WASHINGTON – Today, Senator Mike Braun called out the broken spending process in Washington, D.C. and the practice of stuffing spending bills with Congressional pork called earmarks in a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Hear the audio below:
Today the Senate Committee on Appropriations met to consider the federal fiscal year (FY) 2022 spending bills that cover the jurisdiction of Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration; Energy and Water Development; and Military Construction, and Veterans Affairs.
All three spending bills were considered by the Appropriations Committee despite the lack of a budget agreement that should be in place to set spending allocations. Americans across the country construct budgets and prioritize spending, and Congress is failing to do the same. The first bill I introduced upon being sworn into the Senate was No Budget No Pay, legislation that would simply say if Members of Congress don’t get a budget done, they don’t get paid until they do. I believe we must adhere to budgeting and spending basics.
Regrettably, the Appropriations Committee considered bills without budget and spending allocations in place. For this reason, I offered a procedural motion to send all three bills back to the Subcommittee level to ensure we carefully, transparently, and properly decide how to spend taxpayers’ money.
I also submitted amendments to strip all earmarks from these spending bills. Earmarks are Congressional pork that Senators and Representatives carve out in spending bills. My office identified 417 pork requests in these bills alone.
I will always stand up against Washington’s broken budget process that’s putting our country deeper into debt and on the road to catastrophe.
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