I’m pleased Sixth District Congressman Ben Cline got some attention for this:
Incoming Department of Government Efficiency head and world’s richest man Elon Musk has proposed cutting $2 trillion in government spending—more than Congress’s entire discretionary budget. But some of Donald Trump’s key allies don’t see anything wrong with that picture.
In an interview with Fox Business on Friday, Virginia Rep. Ben Cline claimed that it “absolutely is” possible to slash that much cash from the budget.
“We can do it, and make sure that we focus funding toward the American people and not toward bureaucracy in Washington,” Cline said.
Just a reminder: Congress’s discretionary budget funds practically the entire executive branch, doling out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.
The key to this impossible feat, Cline suggests, is to cut “bureaucracy.”
“Give me one idea in terms of what’s significant that you think, ‘That’s got to go right away?’” asked Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. [Yes, her again.]
“Well let’s just look at the Department of Education and how billions of dollars stay in Washington, funding bureaucrats whose simple goal is to interfere in the decisions about educational choice at local and state levels,” Cline responded.
But that’s not an accurate picture of the DOE. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation. In Virginia specifically, it spends $2,020 per pupil per year, providing approximately 12 percent of the state’s education funding, according to the Education Data Initiative.
How much of this is Cline prepared to cut from schools in the Sixth District? Or does he really believe that the bulk of federal spending on education goes to out-of-touch Washington bureaucrats?
This is one of many topics about which Cline needs to be asked, but somehow never is asked.
Gene Zitver is the editor of ClineWatch.
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