I’m not sure if you saw it, but earlier this week, Sen. John Kennedy put up an op-ed at the New York Post outlining the Senate’s failure, so far, to pass the easiest bill they’ll ever vote on…
The Trump administration has already identified a breathtaking amount of waste.
Under former President Joe Biden, our federal government agreed to spend $3 million on an Iraqi version of “Sesame Street,” $3 million on circumcisions and vasectomies in Zambia, $500,000 on electric buses in Rwanda and $67,000 to feed insect powder to children in Madagascar.
You read that right. Insect powder.
It wasn’t all bugs, though. A group of male prostitutes in Haiti got $3.6 million to run free pastry-cooking classes, cyber cafés and “dance focus groups.”
These spending decisions make Americans want to jump out of a moving car.
Biden bureaucrats also approved over $1.1 billion to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed nonprofit that provides grants to National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, and their affiliates.
There may have been a time decades ago when Americans needed public broadcasting to get the news. Today, Americans have thousands of free news and entertainment options — yet only NPR and PBS get $1.1 billion from taxpayers.
When a country has racked up more than $36 trillion in debt, choosing to fund unneeded and biased public broadcasting is cell-deep stupid.
And a little more…
Trump delivered on his promises to expose the spending porn in Washington. Now, Congress must get off the sidelines.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the Executive Branch to spend the money Congress allocates each year — even though Congress allocated that money when Biden was in office and Democrats controlled the Senate.
The only way a new administration can permanently halt previously appropriated spending is if the president asks Congress to rescind that money.
President Trump did just that. In his initial rescission request, made in May, he asked Congress to rescind roughly $8.3 billion from wasteful foreign-aid programs and $1.1 billion from public broadcasting.
All the president is asking us to do is cut the spending porn from the budget.
Kennedy also took to the Senate floor to harangue his colleagues on the rescission bill…
It’s gut-check time: You either believe in reducing spending or you don’t.
We need to pass President Trump’s rescission bill. pic.twitter.com/iN0xfpxobO
— John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) July 9, 2025
We’ve talked about rescissions in this space before. Rescissions are magical things. They’re like a budget reconciliation bill, but in reverse. And what’s fun about a rescission is that it can’t be filibustered. All it takes is 50 votes plus one, which Vice President JD Vance will provide if needed, to pass a rescission in the Senate. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Rescission Cometh)
And the rescission bill in front of the Senate, which was passed by a party-line vote in the House, wipes out $9.4 billion worth of absolutely useless spending.
But the Senate has a deadline to pass this bill — July 18, which is a week from tomorrow — or else all of the worthless USAID spending and the insulting billion dollars plus being thrown into the toilet on the leftists and lollygaggers at NPR and PBS (Kennedy has been a champion for getting rid of that horrific waste of money for a while; not long ago I gave an example of just how fat and lazy a local PBS affiliate can be) will continue for another year.
This is the easiest layup of a bill the Senate will ever get. Nothing in the list of stuff being rescinded has even a scintilla of support among the people who voted the 53 Republican senators into office.
And yet we’re less than 10 days away from the deadline on the rescission bill, and it hasn’t passed.
Why?
Guess who just showed up to whine about the bill…
The Trump administration’s package to make DOGE spending cuts official still faces some Republican opposition.
Senate Appropriations Chairwoman and Maine Senator Susan Collins was uncertain Tuesday when asked whether the bill could pass the chamber by next Friday’s deadline.
She expressed concerns about some specific cuts, including to funding for PEPFAR, or The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
“For my part, I believe it needs some significant changes. For example, I want to strike the rescission of funds for PEPFAR,” Collins said. “I can’t imagine why we would want to terminate that program or the maternal and child health program.”
Oh, but of course it would have to be Susan Collins, a Committed RINO who somehow managed to chair the Senate’s appropriations committee, trying to slow-walk the bill.
So you’ll know, Senator Collins, you run the committee in the Senate chiefly responsible for the fact that we’re running a ruinous federal deficit, and until that is remedied you are the single most responsible individual in the U.S. Senate, and one of the two most responsible people in these United States, for that ruinous deficit.
It is your DUTY to remedy that deficit. And to do so by finding waste in the federal budget that can be cut.
Were we running a surplus, you could pretend that your job is finding good places to spend our tax dollars. But we aren’t. We’re just south of two trillion dollars a year in the hole. So, cutting the budget is what we are paying you to do.
Obviously, you suck at it. And it is no excuse that you aren’t the only one who does.
And you want to slam the brakes on this thing because of… PEPFAR?
Are you kidding me?
We spend almost $7 billion a year on PEPFAR, which is supposed to, principally, stop Africans from dying of AIDS. What’s in the rescission bill passed by the House is a $400 million cut to PEPFAR.
This is a program that has been going on for 22 years and, to be fair, it has been somewhat successful. In 2003, when it was passed, an estimated 2.2 million Africans died of AIDS-related causes. This year, the estimate is somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000. That’s a reduction of more than two-thirds.
AIDS is a behaviorally spread disease, so you would think that over 22 years, you’d get a significant reduction in deaths simply from the word getting out that some of the behaviors that spread AIDS are a bad idea. The drugs PEPFAR buys to treat AIDS patients in Africa would surely help to limit AIDS deaths there as well.
But it’s 22 years later. When are the African governments going to take over the responsibility for stopping AIDS deaths among their people?
Let’s remember that we are borrowing every dime we’re spending on PEPFAR. So the $400 million Susan Collins is getting the vapors over the prospect of cutting costs us a whole lot more than $400 million.
Depending on the estimates out there and the flavor of debt we’re taking on to finance all this deficit spending, it’s costing us about 4.5 percent to service the debt on funding PEPFAR. At that rate, over 10 years, you’re not spending $4 billion if you fail to cut that $400 million Collins can’t bring herself to cut. It’s $4.269 billion.
So she’s just pissing away $269 million of your money over the next 10 years when the people who are in charge of running this program she loves so much are telling her they don’t need it to save the Africans who can be saved.
And it definitely doesn’t get any better when you get beyond 10 years and you haven’t resolved the deficit or paid down the federal debt. You start to see an exponential increase in the cost of this waste thanks to the magic of compound interest.
Susan Collins is in charge of Senate Appropriations, and she doesn’t understand this?
Can’t we fire her and get somebody who isn’t a dysfunctional clown in that position?
That’s a serious question, by the way, and it’s directed at Majority Leader John Thune. Collins might utterly suck at her job heading the Appropriations Committee, and that’s Thune’s fault for putting her there, but you’re compounding the interest on that fault when you don’t go and educate Senator Collins that (1) the rescission bill is a priority item for the White House, who sent it to Capitol Hill for the specific purpose that it be passed, (2) it’s the first of several rescission bills, and the ones to come will be a good bit weightier and more controversial than this one, and (3) there are going to have to be quite dire consequences for those Republican Senators in leadership positions who aren’t on board with the Republican President — and by extension a voting majority of Americans — when he sends his agenda to the Hill for passage.
That’s Thune’s job. If he does it effectively, then we will have nothing more from Senator Collins to alarm us.
The problem is, Thune isn’t doing his job effectively at present. And the grains of sand in the top of the hourglass are beginning to dwindle.
That’s why Kennedy is sounding the alarm. As he should.
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