire, increasing health costs for millions of Americans, driving many of them to switch to cheaper plans or abandon health insurance coverage altogether. And the less people there are with coverage, the higher the rest of our premiums will be.
He wants to repeal the ACA, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and add work requirements to Medicaid.
At least 110,000 Tennesseans are expected to lose healthcare coverage under Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill' — with an estimated $7 billion slashed from TennCare over the next decade, and nine rural hospitals at risk of closure.
We need healthcare to live. Literally. What is David Kustoff doing to help us? Making things worse. We deserve better.
Wants to Gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security aren't handouts. They're earned benefits that we pay into out of every single paycheck, our entire working lives, so that we can see a doctor, take care of our parents, and retire with dignity instead of going bankrupt when we get old or sick.
For years, David Kustoff and his party have been quietly laying the groundwork to gut these programs. Now they've said the quiet part out loud.
They admitted the plan. Speaker Mike Johnson told the "Moon Griffon Show" that "entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security ... have to be adjusted and fixed," and that "We have a plan to do that next year ... desperate times call for desperate measures."
We know what the plan looks like. The Republican Study Committee — a caucus of more than 170 House Republicans that includes Speaker Johnson and his top three deputies in leadership — released a budget calling for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and converting Medicare into a privatized "premium support" model that would hand seniors over to for-profit insurance companies.
They already started. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that David Kustoff supported cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the richest 1 percent.
Even Republicans admit what "reform" means. Sen. Josh Hawley, on the push to "address" and "reform" these programs: "That's usually code for 'cut.' I'm not in favor of that."
It's a broken promise. Donald Trump pledged in 2024, "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare." David Kustoff and his party are now preparing to do exactly that.
These programs are a promise: work hard, pay in your whole life, and your country will be there for you when you need it. David Kustoff wants to break that promise so he can keep cutting taxes for billionaires. We deserve better.
Cut Taxes for the Rich, While the Rest of Us Pay For It
We all need to pay our fair share to the government so it can provide the services that benefit all of us.
But billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses. That's not fair.
The wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
23 of the largest and most profitable companies in the US paid no federal corporate income taxes from 2018-2022. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of those years.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that David Kustoff supported will reduce taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade, while raising taxes for the poorest Americans.
David Kustoff is on the side of the billionaires and big business. We deserve better.
We all deserve clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet to live on.
David Kustoff has supported the repealing and rolling back of environmental protections and climate change regulations, all so that billionaires and big business can plunder natural resources and destroy our environment in the name of profit.
Is Intentionally Wrecking Our Public Schools and Our Kids' Futures
Nine out of ten American children — 49.6 million of them — go to a public school. It's where they learn to read, where they eat breakfast and lunch, where kids with disabilities are guaranteed an education by law, and where a kid from any family, rich or poor, religious or not, gets a fair shot.
David Kustoff and his party are taking that apart on purpose: draining public school money into private and religious schools, pushing one religion into everybody else's classrooms, and shutting down the federal department that is supposed to look out for our kids.
He voted to create the first national private school voucher in American history. It is hidden inside the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." You give up to $1,700 a year to a charity that hands out private school scholarships, and the government gives you back every penny you gave on your taxes. It costs you nothing — no other tax break in the country works that way. Each person is capped at $1,700, but any number of people can do it, so there is no limit on what it drains from the Treasury. It starts January 1, 2027. Congress's own scorekeepers say $26 billion over ten years; one tax research group says as much as $51 billion every year — more than the government spends on Title I ($18.4 billion) for poor schools and IDEA ($14.6 billion) for kids with disabilities combined. And "low-income" means a family earning three times what a normal family in their area earns still qualifies — in some places, $500,000 a year.
They are giving away our tax dollars to families who are already wealthy and were never in public school to begin with. Every state that has tried it gets the same result — the money goes to people already paying private tuition: 95% of Arkansas voucher users never attended a public school. In Florida's first year of universal vouchers, 69% of new recipients were already in private school and only 13% had ever set foot in a public one. In Iowa, two-thirds were already in private school. We aren't rescuing kids from bad schools — we're cutting checks to families who never needed them, with the money coming out of the schools 90% of our kids actually attend.
And the kids who do switch end up doing worse. Four careful studies found the same thing. In Washington, DC, voucher kids fell behind in math. In Louisiana, a student who started in the middle of the class dropped to the bottom third in math after three years. Indiana and Ohio found the same. Kids with disabilities lost the most.
The money goes to religious schools that can turn our kids away. Ohio now spends nearly $1 billion a year on vouchers, the vast majority going to Catholic and evangelical schools — schools that, unlike public schools, can reject your child over their religion, their disability, or who their parents are, or for ANY REASON AT ALL with almost no accountability for the public money they take. Many have simply raised tuition to capture the vouchers instead of enrolling more students.
Tennessee now spends $273 more per private school student than per public school student.
Our public schools took generations to build, and they are the one institution that has to take every single child who walks in the door. David Kustoff is helping tear them down and hand the pieces to private interests. Our kids will pay for it for the rest of their lives. We deserve better.
A good job where we can make a living to support our families, own a home, and have a good life. That's the American Dream.
David Kustoff supports policies and an administration that are turning the American Dream into a nightmare.
There were 20.8 million layoffs in the U.S. in 2025
55% of employed Americans say they're concerned about losing their jobs
The unemployment rate is 4.2%
In 2025 the U.S. economy averaged just 15,000 jobs added per month, a dramatic decrease from the monthly average of 125,000 the year before Trump took office.
Overall employment for workers without college degrees fell by 361,000 jobs from January to September 2025.
58,000 net manufacturing jobs have been lost from April, when the administration announced "Liberation Day" tariffs, to September 2025.
Works for Billionaires, Big Business & Special Interests and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
David Kustoff works for Wall Street and foreign-policy money, not for us. He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax code for every industry in the country. Two pro-Israel groups — the Republican Jewish Coalition's PAC and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's — have together given his campaign more than $89,000 since 2020, and the banks, insurers and accounting firms whose tax treatment his committee sets fill out the rest. Only 1% of his money came from small grassroots donors, while 50% came from large individual donors and 43% from PACs. Look at who some of his top funders are:
Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC — $255,173 over his career
The industries whose tax treatment his Ways and Means Committee writes: the American Bankers Association ($40,000), the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers ($40,000) and the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors ($40,000)
Ernst & Young — $35,000, also before that committee
FedEx — $40,000 from the Memphis logistics giant
Eastman Chemical ($35,500) and International Paper ($35,000)
People at Blackstone and Apollo Global Management
The American Cotton Shippers Association
David Kustoff is funded by billionaires, big business and special interests. No wonder he's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.
Let Elon Musk and DOGE Cut More Than $353 MILLION from Tennessee
We all want a government that works for us as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately our government doesn't always work that way, so reform is badly needed. Given how big and complicated the government is, it's a tough problem that needs well-thought out solutions, so that we don't make things worse.
That's not what we got.
David Kustoff stood idly by while billionaire and ketamine-addled chaos monkey Elon Musk and his DOGE goons chainsawed their way through the U.S. government, promising to save the government at least $2 trillion annually in waste, fraud and abuse. Because they had no idea what they were doing and no one to stop them, in the end our government suffered, people suffered, Tennessee suffered, government spending actually went UP and Elon Musk became even richer.
Elon Musk and DOGE:
Had access to and exfiltrated (stole) all our sensitive personal information.
Kneecapped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had returned over $26 billion to the American people since 2011.
Attempted to cut $4 billion in funding for medical research.
Will cost the federal government an estimated $500 billion in lost tax revenue (that could pay for programs for us), due to cuts at the IRS.
Laid waste to the employees at several government departments, removing their top experts and most skilled practitioners, and making their services less effective for all of us. This badly affected veterans, who make up 30% of the federal workforce.
DOGE defunded $37.7 million in grants across the University of Tennessee system — eliminating infectious disease research, vaccine education programs, a rural mental health program, and emergency response technology research.
Tennessee has roughly 56,400 civilian federal workers — DOGE's indiscriminate cuts are devastating Tennessee families and communities across the state.
We'd like to thank you, David Kustoff, for doing absolutely nothing while an unelected South African big tech billionaire took a chainsaw to vital U.S. government functions and completely failed to make the government more efficient. We deserve better.
As a member of Congress, part of David Kustoff's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from Tennessee have completely abdicated their responsibility. These spineless cowards are rubber stamping everything Donald Trump wants to do, no matter how crazy, dangerous or harmful. And we've seen the results. We deserve better.
We deserve to feel safe in our neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship.
In order to do that, we need to take real steps to prevent gun violence. And despite what we've been told, it is possible to support the 2nd Amendment and support common-sense gun safety laws at the same time. But David Kustoff has opposed bipartisan gun safety laws, while offering meaningless thoughts and prayers every time there's a new mass shooting.
A child or adolescent is killed with a gun every 2 hours and 48 minutes in the U.S.
Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the U.S. are 33 times greater than in Australia and 77 times greater than in Germany
Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and wounded
Women in the U.S. are 28 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries.
Tennessee has the 9th highest gun death rate in the nation — about 19.8 per 100,000 people, roughly 55% higher than the national average, with approximately 1,400 Tennesseans dying from gun violence every year.
David Kustoff is OK with our kids dying, as long as he has his guns. We deserve better.
America is the land of FREEDOM. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to start a business, freedom to choose your own career path, freedom to make your own medical decisions, freedom to raise your children according to your values, and freedom to pursue happiness. Freedom is what makes America great.
Unless you're a woman and you're making the deeply personal decision about whether to have a baby or not. A decision that will dramatically affect the rest of your life. In that case David Kustoff thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.
David Kustoff:
Opposed Roe v. Wade
Supported federal efforts to ban abortion
Attacked Planned Parenthood throughout his career
Here in Tennessee we live under a near-total abortion ban — one of the strictest in the country — forcing patients to leave the state for care.
Arkansas House of Representatives candidate (and pastor) Robb Ryerse stated it well: "Abortion should remain safe and legal. These are personal decisions best made by patients, their doctors, and their faith — not politicians. You don't have to agree with every decision someone makes to believe they should be free to make it. That's what personal liberty means." Almost 2/3 of Americans agree and believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But David Kustoff thinks he knows better, and doesn't believe that we should have the freedom to make our own decisions. We deserve better.
In America our vote represents our will. It gives us the power to make the change that we want to see in the world.
Unfortunately that's not a sentiment that David Kustoff's billionaire and big business donors can stomach. Because when we have voting power, we use it to make our lives better, and they lose power. Read about all the ways they're trying to take away our voting power on our about page, then come back here.
David Kustoff has opposed legislation to make voting easier while supporting the SAVE Act, which would force every single American citizen to prove their citizenship status in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. For the vast majority of Americans, this would mean presenting a passport or birth certificate at their local election office. This would disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizens: 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and 69 million women who have married do not have a birth certificate that matches their new legal name. Working-class and low-income Americans would also be disproportionately disenfranchised if the bill became law, as the vast majority of these groups do not possess a passport.
YOU HAVE POWER. Why else do you think David Kustoff and his bosses are working so hard to take it away? Don't let them. We deserve better.
Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in America and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that law enforcement will turn on us.
But the current administration has created a secret police force that is abusing their power against anyone who stands in their way, U.S. citizen or not. They claim to be going after "the worst of the worst", but are taking daycare workers, day laborers, grandmas and kids who are valued members of our communities. And David Kustoff, staunch defender of the Second Amendment to fight back against government tyranny, is doing nothing while the government tyrannizes us.
ProPublica:They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world's most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.
ProPublica:Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they're showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can't access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there's a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.
New York Times:Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed "enemies" of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force. The result is an agency whose agents' first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence.
They are executing American citizens. On January 7, 2026 an ICE agent in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a mother of 3, by shooting her in the face as she tried to drive away. Then the killer walked away, and our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened. Decent politicians condemned the murder. What did David Kustoff have to say? Nothing.
They are executing American citizens: Part 2. On January 24, 2026 ICE agents in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a 37 year old ICU nurse, who was filming their activity and trying to help others. Then our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened.
And the list of the dead keeps growing. ICE agents — on duty and off — keep killing members of our communities, while David Kustoff says nothing:
On December 31, 2025, an off-duty ICE officer in Northridge, Los Angeles shot and killed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old U.S. citizen and father of two who was born and raised in Compton. Federal officials called it self-defense against an "active shooter," but Porter's family says he was peacefully returning home and never posed a threat — and witnesses reported only three shots, matching his autopsy and contradicting claims of an exchange of gunfire.
On July 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three and small-business owner who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years. Agents had been hunting a different white van. Harris County's medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, and his co-workers disputed ICE's claim that he used his vehicle as a weapon.
On July 13, 2026, an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian father who was legally authorized to work in the U.S. and supported his wife and 3-year-old daughter by delivering food and cleaning a veterinary clinic. He was not the target of ICE's warrant — agents were looking for someone else — and were not wearing body cameras. Even Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins urged DHS to halt non-urgent vehicle stops in the state.
It's happening here in Tennessee. In May 2025, ICE and the Tennessee Highway Patrol ran a six-night sweep of Nashville's Latino neighborhoods — more than 600 traffic stops and more than 150 arrests, the majority of them people with no criminal record — separating families and terrorizing entire communities.
If ICE can murder innocent U.S. citizens without repercussions, what could they do to you? ICE is out of control and a danger to us all - no one is safe. What's David Kustoff going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. We deserve better.
Voted for the Unnecessary and Unpopular War in Iran
War destroys human lives, families and innocent people, causes economic ruin, and triggers immense suffering. War should always be the option of last resort.
In order to distract from the Epstein Files, Donald Trump started an illegal war of choice with Iran, and now:
We are being dog-walked by Israel, who has been trying to convince presidents to attack Iran forever, and finally found one dumb enough to do so
Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given David Kustoff $255,173.
The American people don't want this war with Iran. But David Kustoff supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does David Kustoff work for Israel or the people of Tennessee? We deserve better.
Avoids His Constituents and Refuses to Hold In-Person Town Halls
Good leaders meet with their constituents and have town halls where citizens can voice concerns, ask questions, and provide input on policies. David Kustoff doesn't want to hear what we have to say. He only wants to talk to his rich donors or people who agree with him.
What he announces instead is "Mobile Office Hours," and he put out 54 of those between February 2019 and March 6, 2025. They are not meetings with the congressman. The last round he announced scheduled 15 two-hour sessions in 15 different counties across the same two days — several of them running at the same hour, in towns hours apart — because what is on offer is a staffer at a table: "If you need assistance with a federal agency, I encourage you to visit our mobile office sites across West Tennessee," as Kustoff put it. That March 2025 round is the last constituent event of any kind in the archive.
West Tennesseans have asked out loud. In May 2025, after Kustoff voted for Trump's budget bill, constituents rallied outside his East Memphis district office over his vote for the bill and his ignoring their demands for a town hall meeting. "We have tried for months to have a town hall so he can hear from his constituents and hear our concerns and know how we want him to proceed, and he has ignored that," said Amber Hampton of Indivisible Memphis. WREG asked his office to comment and never heard back.
David Kustoff is avoiding us because he doesn't care what we think. We deserve better.
He signed an amicus brief backing a Texas lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In July 2021 — months after the attack — he co-sponsored the PROTECT Electoral College Act, legislation that would have suspended federal election security grants and required a new federal study of the 2020 presidential election — keeping doubts about the election alive.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
