[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 45 (Tuesday, March 11, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1647-S1648]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Trump Administration

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, it is another week in Washington and I 
think maybe the 52nd day since President Trump was inaugurated, and we 
are seeing the compliant mainstream media continue to spread falsehoods 
about the work of the Department of Government Efficiency and Elon 
Musk.
  As I have said before, the Federal Government has a spending problem, 
and, like with any addiction, getting

[[Page S1648]]

clean and solving that problem is not necessarily easy or comfortable, 
but it is long overdue and absolutely necessary. With the national debt 
at $36.2 trillion and counting, we have to start somewhere, and little 
things add up. What better place to start than the waste, fraud, and 
abuse that DOGE is identifying?
  This has long been a bipartisan issue--I can think of everything 
dating back to the Grace Commission, where waste, fraud, and abuse was 
a bipartisan target--but apparently not with President Trump in the 
office and not with Elon Musk in charge of the effort to identify the 
spending.
  If you take a look at most things that the Federal Government is 
cutting at the recommendation of DOGE, it becomes harder and harder to 
become a DOGE skeptic unless you are just blind to what they are doing.
  Last week, I mentioned the waste that DOGE had identified with 
subscriptions and software licenses. People may think, well, that is no 
big deal, but there is no reason taxpayers should be footing the bill 
for expensive subscriptions that go unused.
  DOGE uncovered the potential for massive fraud with an audit they 
conducted of government credit cards. At the beginning of the audit, 
there were 4.6 million active government credit cards--4.6 million. 
After 2 weeks, DOGE identified nearly 150,000 credit cards that were 
thankfully unused or unneeded and closed both down. I am sure there is 
more to be done with 4.6 million active credit cards.
  There is no reason for so many government employees to have direct 
access to spending taxpayer money at the click of a button or the swipe 
of a credit card. This is basic and would never happen in the private 
sector or in our individual lives, but in the Federal Government, 
before this administration and before DOGE, this was commonplace and 
has been overlooked for way too long.
  There are some instances of fraud that we have known about for some 
time, but it has taken the Trump administration and DOGE to identify 
and fix them. For example, the Government Accountability Office 
submitted a report to Congress last April estimating that the Federal 
Government loses between $223 billion and $521 billion every year as a 
result of improper payments. The Federal Government is making improper 
payments and spending potentially up to half a trillion dollars. 
Naturally, this was an opportunity for DOGE to identify this waste of 
taxpayer dollars.
  DOGE found payments to illegal immigrants using multiple Social 
Security numbers to submit Medicare claims, something for which they 
are not legally entitled.
  They found $57,000 in Medicare payments in 2020 for a patient who 
actually was recorded to have died 14 years earlier. It is amazing you 
can continue to charge for Medicare payments 14 years after your death.
  In one particularly egregious instance, an illegal immigrant with a 
warrant out for her arrest was receiving more than $100,000 in loans 
from the Small Business Administration, but the waste and abuse of tax 
dollars goes beyond mere inefficiencies.
  Some of the other line items on the DOGE cutting floor are so 
patently absurd it would make your blood boil. For example, last week, 
the National Institutes of Health canceled more than a half billion 
dollars in grants for transgender experiments on mice. You can't make 
this stuff up. It is stranger than fiction.
  In a similar vein, NIH also canceled millions in woke grants ranging 
from promoting healthy relationships among transgender youth to 
delivering transgender services via telehealth. I think if you ask most 
taxpayers how they would like their money to be spent, these programs 
would not make the cut, but that is not all.
  NIH is also canceling research grants that were going to universities 
in China. They canceled a grant for $1.7 million going to the Peking 
University in Beijing for the ``China Health and Retirement 
Longitudinal Study.''
  Once again, I think American taxpayers would prefer to focus on the 
things here at home, including their own retirement savings rather than 
sending millions of dollars to China to study health and retirement 
security in a country which is our chief geopolitical rival, but that 
is not all.
  The list goes on. A group called the Inter-American Foundation has 
been significantly reduced after DOGE found egregious misuse of tax 
dollars, including over $900,000 going toward alpaca farming in Peru. 
That is on top of $800,000 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador and 
more than $700,000 to improve the marketability of mushrooms and peas 
in Guatemala.
  I know that children frequently squirm at the dinner table when they 
are told they have to eat their vegetables, but I don't think this is 
an area where most people think our tax dollars should be spent. 
Unfortunately, this waste doesn't stop at the vegetable aisle.
  This foundation also spent more than $600,000 to expand the sales of 
fruit and jam in Honduras as well as nearly half a million dollars on 
improving the production of artisanal salt in Ecuador--artisanal salt 
in Ecuador.
  Well, thank goodness the Department of Government Efficiency and Mr. 
Musk were key to identifying these egregious abuses of the taxpayer, 
but they have been going on for a long time until the Trump 
administration came along. So I am grateful that now some of these 
outrageous expenditures of tax dollars are being exposed and dealt 
with.
  As I said earlier, Washington, DC, has a spending problem. And like 
any addiction, it is hard to kick the habit, especially after you 
become adjusted to it, but it is time for a little cold turkey when it 
comes to this addiction. Many people who benefit from this gravy train 
don't want it to end.
  So, naturally, many of our colleagues on the other side are concerned 
about DOGE, and they want to suggest that everything the Federal 
Government does is absolutely perfect. They wouldn't change a thing. 
But they don't really have any real substantive response to these 
outrageous examples that I am mentioning here. They wouldn't change a 
thing.
  They see these stats, and they tell you don't believe your lying 
eyes. But those of us who have looked into it, who have taken the time 
to study what has been exposed, know otherwise: The government is not 
infallible.
  We have an unsustainable level of Federal debt that threatens our 
economy and our national security, and the truth is, the Trump 
administration and Republicans are hard at work trying to address it to 
make the government more efficient and more affordable for American 
families.
  So, once again, I would like to do something that you don't hear very 
often here in DC these days and thank Elon Musk for his service to our 
country in performing this essential and long overdue role.