The liberal mainstream media loves to hate on President Donald J. Trump. They fawned at President Obama’s last press conference and praised him for his achievements, yet nobody in the liberal press dares to utter one nice word about the achievements of the Trump Administration. One area that he shined was efforts to target government waste and he needed a second term to reform the spending priorities of the federal government.
The White House put out a list of accomplishments and they are impressive, including 7 million new jobs gained before the China Virus hit our shores, lowest unemployment rate in the past 50 years, and a tax relief law that helped the middle class. The other accomplishments include deregulation, fair trade agreements, including the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), and American energy independence. Maybe the most significant achievement was something President Trump didn’t do – Trump is the first president in years to engage in no new wars.
The president also fought to control spending. He sent a rescissions package to Congress on January 14, 2021 that included cuts to “affect programs of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, and the Treasury, as well as the African Development Foundation, the Commission of Fine Arts, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the District of Columbia, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Inter-American Foundation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the Peace Corps, the Presidio Trust, the United States Agency for International Development, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.” This was part of his effort to cut waste out of the appropriations bills that Congress passed with bloated spending numbers. Congress is expected to ignore the request – they love spending taxpayer money too much to find one cent of savings.
On military issues, the president has “rebuilt the military and created the Sixth Branch, the United States Space Force” and “completely rebuilt the United States military with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.” He also attacked waste like the flawed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program that has wasted billions in taxpayer cash. Just before he was sworn in, Politico reported, “President-elect Donald Trump elevated his criticism of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter today, saying he’s asked Boeing to explore pricing for an alternative to the costly fighter jet.” The F-35 program is still a problem and hemorrhaging taxpayer cash on a daily basis.
The same contractor that produced the F-35 was recently reported to have a poor performance record on a weapons program with scheduling delays and substandard products. Inside Defense reported, “the Air Force’s decision last year to bet on Raytheon to build the multibillion-dollar Long Range Standoff Weapon and later remove Lockheed Martin from the program entirely may have come down to inferior design performance by the latter company.” Bloomberg reported that design flaws continue to persist and plague the troubled program. The program is such a mess that retiring Acting Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller, specifically pointed out the F-35 program as a case study in failure when he said during his exit interview with the press, “I would have loved to have gotten involved in the acquisition process and try…and you know, talk about wicked problem. I wanted to take that one on….F-35s, the case study. Although, I gotta tell you, yesterday we were talking to some guy, some lieutenant colonel, or colonel, said ‘what are you flying?’ Said ‘F-35,’ I was like that’s a piece of…and he was like…and he laughed, and I was like, ‘no seriously, tell me about it.” He went on to say that “we have created a monster,” and the taxpayers know that because they are paying the price for that program spiraling out of control.
The MAGA movement accomplished much over the past four years, but there is much more work to do like ending the foreign wars and ending billions of dollars in federal spending waste. Americans will get a harsh taste of reality when President Joe Biden kicks of 2021 with a new multi-trillion-dollar spending blitz with zero effort to protect the taxpayer from the ‘spend now – pay later’ policies he advocates.
