Hey Steve. Glad to be here on what I think is now the truly final podcast for the year,

Josh. The lights almost went out on the federal government. It took house Republicans three bites of the legislative apple to get the CR done mere hours before the expiration of the one they passed back in September. The first one, a Smorgasburg of the typical year end Christmas tree fashion got torpedoed by Elon Musk in a tweetstorm full of inaccuracies. The second fell because of President-elect Trump’s demand to get rid of the debt ceiling and the third Goldilocks version passed by a wide, wide margin. So Josh, let’s start with the one that passed, the one that was just right. What was or is in the CR that expires in March

Spending wise. The third one is a lot like the first one, the same top line number stuck to the fiscal year 2025 spending caps has a hundred billion dollars in emergency funding in response to the natural disasters. So a lot of the money’s still there. They simply extended the 2024 spending levels for another almost three months.

So it sounds like then it was a lot of these extraneous bobs that adorn these Christmas trees at the end of the year that were ones that were discarded or trashed. So let’s touch on some of that. What wasn’t in the bill compared the earlier version?

A lot. A lot did not make it in. It was literally the last thing the house does, and it’s basically the last major thing the Senate was planning to do before they wrapped up for the year. Pretty much anybody who wants something would throw on there. And so that first cigar that had been negotiated ended up failing. It was just chock full of a lot of things that were policy and not really spending related.

So what were some of these policy or even sort of innocuous or at least not spending related items?

And I say innocuous because it’s things that I saw. One title was the Recycling and Compost Accountability Act. And so this is a bill that had been pushed to mandate that the EPA conduct a series of reports on composting. Recycling. I’m a big fan of composting. I love it in my own personal life, but I mean, it’s not really a big public issue in many respects, I would argue. And there’s another requirement that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau create better standards for e-bikes for the batteries and e-bikes. Hey, that’s an important thing. You might see e-bikes catching on fire in people’s apartments and burning down buildings, but we’re talking dozens to hundreds of these various smaller items that are just not, they might be important to some people, but they’re not critical, certainly not critical to the funding of the government.

So I mean, our listeners, I want to know our budget watchdog, faithful Josh. So I mean there was 1500 pages and you’ve only touched on the iceberg. Any other tidbits of interest that were left on the cutting room floor?

Yeah, there’s plenty. And I think in a bill like this, you’ll see that there’s a lot of provisions that actually many people would say are important and have a lot of support. And I think there were a few in there that things that had bipartisan support in the House and the Senate, but frankly just ran out of time to get across the floor. So Senator Cruz from Texas has a bill basically to require social media companies to be better about stopping revenge porn, which is something that has been a public nuisance from identified as a public nuisance from both sides of the aisle that was in the first cr. And there’s something about some negotiating working with those pharmacy benefit managers. I’ve been seeing even TV ads about these when I’ve been watching some football games. So basically the companies that negotiate with the drug manufacturers, supposedly on behalf of the health insurance companies, but then the PBMs pocket most of the savings and don’t pass it on. And this is something that both sides of the aisle have said, we really want to make sure this savings is passed on to consumers and not kept by these middle managers. That was in the bill too. Both of those things were dropped in the final CR in that 1400 or so pages of stuff that got left on the cutting room floor.

So those are things that are being taken up in the beginning of the next Congress, I imagine, and then probably subject to a end of the year bill and then either in 2025 or in 2026.

Yeah, because something like the PBM legislation has actually started under in the first term of President Trump, but with the way things go, a lot of things with a little thing called covid took up some time, and so it just never really made it to the forefront in Congress.

Well, considering the ads that I’ve seen and heard have been sponsored by pharma, the drug manufacturers, I’m assuming that they’ve got a lot of money and they’ll continue to be running those ads.

Exactly. And when you talk about people who have a lot of money and a lot of interest, there were also a lot of items that were clearly special interests trying to just jam their way into this must pass bill because again, last train leaving the station, and I can really see something including things that have bipartisan opposition, things like year round sales of E 15 gasoline, which is gasoline that has 15% ethanol in it. So there are certain times of the year you’re not allowed to sell that right now. But the biofuels industry had gotten there, folks to put that into the CR, but I think there was, yeah.

Well, so then you’re bringing up E 15 and ethanol. Well, that makes me think of farmers. And so what about the farmers? How did they do in this legislation? In the end,

They made out like bandits, well at least I mean some of them. So there was nearly 21 billion in response to natural disasters provided in this bill. And so these are natural disasters that occurred in 2024 or calendar year 2023. And so it’s supposed to be funding, it’s given to the Secretary of Agriculture with not a lot of strings, just sort of some minimal requirements that basically says for disaster events in these two years provide this money to farmers. And it goes way beyond anything in just western North Carolina, which is clearly the focus for many people from the recent hurricanes. So cover anything from drought to excess moisture to even a typhoon that hit Guam and other places in the Pacific. And so frankly, this disaster aid, it’s excessive for some folks who are already covered by safety net programs, but it may be really important for some people,

But that wasn’t the only aid that went to the farmers in this bill. Right. Josh, there were some other items that you might want to highlight for our listeners,

And this is where I think it goes from being somewhat defensible. You could argue if you don’t really care about deficits and you just want to give money to folks you like, or really important money for people who need it to frankly egregious. So at the last minute negotiations, one of the things that had actually before Elon Musk had started his tweetstorm in opposition to this cr, the first one that helped tank it, the ag lobby had dug their heels and said, we aren’t going to vote for this unless you provide not just that 21 billion that the president requested, but an extra originally 21 more billion that got knocked down to 10 billion for economic relief. Economic relief basically means they just wanted extra money for a handful of commodity crops that were upset that they didn’t make as much money this year as they had hoped to.

And it’s as simple as that. This $10 billion is earmarked specifically for corn, cotton, soy rice, and a handful of other what are called commodity crops, which already have their own farm bill programs. It’s just that the farm bill programs, which we’ve talked about before, these so-called shallow loss programs that are supposed to cover when there is a loss and a calculated loss that is not deep enough to trigger your crop insurance, which is supposed to cover catastrophic losses, these programs would pay out. Well, since the last farmer was passed in 2018, shell loss programs have not paid out as much money as originally projected because prices have been high and incomes have been high, but that’s not how lobbyists work. If they expect money, they want to get that money. So this is another way of getting a backdoor funding for increased farm subsidies without actually having to pay for it in a farm bill. And it’s just, frankly, it’s egregious.

Then it sounds like in the final package you have the CR extending funding at 2024 levels with some anomalies. You have this extra 10 billion that you didn’t mention earlier that you now slipped in Barry Washington of you, Josh, but there was a hundred billion that some of that was that 21 billion for the natural disasters, but there was more of that for some other areas. So what was in the disaster section of this last CR that actually got enacted?

Yeah, in that disaster section, he was mostly to what the president had requested in his couple disaster supplementals, one of which I think we touched on in one of our previous podcasts. But also, we actually have a breakdown of the initial requests that’s date back to October of 2023, some of them through November of this year. So you can see a line by line breakdown on taxpayer.net of exactly what was in the supplemental. And we will update that as soon as we can as to what is actually in there once we finish reading through. It still takes even 119 pages, takes some of us a little time to read. But I think when you look at it, much of it was indeed

Because we read it carefully to get it accurate, so we don’t start tweeting out that the legislators are giving themselves a 40% salary increase or that there was money in there for the NFL. Those were tweets from Mr.

Musk. Exactly. And so when you look at the disaster section, I think readers will and listeners will see that there are some things that there’s not a lot of surprises thus far. And so we have the regular debate about is it truly an emergency or is it not? And even if it is, one of the issues here is that because that 110 billion is designated emergency, it’s unpaid for, so that’s 110 billion extra thrown onto our deficit, our debt. And so frankly there, I mean, there are some things that are not an emergency, like almost $400 million to buy new hurricane hunter aircraft got nothing against having aircraft to identify hurricanes and their severity, but it’s not, those aircraft are currently scheduled to be decommissioned with the new ones coming on in 2030. So this is just giving extra money right now for something that we know is going to happen in the next five years. So it fails the test of being unforeseen or an immediate need. And there’s other things like that. I think there’s close to 3 billion in defense operations and maintenance funding. And this is for a department that has about an 850 billion base budget. So I think they can find 3 billion in their couch cushions or maybe just move some other things around. So we don’t need to be piling on even more money onto our national debt

Channeling our colleague Gabe Murphy, who handles our national security work. I mean, wasn’t some of that money for basically hiring and retaining workforce at the submarine facilities?

That is part of, one of the things they’re trying to do is they want some money basically to help with increasing wages at these facilities. But again, this is something that’s going to take numerous years and you can plan for, so it’s not an emergency to plan for five years of pay increases.

And not only that, I mean some of it is workforce attraction and retention. I mean, that should be the contractors that should be electric boats responsibility, generally dynamics, not the taxpayer figuring out how they can hire and do job fairs and whatnot. So one of the other things that came up and was a big demand, what happened about the bridge, the collapse in Baltimore, the subject of one of our most popular budget watchdog AF podcasts, who pays when disaster strikes? What happened with the Baltimore Bridge?

Well, at the end of the day, the president and the Maryland delegation won out. So the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the rebuilding of that is currently going to be at a hundred percent federal cost. And so again, this is one of those areas where it’s a debate about what responsibility goes to the federal government versus the state in which this bridge is located. Because it is, it facilitates interstate commerce. It’s an important bridge for not just the state of Maryland, but you could say for in many respects, commerce on the East coast. But typically you have a cost share between the local sponsors and the federal government. But the president after this tragedy occurred, had been asking for a hundred percent federal funding, mostly to get it rolling, to make sure that there was no impediments in rebuilding it. And so in a slower time, if it hadn’t been subject to being thrown onto or being included into a CR, it may have had a different result. But in the end, the president got what he wanted In this time, at least for this provision,

Dc the actual city did kind of pull a rabbit out of its hat in here, right, Josh? I mean, what happened with our parochial issue? What happened with the Washington football team, the commanders?

Well, this to me, so what ended up happening is for years, the city of DC has been trying to get control of the RFK stadium and the surrounding. It’s about 174 acres around where what is now known as the Washington Commanders used to play football and haven’t for decades. And so there’s been a bill consistently, the government has tried to get control of that so they could redevelop it, possibly build a new stadium and attract the commanders back into DC instead of playing in Landover, Maryland. There was actually a bill passed in the house back in February, I believe it was, that allowed for, they gave DC control not actually transferring the land in perpetuity, but giving them control for 99 years to allow them to just manage it basically. So it’s off the government, the federal government’s back that was in the first 1500 page CR, it was one of the many things that had on there.

It’s one thing that Elon Musk and some others had pointed out as incorrectly. He was correct. It was in there. He was incorrect about how much that it was transferring money. It was just transferring the land. This is also a provision that has faced opposition from Senator Lee of Utah, especially for years, and has blocked it. And so it was pulled, it was not included in the final pier that passed. And actually, when I was reading that night, I think it was actually when I got up, I’ll be honest, I didn’t stay up late and watched everything early in the morning. I read an article about how DC had lost because this had been pulled. And then I read in another outlet how it turns out actually DC had won because instead of actually being included in cr, it was the Senate, after they had concluded the business, they were cleaning up a few other things and they actually passed this bill under uc or unanimous consent, so no one opposed it.

So it’s just one of these things where it turns out you can get a few things done at the end of the year if you’re just waiting on the Senate and they all just want to go home. So there’s a couple of little things they can do, but also it’s just an interesting tidbit where, I don’t know why Senator Lee or someone else if they were just asleep at the wheel or if they just finally got, that’s what happens in the year. Sometimes you’re not in town anymore or you just aren’t paying as much attention at two o’clock in the morning.

And also Daines from South Dakota was also opposing it and promising to hold it up over the former mascot and recognition for the people who created the mascot. But it is a case though in some ways, this is the legislative process that actually it passed as a standalone piece of legislation. I mean, it may have been unanimous consent, but typically if Senator Lee or Senator Daines wanted to oppose it, they would relay that to their fellow Republican members, senators and somebody on their, even if they supported the legislation and their stead would’ve had that opposition and it would’ve, I stalled it. And as you pointed out, I mean this legislation was led by Congressman Comer, the chairman of the oversight committee in the house that thought that local government should, instead of having this as park service land and controlled by the Park Service, which it’s decrepit it, huge parking lots and everything else, and I mean, obviously I’m a little bit parochial on this and the fact that I live about a mile from that property, but it still was something where he thought that local control over that land was more important. It’s not about, I mean, certainly the city can think about bringing the team back, but it is really, this is the way legislation to some extent. You don’t want it to be in the wee hours of the morning. But to some extent, as the house passed it by a large majority, the Senate then enacted it. It was standalone piece of legislation. It was done at the late hours, but it wasn’t done as part of the CR, which is something that is important and that Congress can actually do their job if they really want to.

Exactly. Steve and I think it also, not just the DC specific, the RFK legislation, but this whole, I guess it was a two day event, it felt like two months in some respects, being the last week before the holiday break. And full disclosure, a lot of the groups that we work with, I mean we were fully working, but as I was going back and forth to some of them, they were like, yeah, we are officially not working this week. And another group, it was supposed to be a light week, but they were all pulling 10 to 14 hour days.

It’s a welcome to Washington moment, I think for folks is like, this is how it works. There’s a lot of things, yeah, it’s not necessarily the best way. We don’t like crs. We don’t like massive omnibuses. But if you want to change that, you got to engage in the process and be there for the long haul. Frankly, parachuting in at the last moment with the tweet storm, even if you’re, I guess the most powerful tweeter in the world, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have the impact you want. And also to be fair that the president-elect had his own, he came in at the last minute. This Sierra has been negotiated in earnest since September in many respects. But then he came in and said, oh, we need, by the way, we need to have a suspension of the debt ceiling for another two years, conveniently of the whole entirety of the next Congress. And that’s purely self-interest because he didn’t want to have to do that as one of his first acts as president in his second term is to sign a bill that lifts the debt ceiling or extends the debt ceiling.

Let’s unpack that a little bit, Josh, because you’re right. I mean he did. All of a sudden it was, yeah, the original one was too full of all sorts of stuff that was extraneous. And also, we need to suspend the debt limit or eliminate the debt limit. I mean, he didn’t just say that, and he said, suspend the debt limit, not just for two years, but initially he said until 2029, which of course would be when he is out of office. And so budget was a F faithful this, that we’ve on the record decided that the debt limit is something that is anachronism and that it’s been weaponized and it’s used for fiscal terrorism to extract various provisions. And so we’ve basically said we need to get rid of it. But you could see that he was opposed by not just the Democrats, but about 30 some odd members of his own Republican conference.

The President Trump’s Republican president elect Trump’s Republican conference because they want to continue to use that as a weapon and a tool. And they recognize that at some point there won’t be a Republican in the White House and they want to bring this up again. And it does also, from our perspective, and even though we’ve said to get rid of it, it’s going to underscore the issues that the debt limit has been suspended until January 2nd. At that point, it resets, and then that is the debt limit that then the Secretary Treasury starts doing extraordinary measures to extend that, which will probably take you to June or July. But that does put a potentially in any kind of aggressive budget reconciliation package or anything else, or that’s also where you can extend the debt limit is in budget reconciliation is one of the three things you can do in budget reconciliation, which is spending revenue related, spending related and debt limit related, no policy. So anyway, it’s kind of an interesting combination of things together going into that.

Yeah, no, and like I said, it was an eventful last full week for Congress, but I think in the end we haven’t solved many of the problems. And I think the debt limit debate has just brought up a new one that’s going to show there’s some complications next year. But this does give me some, we have, I don’t, is it 90 days? It’s a three month cr, so it’s till mid-March, so it’s a little bit of time. It’ll give Congress a little bit of breathing room to come in and get their feet under them and the president will be in place. And for these newcomers who are really getting their first taste of Washington and how it works and how it doesn’t work, I think it gives us a jumping off point to say we want to tackle that debt limit, if not eliminate ourselves. But to do these kinds of things, you really have to. It has to be, it takes everybody, and we have to engage. Majorities are very slim slimmer than they were in the last Congress. And so enduring policy requires bipartisan cooperation and opposition, but eventually that bipartisanship turns into some sort of product. And so I’m optimistic, like always ending the year on a high note too high in the emergency spending part, but that’s a fight for next year.

It would’ve been much better for president-elect Trump if Congress had actually taken care of their business in the hundred 18th Congress rather than punting it to the hundred 19th Congress. Because one of the first things that is going to be on his docket is enacting the fiscal year 2025, spending bills halfway through the year. And really the amount that they can shave or adjust those is really not that much. It’s minimum really when you think about the overall federal spending. And so it would’ve been easier for them if they had cleared the decks and then just had to deal with their own stuff. But instead they’ve got to deal with unfinished business. That goes back to the Biden administration, goes back to the hundred 18th Congress. And I think the other point that I really want to emphasize is you’re right that parachuting in like Elon Musk did, or even President-elect Trump did with the debt limit, demand N is not a successful strategy that you’ve got to really develop your base. And so even the president-elect coming right in off of winning electoral landslide, a strong popular vote isn’t enough to get the Republicans to all come together and do exactly what you want if you haven’t brought them along in that process. And that’s what happened right there, that buzz saw that they ran into

A hundred percent. And I think it’s a testament also. There are a lot of groups on both sides of the aisle looking to do some real work here and have that debate to figure out how to have a fiscally sustainable future. And that’s why we are still here and we at taxpayers for common sense are going to keep working at this. And for anyone interested in the end of the year to support voices like ours, we are as a reminder, 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit. Happy to take your donations to help us continue the work that needs to be done.

Thank you for that plug and yes, yes, tax deductible donations. We’re welcome. So really in the end, there was a lot of steersman drawing and from Elon Musk and President Trump, but in the end we got enacted basically what was where we started with a few extraneous items left on the cutting room floor. But as far as spending, it didn’t change a lot.

That’s right. Yeah. So it’s a question of how we’re going to invest our time in the future, and I think folks can be a little more productive if they start at the beginning of the process and not at the end.

Alright, CT CS, director of Research and Policy, Josh Sewell, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Same to you, Steve.

Well, there you have a podcast listeners. The name of the game is Transparency Keeping Federal Spending Out in the Open where it belongs. This is the frequency. Mark it 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 spent our money and shift 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.