Ernst: It’s Sunshine Week, But Biden is Trying to Keep Taxpayers in the Dark

WASHINGTON – During Sunshine Week, the annual celebration of transparency and openness in government, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the Senate’s biggest foe of government waste, is calling out the Biden administration for keeping taxpayers in the dark about Washington’s wasteful spending.

Last week, President Biden proposed massive increases in spending, paid for with higher taxes and more debt. Where all this money will go is anyone’s guess because the president continues to ignore sunshine laws requiring taxpayers to be told how their hard-earned money is being spent.

• A law passed over a decade ago requiring that taxpayers be given a list of every single government program with the cost of each has still not been completed.
• Another mandating that many of the projects paid for with your tax dollars include a public price tag disclosing the cost also is not being enforced.
• A law authored by Senator Ernst requiring every infrastructure project that is behind schedule or $1 billion over budget be publicly disclosed is—you probably guessed it—behind schedule and still not completed.

President Biden and D.C. Democrats are hiding Washington waste and playing games with taxpayer money, including millions of dollars spent training pigs to play video games, building underwater Whack-a-Mole for dolphins, and cooking up critters into edible insect entrees for human consumption. 

“Unexplainable expenditures like these really bug taxpayers, yet they keep popping up because no one really knows where the trillions of dollars being doled out every year by Washington are actually going. That is entirely intentional,” said Ernst. “Biden’s budgeting is a lot like Whack-a-Mole. He keeps digging the country deeper in the hole while doing everything he can—including ignoring the law—to hide Washington’s waste so it doesn’t get whacked.”

Considering the U.S. government is more than $31 trillion in debt, Ernst is renewing her push to pass her Cost Openness and Spending Transparency (COST) Act which would require all projects paid for with your tax dollars to display the costs. The government would be forced to regularly review projects to ensure compliance. In addition, taxpayers would be allowed to report on projects that are not disclosing the required information. 

Ernst also awarded her March 2023 Squeal Award to President Biden for playing hide-and-seek with taxpayer money.

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