Biggs Chastises Democrats for 'Doomsday Scenarios' About Government Spending

Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) chastised Democrats for discussing "doomsday scenarios" during the recent House Oversight hearing on government efficiency, further blasting them for supposedly not sharing the goal of making the federal government more transparent.

"So our nation is $36 trillion in debt with a structural deficit, not a cyclical deficit, of $2 trillion each year, and it is rising," Rep. Biggs began, further noting that interest payments recently surpassed the defense budget for the first time.

More egregiously, Rep. Biggs pointed out that "meanwhile, we are losing hundreds of billions of dollars annually to waste, fraud, abuse, improper payments, et cetera."

He then asked hearing witness Thomas Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste, if preventing taxpayer defrauding in transfer payment programs "without a thorough review of how the federal government actually sends money out the door" was possible, to which Mr. Schatz said, "Absolutely not."

"In order to determine how the money is being spent, somebody has to see what it looks like, and that has been a big problem for a very long time, as no one has looked at it. They just make opinions and they do not prevent it from being wasted when it goes out the door," Schatz continued.

More to the point, Schatz said the federal government does not have a public-visible line-by-line system of accountability for its budget.

The Arizona Congressman agreed, saying of Democrats, "So I am actually baffled that, instead of sharing the [Trump] administration's efforts to conduct a thorough, necessary review of the systems, they are repeating these doomsday scenarios, these statements that they want to stop it. I do not know why you want to stop it."

Biggs further chastised the federal government for lacking a line-by-line system, describing how he had asked for such a record from a single agency and received two huge books, "and none of them were line-by-line. They did not cover every program within that agency. They did not describe everything that was there."

"This is where we have to correct if we are going to get out of our structural deficit," Biggs concluded.