Texas Weekly Online

Texas-trans-white
Menu
Menu

Author: shailender

WATCH: GOP senators rail against staggering $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury payments

WATCH: GOP senators rail against staggering .7 trillion in untraceable Treasury payments

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury Department payments.  Prior to the discovery, Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional for $4.7 trillion in Treasury Department payments, so they were often left blank and were untraceable. The field is now required to increase “insight into where the money is actually going,” the Treasury Department and DOGE announced in February.  “Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government earlier this month.  Fox News Digital asked Republican senators on Capitol Hill to respond to the approximately 500,000 in untraceable payments made by the Treasury Department each year.  DOGE SAYS IT FOUND NEARLY UNTRACEABLE BUDGET LINE ITEM RESPONSIBLE FOR $4.7T IN PAYMENTS “I’m not surprised at all, unfortunately,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, said before adding, “They were leaving complete fields undone when they were filling out their financials, so this is a common theme. I’m not surprised.” TOP 5 MOST OUTRAGEOUS WAYS THE GOVERNMENT HAS WASTED YOUR TAXES, AS UNCOVERED BY ELON MUSK’S DOGE Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, called for an investigation into where those payments actually went.  “There’s so much waste. There’s so much fraud, There’s so much abuse in our government,” Schmitt told Fox News Digital. “I’m glad there was a laser-like focus on it. We ought to make many of those reforms permanent, but there probably ought to be some investigations here about where this money actually went. I mean this is taxpayer money. People work hard.” After DOGE and the Treasury Department uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable funds, Marshall and Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced a bill in March requiring the Treasury Department to track all payments.  The Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records (LEDGER) Act seeks to increase transparency in how the Treasury Department spends taxpayer money.  “When you hear about this story that they didn’t know where the money was going, it makes you mad because this is somebody’s money, this is taxpayers’ money when we have almost $37 trillion in debt, so this makes no sense at all,” Scott said.  The Congressional Budget projects that interest payments on America’s national debt will total $952 billion in fiscal year 2025. That’s $102 billion more than the United States’ defense budget at $850 billion.  CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP “We paid out more last year on our debt, $36 trillion in debt, with $950 billion in interest going to bondholders all over the world, including in China. That $950 billion didn’t go to build a bridge or an F-35. We paid more on the interest on debt than we did to fund our military,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska.  “That is an inflection point that when most countries hit, you look at history, that’s when great powers start to decline. So we have to get those savings.”

Grading Trump: Where the president stands in the eyes of Americans four months into his second term

Grading Trump: Where the president stands in the eyes of Americans four months into his second term

President Donald Trump this week enjoyed one of his biggest legislative victories during his second administration. “THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL” has PASSED the House of Representatives!” Trump touted in a social media post Thursday. The president’s post came soon after the GOP-controlled House passed Trump’s sweeping tax and spending cuts package by a razor-thin margin. The Republican-crafted measure is full of Trump’s campaign trail promises and second-term priorities on tax cuts, immigration, defense, energy and the debt limit. Ahead of the House vote, two surveys released earlier in the week indicated that the president’s poll numbers remained underwater. MIKE JOHNSON, DONALD TRUMP GET ‘BIG, ‘BEAUTIFUL’ WIN AS BUDGET PASSES HOUSE The president stood at 46% approval and 54% disapproval in a national survey by Marquette Law School. And Trump was at 42% approval and 52% disapproval in a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Most, but not all, of the latest national surveys place the president’s approval rating in negative territory, with a handful indicating Trump is above water. HEAD HERE FOR THE LATEST FOX NEWS POLLING Trump has aggressively asserted executive authority in his second term, overturning longstanding government policy and aiming to make major cuts to the federal workforce through an avalanche of sweeping and controversial executive orders and actions, with some aimed at addressing grievances he has held since his first term. Trump started his second administration with poll numbers in positive territory, but his poll numbers started to slide soon after his late-January inauguration. But two issues where the president remains at or above water in some surveys are border security and immigration, which were front and center in Trump’s successful 2024 campaign to win back the White House. Trump stands at 56% approval of border security and 50% approval of immigration in the Marquette Law School poll, which was conducted May 5-15. But Trump’s muscular moves on border security and immigration, which have sparked controversy and legal pushback, don’t appear to be helping his overall approval ratings. “Immigration is declining now as a salient issue,” said Daron Shaw, who serves as a member of the Fox News Decision Team and is the Republican partner on the Fox News poll. Shaw, a politics professor and chair at the University of Texas, said “immigration and especially border security are beginning to lose steam as one of the top three issues facing the country. Republicans still rate them fairly highly, but Democrats and independents, who had kind of joined the chorus in 2024, have moved on and, in particular, moved back to the economy as a focal point.” Pointing to Trump, Shaw added that “when you have success on an issue, it tends to move to the back burner.” Contributing to the slide over the past couple of months in Trump’s overall approval ratings was his performance on the economy and, in particular, inflation, which were pressing issues that kept former President Joe Biden’s approval ratings well below water for most of his presidency. Trump’s blockbuster tariff announcement in early April sparked a trade war with some of the nation’s top trading partners, triggered a massive sell-off in the financial markets and increased concerns about a recession. But the markets have rebounded, thanks in part to a truce between the U.S. and China in their tariff standoff as Trump tapped the brakes on his controversial tariff implementation. Trump stood at 37% approval on tariffs and 34% on inflation/cost of living in the Marquette Law School poll. And he stood at 39% on the economy and 33% on cost of living in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted May 16-18. Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist and former RNC and Bush administration official, pointed to last year’s election, saying, “The main reason Trump won was to lower prices. Prices haven’t lowered, and polls are reflecting that.” “With the exception of gas prices, there hasn’t been much of a reduction in prices,” Shaw said. “Prices haven’t come down, and it’s not clear that people will say the absence of inflation is an economic victory. They still feel that an appreciable portion of their money is going to pay for basic things,” he added. “What Trump is realizing is that prices have to come down for him to be able to declare success.”