Issue: Wasteful Government Spending

Spending in Washington, DC is so out of control that it has become a routine practice for Congress to pass bills costing billions of dollars without much debate or afterthought as to who will pay for these new commitments. Our national debt exceeds $12 trillion, and we are now adding a trillion dollars more to this debt every year! Our government wastes at least $350 billion every year through waste, fraud, and duplication, yet the focus of DC politicians is always to simply spend more of your money to solve problems.

One of the primary reasons I ran for the Senate was to provide a voice of fiscal discipline in Washington, and obviously that voice is needed now more than ever.

Since being elected to the Senate in 2004, I have offered hundreds of amendments to eliminate wasteful spending or to add transparency to federal spending. It’s been a lonely battle, but someone had to question earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars to construct a bridge to nowhere in Alaska, millions of dollars for Hollywood movie producers in Hollywood, and a million dollars to build a museum to commemorate the Woodstock music festival. Unfortunately, bringing fiscal responsibility to the Senate has been a lonely quest, but we have succeeded in trimming billions of dollars of wasteful Washington spending.

I have been criticized in Washington for my use of the “hold,” an informal procedure allowing a single Senator to delay or stop a bill. I hold every bill that proposes new spending or creates new programs without offsetting the costs with reductions in spending or elimination of existing, lower priority programs. As a result, I have stopped Congress from authorizing and spending tens of billions of dollars of new spending that we could not afford during the five years I have been a member in the Senate.