In this illuminating discussion, Budget Watchdog host Steve Ellis and TCS Director of Research and Policy Josh Sewell examine why the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) approach to federal budget cuts is misguided and potentially counterproductive.

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Budget Watchdog All Federal, the podcast dedicated to making sense of the budget spending and tax issues facing the nation. Cut through the partisan rhetoric and talking points for the facts about what’s being talked about, bandied about and pushed to Washington, brought to you by taxpayers for common sense. And now the host of Budget Watchdog AF TCS President Steve Ellis.

Steve Ellis:

Welcome to All American Taxpayers Seeking Common Sense. You’ve made it to the right place for 30 years. TCS that’s taxpayers for common sense, has served as an independent nonpartisan budget watchdog group based in Washington DC We believe in fiscal policy for America that is based on facts. We believe in transparency and accountability because no matter where you are in the political spectrum, no one wants to see their tax dollars wasted. It’s March, 2025 and dear podcast listeners, America is again engaged in a trade war. And let me tell you, when trade wars strike, farmers feel a squeeze. So as you’d expect Mr. Agriculture TCS Director of Research and Policy, Josh Sewell is here with the latest on efficiency and profitability in America’s Farms.

Josh Sewell:

Steve, I’ve got everything you need when it comes to ag, everything you need and more.

Steve Ellis:

I know you do Josh, and you’re just back from a road trip to the annual Commodity Classic, which is billed as America’s largest farmer led farmer focused agricultural and educational experience. So what exactly is the

Josh Sewell:

Commodity

Steve Ellis:

Classic?

Josh Sewell:

The classic is the big national convention for a number of farm interest groups, namely the National Corn Growers Soybean Association, association of Wheat Growers and Sorghum Producers. So those four distinct interest groups that actually a lot of the growers cross-pollinate, you can say across those crops. So they get together all at once, they conduct some business, but it’s mostly sort of an education for members. Some formal education they hear from some politicos and they have a big massive trade show.

Steve Ellis:

Josh for the budget. Watchdog AF Faithful, they know corn, they know soybeans, they definitely know wheat. What exactly is sorghum?

Josh Sewell:

So sorghum is another grain. It’s not a terribly popular grain as far as acreage now, but it’s primarily used in animal feed. And as a biofuel you can make beer out of it. Some of the gluten-free beers are going to be from sorghum and people can consume it other ways, but it’s mostly a feedstock.

Steve Ellis:

Well thank you for that edifying bit one of many that we’ll get to in this episode. So why did you go to the Commodity Classic and what did you expect to get out of it?

Josh Sewell:

So these kind of events I think are a great way to catch up with farmers and frankly, as someone who works in DC I think it’s important to go out and meet people where they are. And sometimes that’s physically where they are, not just on the political spectrum. And so I attend as many of these as I can stand and I can budget for. And so frankly, it’s also, it’s a great way to learn how the industry works.

Steve Ellis:

Alright, well then let’s get into what you learned.

Josh Sewell:

One of the things that you learn when you go to a big event like the Commodity Classic is that there are a lot of people there, first of all, and farming is very diverse, even amongst corn growers and soybean growers. There’s a lot of different types of people. But at this event, this is a business. So there’s a lot of talk about family farmers, I’m sure you’re familiar with USDA. Every time they put out a press release, they talk about the health of the family farm and we do everything in America for family farmers, but these guys are first and it’s mostly guys, but there are definitely women there as well. It’s mostly first and foremost, even as a family, this is business. They stand on business at these events.

Steve Ellis:

Alright, we talked about this business and I’ll just relay the one anecdote that, and this is from 15 years ago, but a congressman, someone talked about saving the family farm. The congressman leaned in, he says, son, family farm is dead. I know because I own five of them. So that leads into my point about this business aspect of the farming.

Josh Sewell:

And that’s what I mean a lot of the classic it goes, you’re talking about how to run your business better. There’s some really educational things for me as well about how to squeeze more yield out of your land in certain ways of applying conservation practices or particular inputs. And it’s a trade show, so there are people trying to sell you probiotics for your soil basically, and different things that actually do potentially give you a competitive edge. But it’s also because this is about business. And to be frank, this is a little different than if you go to one of the extension, most states have an extension service to help producers more directly and the state ag school will do some educational events and I go to those as well when I can because sometimes you get a different kind of farmer, someone who either doesn’t want to or doesn’t have the ability to perhaps fly to Denver for a week long convention right before planting season.

But at this event there’s also a lot of landlords. And so I have all kinds of anecdotes and I say landlord because one of the things that happens is everyone has their name tag says where they’re from. Mine says Loudoun County Virginia, not DC because that’s where I live. Little slightly strategic, but I tell people I work in Washington once I started talking to them. But up one guy ran across that said he was from I exactly where in Illinois. I was like, okay, I have family in Illinois, just try to figure out where he’s from. He’s like, well, we live in Tucson, our farm is in Illinois. It’s like, oh, got it. It’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do when you retire from your farm. They kept a farm in the family, so they were, but they don’t actually farm it, right? They are landlords extracting rent from the people who are farming it. And for those guys, they’re tenant farmers so to speak, they’re just leasing it out to non-family owners. So you get a lot of different folks, some of ’em actively farming, some of them definitely not actively farming anymore,

Steve Ellis:

Still sweeping in some subsidies.

Josh Sewell:

Absolutely. And that’s part of what you talk about there is how to maximize your returns on your choices in your farm programs.

Steve Ellis:

Well, speaking of subsidies, I mean what do they think about DC these days?

Josh Sewell:

So this was an interesting time to go to the classic. So this was the first week of March when this happened and there’s a lot of anxiety, and I think this micko is no surprise, but for these types of farmers, they definitely lean conservative, say there’s a Republican tilt for most of their personal politics, not all, but frankly it’s such a tumultuous time right now. It came across for the folks there that again, as they are businesses, one of the things they really like is a stable and predictable environment as much as you can. And what was coming out, some of the Q and just some of the conversations is that this is clearly not a stable and predictable policy environment. So that is really causing some concern amongst a lot of these producers.

Steve Ellis:

Well, it’s certainly understandable and I think Trump administration recognizes that. I saw that Ag Secretary, Brooke Rollins was at the Commodity Classic and pledged to make America great again. Oh wait, sorry, got that wrong. Make agriculture great again. Oh, so clever with that maga, I wonder who her speech writers are, but the president told Fox business last weekend. She acknowledged hardships now and in the future, what’s the state of play according to the new Ag Secretary,

Josh Sewell:

A lot of it’s up in the air. What she made clear and some of the other folks from USDA who were there and some other events is that there is a perception and a claim that they want to radically change some of the approaches to agriculture. And so specifically there’s a lot of focus on deregulation and making it easier for farmers to farm and having less government interference in agriculture. Now, they didn’t talk about taking the money away from agriculture, certainly lots of potential. You could call it interfering in the markets with farm subsidies and some new subsidies. They may come down the pike at the beginning of an administration. And so I think they’re still getting their feet under them in some respects. She had been confirmed not too long before she appeared. And so I think it was even acknowledged at one point that she’s still getting educated on all the details and nuances of the office. And so again, that leads back to that issue of anxiety because if anything, whether you like it or not, this administration is not predictable.

Steve Ellis:

Well, I was just going to go there, Josh, because the farmers like this stability and predictability as you said, but this administration is the biggest force of unpredictability. So that said, what were some of the policy priorities that she lined out or that has been emanating from the administration?

Josh Sewell:

There was a lot of discussion about how there will be reforms to USDA services you could say. And so the elephant in the room being doge and this effort to streamline government and make cuts. And so there’s a lot of talk about needing to refocus USDA on serving farmers and ranchers, not far left climate agendas or radical environmentalists. And so the administration was patting themselves on the back about how they’ve eliminated so far a lot of the DEI programs and some of these other presidential promises from the campaign trail. But you think about this. Here’s the thing, and I think you’re probably familiar with this. One of the issues with USDA that’s been a perennial issue is there, I don’t know how many more than a thousand USDA offices across the country. Every farm service is called the Farm Service Administration and then the conservation part of it, the NRCS, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, they don’t anymore. But the goal for a lot of times is to have an office in every county where there’s agriculture. There’s I believe 3018 counties or county equivalents in the United States. Not every single county has one, but there are plenty where there is an office with one to four people in it to serve farmers, so to speak, where that office is. And so the Doge has that as a priority of closing many of these. And so that really came up a number of times.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah, it’s hard to beat people where there are when you’re closing their office and shutting them out. And I like the flag, certainly the DMV dc, Maryland and Virginia is home to 20% of the federal workforce, but that means 80% of the federal workforce is not in the DMV and those are also places that are getting cut

Josh Sewell:

And some of those offices aren’t necessary. Let’s be clear. And that also came up in some of the reforms that could come out of this is that one of the problems with the farm programs, these are commodity programs, title one programs that give direct payments to producers for certain programs and even some of the conservation programs is that you are required to physically go to the office to sign up or change. It’s the 21st century. You don’t physically go to the office for a lot of things. Even you mentioned the DMVI was thinking of the apartment motor vehicles part of it. You can renew your license without going, you can do a lot of things. You can pay your taxes without going to the office, but if you want sign up for farm programs and modify, a lot of times you are required to go in person to do it, which just seems insane.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I mean, I think almost every week I do a DocuSign of some form or another to some official capacity rather than actually physically wet ink signatures.

Josh Sewell:

And so that was one of the things that I think Doge can do a real good here is if they move away from eliminating personnel in some of this hatchet approach to their reforms and they go and say, where is the electronic stuff that we can improve? What can we do to make it better? Because the thing that I hadn’t really put together, even though I work on this stuff for so long, is that especially in the commodity programs, part of the reason they go in person is they have to look at physical maps of the farm because your payments come not based on your ownership, it’s tied to the land. It’s called a farm serial number. And so the planting history, the payment history is tied to the land, not the producer for these programs. And that makes a lot of sense because certain producers could do better on certain land, but the idea is that you just want to know what’s been going on there for the last 60, 70, 80 years.

Well, those are physical paper maps which didn’t know existed anymore, but they don’t have that tied into an electronic format that can speak within the agency, let alone to outside data sets. And so it’s one of these areas where USC has been working for years to try to upgrade their technology and stuff. They just don’t necessarily have resources at times. But it came to the forefront again is like here we are in the 21st century at this commodity classic where they are showing you innovative tools for measuring the soil, the health content of your soil down to particular trace minerals because those trace minerals can be the difference between three or four bushel increase. And right now, let’s be clear, if you’re getting four more bushels per acre in soybeans, that could be the difference between profitability and bean in the red this year. Yet you then have to go down to some county office with one employee to look at a physical map and tell them, this is where my farm is, and to make a modification system other programs, there’s this real disconnect between the business side of where we are and where our policy is really sclerotic, I guess.

Steve Ellis:

Sounds like a job for the US Digital Service. Oh wait, that’s now the US Doge service. But anyway, so as we were talking about the administration, I saw an article yesterday talking about how some farmers during the Biden administration changed some of their practices or were just getting credit for existing practices like no-till farming to get some climate related assistance for the Biden administration and now they’re being cut off. Did any of that sort of thing come up?

Josh Sewell:

Yeah, it did. And the first time I came up was in a panel of a lot of USDA officials who were there, basically the policy panel. So it was normally it would be the head of the risk management agency, which runs the crop insurance program, the chief of the Conservation Service and the chief of the Farm Service Administration. This time they were all acting members because it’s in a transition and those are all Senate appointed positions, but they don’t have an appointment yet. So no offense against people who understand the policy well and worked at USDA for 20 to 40 years, but they’re not the policy heads, they’re not the political heads. So they didn’t really necessarily weren’t in the know of this, but they talked a lot of faith in that conservation will be protected because conservation is so profitable for farmers, which it is.

Farmers love conservation and conservation programs, which most of them do. At the same time, there were 2000 USD employees let go basically that week as far that were running some of these offices. And now it’s come out that the administration is going through, especially the money that was paying for projects from the Inflation Reduction Act and anything that says climate is being flagged, anything that says resilience is being flagged, and sometimes even projects where their application mentioned weather are being flagged as potential review, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense because of course, if you have a concern, if you don’t necessarily like climate change spending and whatnot, the fact is that weather affects farming dynamic weather especially. And so when you can take practices and implement things that make you more resilient physically and a better business, there’s all kinds of benefits from that, not just for the environment, but for taxpayers who want to spend less money on the safety net programs because you are more successful as a business. So that came up a lot and there was a lot of concern there amongst the producers of some of them had signed contracts to get some of this money to implement practices. And so they’re out money. They want to know when are we going to get reimbursed.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah, that’s an interesting point and probably topic for another podcast, but it’s certainly one of the things that budget watch like Faithful should know is that most government contracts and government contractors are paid in arrears, meaning they actually do the work and then get compensated afterwards. And so in canceling some of these contracts, the work has already been done and it’s pretty likely that these entities are going to sue the government to get that money and then may actually cost government more for canceling these contracts. So we kind of touched on that a little bit on the Doge episode, but let me go back to USDA As much as we talk about cutting, they are spending at USDA, right?

Josh Sewell:

Oh, absolutely. So you have the farm bill programs, which are run on autopilot like any other mandatory program. But just in December, in the last CR that was passed attached to that was a supplemental spending bill, so an emergency spending bill in response to natural disasters. And as part of that there was 30.8 billion appropriated in response to agricultural disasters. So there’s a 30.8 billion pot of money sitting out there.

Steve Ellis:

So what is all that cash aimed at who’s going to benefit Josh?

Josh Sewell:

That’s an open question partially, but having done this for a long time, I can tell you who’s going to benefit some of the people. The commodity classic for sure. So really it’s actually two pots of money and that came up from the secretariat. So you have a 20 billion pot that was in response to emergency needs supposedly. So the natural disasters, it would cover natural disasters in 2023 and 2024, another $10 billion was basically a short-term payment on the farm bill. It was money that they were hoping to get in if they had passed a new farm bill. That’s the most egregious part of this is it’s basically a 10 billion payoff to groups wanted money and couldn’t come to an agreement on a farm bill because they were unwilling to pay for it with cuts somewhere else or revenue raisers. But the big part, that 20 billion, it was announced that the details will be coming sometime in March. This was the first week of March at this meeting. So any day now we should see some details, but 20 billion is a huge chunk of change. And in this current environment, things are tough for a lot of producers compared to some years. Those federal subsidies are making up to about 30% of their income this year across the sector. So it’s a big pool of money. Washington will be in the seat of picking winners and losers depending on how they dole that money out

Steve Ellis:

Or if they doge it bringing up doge again. So what are some of the good things that Doge could do in agriculture?

Josh Sewell:

Yeah, we touched on it briefly, but it really is about getting an industry, which if one of the things you can learn from a commodity classic or some of these other events, agriculture is extremely technologically advanced. The tech sector goes into agriculture all the time. There’s all kinds of ways of maximizing the efficiency of your business, and there’s all kinds of tools that are available. Farmers are not hillbillies, they’re not simple people. They are very sophisticated businessmen and women and they play in an international market that also comes up. It’s clear we export half of our soybeans typically, and so they’re very plugged into the global economy and markets and whatnot. What Doge can really help do is get the safety net and the tools that we do provide into the late 20th century, let alone the 21st century. And you talked about that needing to just layer on some of these digital services instead of physical maps.

It’s also a simple thing as of the applications themselves, there are so many forms you have to fill out to get to different programs, like if they really can create some apps that make it simpler and that the producers, the farmers can use, and if it’s an actual app, they could use it from their phones because out there sitting in your combine, which is literally driving itself a lot of times because it’s plugged into the internet and plugged into satellites, you’re sitting on your phone trading, you’re doing market trades. If you could do your actual needed USDA business on your phone as well, it would make things cheaper for us and more efficient for those producers as well.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah, it’s amazing how sophisticated some of those combines are with the laser guided and GPS and then they have the tracking the markets right there from the farm, from the combine and making trades. So certainly it would seem like if you could fill out your farm service agency paperwork there, that would be a huge boon to farmers.

Josh Sewell:

And there’s one other thing which would be, it’s really in the weeds, but it’s really important is that the USDA’s subagencies need to talk to each other. I mentioned how the farm subsidy payments for commodity programs are based on farm track numbers. So are USDA conservation payments oftentimes, but the dataset that runs the farm subsidies and the dataset that manages the conservation, they’re two different things that they don’t actually talk to each other. And so it’s a very onerous thing for someone to get the authority to even look at both data sets. You actually have to physically go to USDA oftentimes and do that if you’re a researcher to find out, oh, if we’re spending all this money on conservation programs and practices on this piece of land, how has it affected payments? Does it make the land less risky? Is the farmer more profitable?

It should be easier to have those data sets talk to each other so that we know and not just us, and I say this is royal, it’s taxpayers who are paying for it, but also the farmers who are also paying for some of these programs cost shared, or they at least are investing their time and putting their operation potentially at risk as they’re going to try something new. Well, let’s figure out we don’t want them to reinvent the wheel. Is it working somewhere else? Let’s better serve the people who are supposed to be benefiting from this, which is the actual farmers themselves. So it’s a real opportunity and it gets really nerdy, but there’s a lot, that’s the most bipartisan thing you can do, is to actually make programs work better for farmers at a cheaper price. And I think that’s where Doge, they have the capability if they keep the political capital and not burn it all by making some people upset.

Steve Ellis:

And I mean it’s certainly having data systems talk to one another, be translatable across, not just in USDA, but even from other agencies to USDA from commerce or tapping into the master death file at the Social Security Administration. Those are important resources. So putting aside Doge, getting back to Secretary Rollins, what did she say specifically her priorities were?

Josh Sewell:

She really talked about reducing regulations and government interference in agriculture. That was a big part of it. And then also she wants to strengthen the farm safety net in order to provide that more predictable and stable environment for producers. And so really it comes down to completing a five-year farm bill as soon as possible. Yes. Here we are operating on the second year of an extension of the 2018 farm bill. So she says we need to do this farm bill by the ideas as soon as possible, but certainly by the end of this year she wants to expand trade. We want to increase trade opportunities for our farmers to export their products. And of course I say of course, because I’ve been doing this in a little cynical biofuels, we need more and more biofuels. We need to, did she say cram down more ethanol?

No, no, no, no. She said, we need to support more ethanol use in the market, not mandate and force it. They have this thing that we need to use the markets to get more biofuels. By markets they mean mandates that you use more biofuels. And also, again, like working with the EPA to reduce regulations affecting farmers and a perennial favorite ending, the death tax as they call it, but frankly, making the estate tax unworkable or eliminate the estate tax completely so that some of these very large farms that have more than 30 million in would not have to pay any estate tax when they pass it on to their heirs.

Steve Ellis:

Speaking of estates, I’ve hedged my retirement plan by creating a nest egg. That’s right. I’m hoarding eggs. So more seriously, what’s the administration’s plan to deal with egg prices? I mean, every time I look at the grocery, it’s up another dollar per dozen.

Josh Sewell:

Yeah, they’ve done a few things. They’ve taken about so far, they’ve committed about a billion dollars from the Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act authority to respond to the avian influenza. Mostly. Some of that money is going into depopulating flocks. If you test positive for avian flu in your flock, the current regulations require you to eliminate all those birds. So there’s some of that. Then there’s some research into trying to promote egg production and also some direct compensation for the producers. One thing with the egg prices that they’re not doing is reducing trade barriers, which again, this meeting happened the first week of March and it was actually at the panel on that Tuesday morning with all the economists from these groups and the USDA chief economists talk about 2025 market for agriculture, what can we expect? And they’re like, well, 30 minutes ago the president announced that he’s imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico. And so it was like all my slides are not up to date as of 30 minutes ago because you can’t predict what the market’s going to be. And I think as we’re taping this now, most of those tariffs were suspended then reapplied. Some of them are suspended again. So again, that volatility is certainly not main help there when it comes to the trade war.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah, I guess the most predictable thing is that it’s unpredictable and the variability. So last Trump administration then Secretary of Agriculture, Purdue dipped deep into his charter Act authority to shower tens of billions of dollars on the ag sector to offset the tariff impact of that trade war. Speaking of trade wars and where we are, I see that China has put tariffs on soybeans. Are we going to see that bail out again?

Josh Sewell:

Yes. And it’s not just my prediction. The secretary herself has been quoted and then some of the people that worked for her at this one of the panels said explicitly this will happen. They are going through the process of figuring out they don’t know what the payments will be or exactly who will get them because we don’t know the ramifications, but we did this before and you can have confidence in us that we will do this again. And so it’s an open checkbook. Trump loves farmers, so he’s going to help you. And it’s like, I don’t know any farmer who wants aid payments instead of making their money from trade. And a lot of them will take the money, but it puts them in a bad position moving forward because it’s just not a viable business strategy to make all your money from government payments.

You’re going to lose market share, which happened last time soybean exports to and some of the other products to China did not. It took ’em years to recover back to the level they were. So even if you get back to where you were in 2019, you had those three years, four years of growth that you didn’t experience. And there’s plenty of other places that grow products. Brazil can grow two crops of soybeans and corn in a year when they want to because they’re closer to the equator. And so when countries move away from your products, that could be a real problem.

Steve Ellis:

When you establish a different supply chain, all of a sudden everything, especially if it’s over a course of years, reorients to that. And then why would you rebound back unless it’s very cost effective to do so. And in reality, the margins in agricultural products are so small that that would never be the case.

Josh Sewell:

And in again, this was the corn growers, one of the groups, here’s the Corn Growers Association, and one of their priorities is perhaps unsurprisingly for people to use more corn, there’s only so much corn you can use in our economy. It’s a physical fact. The market can only take so much and which is why we export. We don’t export nearly as much corn as we do soy, but of the corn we do export, 50% of it goes to Mexico. And so you automatically, half your exports are potentially at risk, and I think it’s another 10% or 15% goes to Canada. So two thirds almost of your corn exports could evaporate overnight. And so then there’s only so much more you can try to sell your core domestically, but where does it go? So again, that’s why their goal is to try to increase ethanol, use liquid fuel, as you can call it, basically more on your gas tank. But that’s kind of a losing venture in the long run as things are more efficient. So that’s called sustainable aviation fuel is now the new shiny object, which is to shove more ethanol and other corn products into airplanes.

Steve Ellis:

So Josh, speaking of subsidies and spending at USDA earlier this month, we released our fact sheet updated cashing in on federal crop insurance subsidies. How is it possible, Josh, that over the last 10 years, farm businesses have received crop insurance payouts, totaling $54 billion more than the premiums that they paid

Josh Sewell:

Because it’s not an insurance program. That’s the easy answer. So in crop insurance, it only looks like insurance. It’s not like the insurance that you or I have for our home and auto or even life insurance so they can get so much money back as individuals and definitely as a sector because for every dollar of premium that’s charged, the farm businesses on average only pays for 60% of that taxpayers are covering the other 40%. And so it’s a highly subsidized, so then you can think about it, if you were offered someone who was offering to buy you insurance that ensures that you have a crop, it actually ensures the level of revenue you expect from that crop and they’re willing to pay for 40% of it. It’s a very popular program. And so that’s exactly how it is. And actually when you run those numbers, for every dollar that a farmer pays as a sector, they’re getting $2 and 40 cents.

So it’s a great investment. Can you imagine? You put in a dollar, you get $2 and 15 cents out. I mean, that’s a win-win for them. It’s a no-brainer for them. That’s how you get that massive number. It suggest people look at that small fact sheet we did on that, because there are certain places where farmers in that state, when they buy crop insurance, they make more money off of crop insurance every single year, not just once in a while. It’s not like some of the ice states where if you go to somewhere like Iowa Farmer, paid premiums have exceeded their payouts in something like five of the last 10 years. So it means they’ve actually paid money and not gotten all their money back in insurance. Indiana, I think it’s even lower. I think they’ve only, it’s been three years of the last 10 where they’ve actually gotten more in insurance payouts than the premiums. They paid North Dakota all 10 years, Oklahoma, every year, Texas every year. And it’s not small. And Texas is, I think for every dollar they get $3 and 50 cents back. It’s a cash transfer program for some of these folks and not just insurance, which is something right now we have to take a look at and say, is this too generous? I’m pretty sure the answer is with $34 trillion. Is that where we’re at now or are we up to 36? I don’t even know anymore.

Steve Ellis:

36. More than 36 trillion.

Josh Sewell:

36 trillion. I guess I was thinking of January 1st numbers. It’s ridiculous.

Steve Ellis:

Well, thanks for sharing all that with us, Josh, fresh back from the Ty Classic, Josh Sewell, Mr. Agriculture, thank you for being here with us for this critical conversation. Yeah, always happy to do it. Appreciate it, Steve. Well, there you have at podcast listeners, this is the Frequency Market on your dial, subscribe and share and know this taxpayers for common sense has your back America. We read the bills, monitor the earmarks, and highlight those wasteful programs that poorly spend our money and ship long-term risk to taxpayers. We’ll be back with a new episode soon. I hope you’ll meet us right here to learn more.