our first speeder speaker this morning is Adam Angie upski he's the CEO and founder of open the books calm the world's largest private database of US public sector spending whether at the federal state or local level what this means is his database is pretty huge I think and getting bigger does it doesn't include Hillsdale by the way since we don't take a dime of federal taxpayer money thank you his organization's oversight model has led to some impressive results including grand jury's indictments congressional hearings and legislation he speaks frequently around the country on the topic of big data journalism and forensic auditing techniques and I think he'll explain that in greater detail previously he co-founded the publishing company home pages directories he's a senior policy contributor at Forbes and his work has been featured in a variety of national publications he makes frequent appearances on radio and television he's the author of the encounter broadside titled operation drain the swamp so in order in order to in order to drain the swamp it helps to know how deep the swamp is exactly and that's his topic today the depth of the swamp please welcome to the podium Adam and Jeff's key Tim Kasper thank you very much for that kind introduction president Larry Arne director Matt bell supporters of Hillsdale College thank you thank you for this opportunity to share our mission and vision in 2017 published on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and aired on the Fox News Channel our organization at open the books comm launched our oversight report of the Ivy League colleges and I know of no better example of the depth of the swamp the true size scope and power of the federal government here's what we found over the six years of our report the eight schools of the Ivy League collected forty two billion dollars of US taxpayer subsidies special tax breaks and direct federal payments on contracts and grants we compared the Ivy League's federal contracting business on the direct receipt of federal contracts in grants at twenty five billion dollars versus their educational mission they only collected twenty two billion dollars worth of undergraduate student tuition in the six year period they are more federal contractor today than they are educator and we found a lot of taxpayer abuse in their federal grants two examples Cornell University they took a million dollars on a study where it hurts the most to be stung by a bee Columbia University they took 5.6 million dollars to create fake voicemails from the Year 2065 describing the world after it's been decimated by climate change the Ivy's can't make the argument that they need taxpayer subsidies they have a collective endowment of a hundred and twenty billion dollars so here's our conclusion there is no public purpose for working-class taxpayers for middle-class taxpayers for any of us to subsidize the wealthy Ivy League so let's compare the Ivy League at 25 billion dollars in a receipt of federal grants and contracts over this 6-year period versus Hillsdale College over the same six year period we fact-checked the Hillsdale promise of no federal money and guess what it's true they're not in the federal checkbook zero dollars and today that's what we call an American miracle and it's it's only possible because of your support of this college thank you for supporting Hillsdale College as many of you know I'm from Illinois and it is the Superbowl of corruption in Illinois our number one manufactured product is corruption and our governors are famous you know one point we had four out of the last nine governors that had been convicted and it served time in the federal penitentiary in 2013 we actually had two governor's in federal prison at the same time one from each party it was Republican George Ryan and Democrat Rod Blagojevich and I remember when rahm emanuel promised to clean up the city of chicago in 2011 rahm emanuel ran for mayor of this city on two promises to end pay to play to end the historic culture of corruption in city hall pay-to-play is when you give campaign cash and expect to receive a government contract and sure enough after a manual one for mayor he issued an executive order prohibiting city contractors from giving him campaign cash in 2015 the Emmy award-winning journalist John Stossel called me from Fox News headquarters in New York City Rahm was running for reelection and Stossel asked me if we could fact check the mayor's promises and I said yes we can and here is what we found we took the city of Chicago checkbook we mashed it up with Rahm Emmanuel's campaign donor disclosures six-hundred city contractors gave Rahm Emanuel seven million dollars of campaign cash and those contractors had reaped two billion dollars in city payments in god we trust' Illinois politicians we must audit I am hopeful and optimistic about our future despite the corruption in Illinois and across the country because you and I we have been given the greatest gift in the last 5,000 years of human history we've been given a constitution that recognizes our inalienable rights our rights come from God and not government and we instituted a government to secure our rights and our founders knew that we needed the tools to hold that government accountable our founders knew that knowledge is power and they recognize the power of transparency and they wrote it into our founding documents and it's article 1 section 9 of the US Constitution and it states that a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time today there's a simple interpretation post every dime online in real time open the books my name is Adam Angie FC and I found it open the books calm on a simple vision to capture and post online every dime taxed and spent at every level of government across the entire country that's at the federal level the state level and the local level our vision is to empower regular people where they live with the information to hold the political class accountable for tax and spend decisions and our honorary chairman is the former legendary US senator from Oklahoma dr. Tom Coburn in 2013 Coburn made the time 100 most influential persons in the world list and we are privileged to be locked arm and arm fighting these battles in the same trench with dr. Tom Coburn we've had a lot of success capturing data we are the world's largest private database of public sector expenditures and here's what our database is comprised of at the federal level since the year 2001 all disclosed federal spending at the state level 49 out of 50 state checkbook spending most going back 10 or a dozen years at the local level in 50,000 of the most substantial public bodies in the country for the first time in US history we've compiled virtually every single public employee salary record at every level of government last year we compiled records from 23 million public employees salary and pension records when candidate Donald Trump won for president here's what we found at the federal level we did an oversight report called mapping the swamp a study of the administrative state and we found that the federal bureaucracy is very expensive it's 1 million dollars a minute it's a half billion dollars a day we found a new minimum wage in 78 of the largest federal agencies and the minimum wage the average pay is a hundred thousand dollars today for a federal bureaucrat but it's not even about the salary get performance bonuses our auditors found that the agencies gave out 1 million performance bonuses to bureaucrats costing taxpayers 1.1 billion dollars and that shacks most people they don't know how a million federal bureaucrats can qualify for a performance bonus most people don't think government's running that well so we dug deeper and we found that ninety nine point six percent of the federal bureaucrats are rated fully successful and that's actually impossible the advertised purity of Ivory soap is only ninety nine point four percent they're highly compensated on salary they get performance bonuses and they also get paid time off if you hit your three-year anniversary as a federal bureaucrat you get incredibly forty-three days of paid time off that's eight and a half weeks we estimate that small benefit cost the American taxpayers twenty billion dollars a year because if you're giving eight and a half weeks of paid time off your payroll head counts have to increase little pull the room we got about eight hundred people here today who receives eight and a half weeks of paid time off forty-three days we got one guy that said in the entire room this isn't France we also have transparency problems because the Federal Bureau bureaucracy gets pensions except you and I we help fund those pensions we guarantee those pensions and you and I don't get to see those pensions you see under existing federal Freedom of Information Act law when you when a bureaucrat retires or your member of Congress their retirement payout is considered private information and we we need to change that law those performance bonuses we know there's a million of them but I can't tell you who received them the transparency was negotiated away the performance bonuses are shielded from disclosure because of the union contracts so we have a lot of work to do on paying pensions here's another transparency problem you know we mapped the swamp that the president inherited from the Obama administration and we were upset because there was 3,500 names and salaries redacted from the responsive record and then in 2017 we filed our request we got the information and two hundred and fifty five thousand names and salaries were redacted and we estimated twenty billion dollars was hidden in the swamp the swamp was fighting back this year just about a month ago we got the 2018 federal executive payroll through the door and three hundred and fifty thousand names were redacted we estimate we don't know who received 30 billion dollars worth of federal payroll you and I we have a lot of work to do to simply open the books and hold the administrate accountable but consider this the federal swamp is dwarfed by the state and local swamps it open the books calm I can tell you that there are two million public employees across the entire country at the federal state and local level who are highly compensated in our definition of that is that they make six figures one hundred thousand dollars a year there's two million of them four hundred thousand are at the federal level and 1.6 million of them are in our own backyards at the state and local level right here in Florida in the small town of Dana Beach the city attorney for two years made over four hundred thousand dollars out earning every president ever in Chicago the tree trimmers lop off six figures up to a hundred and five thousand dollars in LA County in Los Angeles the lifeguards they get free sunscreen allowance and they can earn up to three hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars as lifeguards in New York City in the New York City Public Schools the school district janitors out earn the principals because of the union contract the janitors are making up to two hundred thousand dollars a year and you and I need the tools to be able to hold our elected officials accountable locally for tax-and-spend decisions and it opened the books calm we are giving you free tools to do that all 23 million public employee salaries are in a free mobile app for Apple and Android called open the books it takes the entire payroll file of the country localizes it to your zip code so you can see who by name for what unit of government makes how much money we can't complain about Washington DC unless we have good government where we live and we need to fact start fact-checking our local politicians on their promises our team noticed that in San Francisco there was a new candidate running for mayor London breed and she was promising to literally clean up the streets of San Francisco you see in San Francisco there are 8,000 homeless people and it's a crisis and many of those people are defecating on city streets she promised to clean up the streets so after she was in office for a year our team decided to fact-check her programs to see how she was doing and here's what we found we literally mapped on our interactive mapping platform the San Francisco human waste challenge and yes on that map we did use brown pins let me tell you there is a brown out in the Bay Area the whole city was brown it trended on national Twitter was international news we took nine years of case reports of human waste in the public way we put it on our map and in 2011 there was 5,000 cases in 2015 there was 13,000 cases in 2017 there was 21,000 cases then 28,000 in last year in 2019 there was 31,000 cases of human waste in the public way we mapped a hundred and forty thousand cases over a nine year period and that is a human health catastrophe I don't have to tell you that California has a lot of problems every year our auditors file state checkbook requests that's for the line by law and state expenditures in all 50 states and were able to collect 49 out of 50 states only California has rejected our request California Controller Betty Yee rejected our request this year oddly saying that she couldn't locate her words any of the 49 million individual bills she paid last year she spent over three hundred billion dollars and a hundred billion of that came back from Washington DC that's our money in the Golden State we deserve to be able to follow the money and so we sued Betty E this year to begin the process of forcing open the California state checkbook expenditures and this is not our first rodeo in 2013 we sued Republican comptroller in Illinois Judy part of inca to Pincus said that the state doesn't have a magical checkbook and we reminded two Pinker that the state doesn't have magical taxpayers either so he sued her and within nine months we'd opened up seven years worth of line-by-line payments in the state of Illinois in 2018 we sued Republican State Auditor Cynthia cloud in Wyoming what cloud said it would take years and years to produce a state checkbook so we sued her and within ten months we had six years worth of line-by-line expenses we have never lost a state checkbook transparency fight and we expect to win in the state of California as well when we opened the books in California what do you think we'll find well here's the first project that we're going to do we're gonna take governor Gavin Newsom Champaign donor disclosures we're gonna mash it up with the state checkbook vendor list and we're gonna see if governor Newsom is soliciting campaign cash from state vendors because that would be highly unethical we did this in Oregon governor Kate brown solicited 557 state vendors for 2.6 million dollars in campaign cash and those vendors had reaped 4.6 billion dollars in state payments we're gonna break news right now in March we're coming out with the same report and Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state of New York here's our preliminary findings preliminary findings show that three hundred thirty seven state vendors were solicited for 4.6 million dollars worth of campaign cash and those vendors had received six point three billion dollars worth of New York State payments the elites in this country have gained the system for their political power and their personal benefit and you know this this is a message that resonates across the entire political spectrum the disruptors in 2016 for president you had Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right and they ran on eerily similar campaign messages that the system is rigged and it's rigged for insiders and it opened the books calm we we show you by shining a white-hot spotlight just how bad it is you tell me what government program is running well could it be farm subsidies in urban areas where there are no farms we did an oversight report of the federal farm subsidies flowing into New York City Washington DC and Chicago and my favorite story comes out of Chicago I guess the corruption stories are always better in Illinois the Reverend Minister Louis Farrakhan the founder of the Nation of Islam is a farmer in a seventeen year period to his home in Hyde Park three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars worth of farm subsidies were mailed what government program is running well let's take a look at an obscure federal agency called the Small Business Administration you know the SBA they're supposed to be funding mom-and-pop businesses on Main Street those men and women that have good ideas but can't find financing in the private marketplace so we did an oversight report on them last summer and in a five-year period we found a hundred and ten million dollars flowing into zip code nine oh two one oh and that's Beverly Hills California it was 1.75 million dollars worth of low-cost taxpayer backed financing that flowed to their french wine importer 2.1 million dollars floated diva limousine and they shuttle the stars and starlets in hollywood and 2.2 million dollars flowed into their eyeglass designers whose frames are worn by Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and four million dollars worth of cheap financing backed by taxpayers went to the Beverly Hills exclusive diamond broker since 2007 our team has quantified 300 million dollars flowed to America's private Country clubs golf clubs swim clubs beach clubs tennis clubs and yacht clubs across the country we found that in a five-year period fourteen billion dollars didn't go to Main Street it went to Wall Street with no transparency after that now in America we must never demonize success but you and I we shouldn't subsidize it either so you tell me what government program is running well could it be healthcare well the right the rising cost of health care is crushing the American dream you know last year the average family across the country paid twenty thousand dollars on health insurance premiums deductibles and out-of-pocket costs and so we did an oversight report of 82 largest nonprofit public Charity Hospital groups across the country and we found that these nonprofit hospitals these public charities are making huge profits these nonprofits in one year the latest year available our auditors found they admit to 40 billion dollars worth of net asset increase in one year it was a 23 percent year-over-year increase in their net assets that they admit on their iris disclosure forms and that's the definition of gaming the system pocketing forty billion dollars as a nonprofit in one year without paying a dime z' worth of federal income tax and it gets a little worse the pay to their ceos went up to fifty nine point 1 million dollars over a four year period ascension healthcare in st. Louis it was fifty nine million dollars to their CEO Kaiser Permanente in Oakland California it was twenty nine point eight million dollars over a four year period it was banner health care in Phoenix Arizona 27 million dollars in Illinois advocate health care 27 million dollars went to their CEO over a four-year period and joined me public charities are supposed to be about public service and if you're going to be an executive at a public charity non for profit you shouldn't have a compensation package that rivals Wall Street investment bankers so what government program is well could it be Veterans Affairs so you remember in 2014 the scandal at Veterans Affairs were up to one thousand six dad while waiting to see a doctor because there weren't enough doctors and they were placed on waiting lists and the scandal broke at the Phoenix facility the VA facility in Phoenix Arizona were up to 40 veterans died while waiting to see a doctor and we took a look at the payroll numbers at that time and there was 30 100 employees in Phoenix at the VA but only 226 doctors so Congress through billions of dollars at the VA and since 2015 we've fact-checked what the VA has done with the money they've actually added to the payroll headcount 36,000 positions but less than 3,000 of those positions are doctors and the average veteran today still waits 70 days to see a doctor because there aren't enough doctors and this can't be the end of the story our veterans they deserve basic health care they fought for us and we we need to fight for them during the scandal in 2014 our team had opened the books calmly forensic audit of the VA checkbook and this is what we found coded as furniture was twenty million dollars worth of high-end luxury artwork it was Christmas trees priced like cars 27-foot Christmas trees costing $21,000 it was sculptures priced like five bedroom homes at a Palo Alto VA facility in California that treats blind veterans we found they purchased two fancy sculptures for $700,000 and our findings rocketed to Good Morning America and ABC News and they were picked up by Chuck Grassley who wrote an oversight letter to the VA then Secretary Robert McDonald and within 34 days after national airing on national news the VA secretary apologized for the purchases and instituted new rules to stop the practice of purchasing high-end luxury art on a go-forward basis and that's the power of transparency you can't make America great again unless you make America accountable again twenty-three point two trillion dollars worth of national debt shocking every day we had four billion dollars to the national debt year over year this year we're gonna rack up a trillion dollar national debt that's shocking President Donald Trump has signed three budget bills adding four point six trillion dollars to our national debt and I get it the appropriations bills come out of Congress they come out of the house and far too often patronage Republicans in Congress have joined Democrats to drain the US Treasury from the left and so our team had opened the books calm we investigated Congress and last fall on that Tucker Carlson show on Fox News we launched our findings our report was called the congressional favor Factory we took a look at four powerful Republican congressman and four powerful members of Congress on the Democratic side here's just one example at a Nashville Tennessee Democratic congressman Jim Cooper he's a powerful member of Congress he sits on US House Oversight and Government Reform and he's a member of the Budget Committee where they carve up the budget his number one campaign contributor is based in his district and it's the executives Chancellor key employees and key executives at Vanderbilt University those people have given him over a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars with the campaign cash helping him get reelected they've also employed him for 12 years he was an adjunct professor and made total compensation of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and Vanderbilt University just in the last five years has reaped two point three billion dollars worth of federal payments so here's what we found we found that is completely legal today to be a large federal contractor based in a congressman's district helping him get reelected employing him and reaping billions of dollars out of the federal treasury Congress needs to crackdown on the ethics laws these conflicts of interest must end and it's an election season and the president has tipped his reelection messaging quote America will never be a socialist country and he'll have a lot more credibility on the issue if he's not seen as draining the Treasury from the right here's how the president can lead on spending our organization mapped a spending plan for the president six times in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today we published an open letter to President Donald Trump that was the first page the second page was a hundred outrageous examples of federal taxpayer abuse so today we'll go through three of those examples and our four point strategy for the president we encourage the president to embrace the transparency revolution declare war on waste and as commander-in-chief defend the American taxpayer against waste fraud corruption and taxpayer abuse first prong open an audit all spending second prong cut 5% it's a modest goal and then keep going I mean for crying out loud in 1982 the grace Commission under President Reagan identified one out of every three dollars was waste and it's probably worked worse today prong three mobilize the federal work force they know where the bodies are buried prong four the president's really good at this one communicate with the American people keep us updated on the progress of the transparency revolution use Twitter [Laughter] the president will find it's a target-rich environment to cut waste here's the first big area where he can go federal grant-making last year incredibly 700 billion dollars went out the door on subsidies grants and giveaways our team did an oversight report called where's the pork here are just some of our findings $200,000 created a new mobile app to help Chinese children cross their busy streets 700,000 dollars went to a Senior Center outside Boston Massachusetts to teach the seniors Tai Chi Nassau funded a 1.1 million dollar outreach to prepare the nation's religions for the discovery of extraterrestrial life one point four million dollars funded sex education for California prostitutes who could have probably taught the class 20 million dollars went to the airport on Martha's Vineyard the playground for the East Coast money elites and the Hollywood superstars they can pay their own way we need a transparency revolution we need a war on waste here's the second vertical that the president can concentrate on improper and mistake in payments here's the definition of an improper payment a payment to the wrong person or in the wrong amount or under the wrong set of federal rules or all of the above let's just start with the 1 billion dollars paid to dead people last year people that had a death certificate on file with the federal agencies the agencies admit to continuing to pay them nearly 1 billion dollars the Social Security Administration admits that last year alone they overpaid 10 billion dollars and so we dug a little deeper on that number Social Security also admits that they have 6 million active Social Security numbers of people aged 112 and over there's only 40 people aged 112 and over in the entire world Medicare and Medicaid admit last year they paid sixty seven billion dollars in overpayments in Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wants Medicare for all he wants to put that program on steroids really the IRS Internal Revenue Service don't try this at home but the IRS admits they overpaid one out of every four dollars on the federal income tax program on the Earned Income Tax Credit to the tune of eighteen point four billion dollars last year we need a war on waste we need a transparency revolution and we need to challenge and change the culture of corruption in Washington DC here's the third spending vertical the president can concentrate on and that's the year-end use it or lose it spending phenomenon the federal the federal fiscal year ends in September it is Christmas in September for federal contractors our organization that an oversight report of the 67 federal agencies that we found spent a hundred billion dollars in the last month of the fiscal year spending down their budgets this year so that I get the same or more money from Congress next year and here's some of the ways they spent down their budgets we found we found 300 million dollars spent down the vehicle budget purchasing cars trucks snowmobiles motor scooters and and other vehicles we found four hundred and sixty million dollars spent by the agencies on redecorating and on furniture we found five hundred million dollars a half billion dollars spent by the agencies on PR that's public relations spending down their marketing promotion and advertising budgets and I can tell you nothing rankles taxpayers more than spending taxpayer money to convince taxpayers to spend even more taxpayer money on a larger size and scope of government the Pentagon the Department of Defense spent sixty two billion dollars in the last month of the fiscal year it was one out of every four or five dollars that they spent on contracting on the year they spent in the last month of the year we found they spent nine thousand three hundred dollars on a club leather chair they spent a million dollars on PBR the Professional Bull Riders Association the Pentagon spent down there lobster tail and snow crab budget spending four point six million dollars in the last month on lobster tail and snow crab and so we dug a little deeper and when we reached out for comment the Pentagon admitted to spending twenty five million dollars on lobster tail and snow crab over an 18 period we also published at The Wall Street Journal an annual figure of what the pentagon's was spending on expensive coffee cups up to 1218 dollars on these expensive coffee cups and Senator Chuck Grassley picked that up wrote an oversight letter to the Department of Defense he got the program stopped but they admitted they had spent three hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that program of expensive coffee cups and I'd feel a lot better about all of this spending at the Department of Defense if they could pass their audit the president the the audit of the Pentagon has been on the books for decades but nobody enforced it well President Trump didn't force it he mandated it the Pentagon spent a year there was 1,200 auditors they spent four hundred million dollars on the audit and the Pentagon flunked it we need a transparency revolution we need to challenge the culture of corruption in Washington DC I just want to close with the with the following story and it is good news I received a call two weeks ago from the White House from the executive office the president the Office of Management and Budget and they said that for the first time in our nation's history included in the President's budget to Congress is a chapter on the elimination of wasteful spending and they said that our work our oversight work at open the books com had helped inspire that chapter they sent me a copy of it and the president recognized in that chapter the following and this is really important quote that a bloated duplicate 'iv and wasteful federal government is a threat to America's future and that's really good news we called for a transparency revolution and in the president's budget to Congress he commits to oversight resources on every single federal spending program we called for a war on waste and the president is declaring war on waste we called for five percent cuts in the agencies and the President's budget adopted that cut we called for the elimination of improper payments and the president is committed to it we called for the end of use it or lose it urines spending the president cited in his budget our organization by name bullet-pointed our findings and hyperlinked and footnote at our oversight report on our website we believe that transparency is revolutionising United States public policy and politics join us join the transparency revolution [Applause] thank you [Applause] well I'm glad you're clapping and that you're not depressed if you feel depressed fight the urge we're Americans and we have a fighting spirit and this is our moment thank you we now have time for a few questions please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you first of all great work fling down is where all the secrets are and you've done a heck of a job drilling down my question to you is president trump signed an order freezing hiring and non-essential services when he first came into office is that still into effect and you know how many spots he's eliminated so I don't know if that specific executive order is still in effect my thinking is that it probably is but let's go to some of the research that we've done that we feel is a leading indicator by the president on spending and that's a tranche of spending he fully controls as the executive and that's the White House payroll and I'm a senior contributor at Forbes the last three years I've written about the White House payroll it's such good news that were about the only ones now writing about the White House payroll President Trump has saved taxpayers 20 million dollars on a leaner White House payroll versus the same years under the Obama administration we found no evidence of czars the payroll of the first lady is half 12 versus 24 under the previous first lady so the president is leading by example his payroll headcount in his first year he was down 100 employees he has slowly added employees back but he's still down about 40 employees versus the same period underneath the Brock Obama administration and quite evidently there's been a lot of winning the president is doing more with less I think you just gave an extraordinary speech but I think it would be much more effective if people like us could find it online and share it with people we know would that be possible yes we'll post a transcript of it thank you very much thank you I appreciate that very much I tell you our team you know we never take any of this for granted my personal story is I'm an entrepreneur so in 1997 my brother and I we started a publishing company from scratch from our apartment's and you know success in America it's always impossible and this is the genius of capitalism because it squeezes you and brings out your best for six years every one of our employees out earn my brother and I my brother had gone to Harvard Law School didn't want to be a lawyer he wanted to be an entrepreneur in up through year 5 we'd make a little bit he'd call me with a capital call you know what that is that's money that goes back into into the business to grow the business in year six we were a five million dollar business but by year ten we were a twenty million dollar business and we were an overnight success and that's how it works in America right but that's why I fight so hard because if we're gonna be taxed and if they're gonna spend it we deserve to see it be able to follow it and hold them accountable for honest clean and effective spending I did not see any papers being put on your podium did you do all these out of memory so I just turned 50 years old and my eyes are starting to go I have seven pages up here but I can't read them I'm not gonna get a rod Blagojevich question the president didn't call me if he did I would have said mr. president you know bad idea look in Illinois many of us are here from Illinois and we live the heavy boot of a corrupt government at all levels and finally they never catch anyone they never prosecute public corruption they only prosecute people in the private sector for crimes not in the public sector for crimes they finally caught this guy and now we're letting him go early I just thought it was a bad idea I'd like to know if there's any avenue for average Americans to report abuse and waste that we see I'm a physician I see Medicare abuse and waste I've tried to report it and nothing ever happens I know the VA that probably has issues not only did they have too few physicians but they don't work very hard why so I think you just articulated why the founders of our country feared government and that's because the accountability mechanism oftentimes is shattered it's not even broken it's just shattered and the president has specifically at the VA worked with Congress on a bipartisan basis to try to reform the civil service laws to be able to fire bad employees and more a lot more needs to be done I was just on a conference call with the House Republican Study Committee and they are they have tens and tens of recommendations on how to reform the federal bureaucracy and so we do need operation drain the swamp the president does need to focus on the federal bureaucracy and I think he's got a lot of insensitive a lot of incentive to do so question to the speaker's right thank you for your presentation I don't know if you can collect this type of data but I have a number of friends who are highly compensated employees in the federal government and they tell me that it's very common to have other highly compensated employees who are also on total disability from other branches of government and I've always wondered how can you be totally disabled but be a highly compensated employee in a different department do you know anything about that situation well yes and please reach out to me I'd like some more detail on that I want to give one example it's a very high-level example if you're from Illinois you probably remember this example this Chicago Tribune unearthed this example and it's with former disgraced and convicted congressman Jesse Jackson jr. so before Jesse Jackson jr. was indicted he claimed that Congress made him mentally ill and we know that's true that's true for the whole body but he gets he qualified for fellow for dis federal disability benefits and Social Security benefits and I think this was 2012 and I think his total benefit between the two programs one of the programs is tax free but he's getting a total benefit of about 120 to 130 thousand dollars a year in the thinking as he's still getting it so he's collected nearly 1 million dollars over this period of federal disability benefits because Congress made him mentally ill there needs to be reforms in these areas and I'm highly interested in these stories just wondered if you could comment it's always driven me crazy that the federal budget automatically goes up every single year every department gets eight or ten percent more or whatever it is number one is that a law written somewhere can me president by executive order eliminate that I mean I've never heard of any company that ran anything that their budget automatically increased every single year even Reagan although he tried never really cut anything he cut out that increase that's every year in the budget I just wonder if you could enlighten us so look the president's taking a lot of heat you know we're running trillion-dollar budget deficits the President's budget delivers a path to balance the budget over 15 years but the headline was president cuts four point six trillion dollars in federal spending including food stamps and housing assistance and most of the cuts are off that baseline increase so the best example of exposing this phenomenon comes from Rand Paul last fall in the United States Senate because he took it to the floor insisted on a individual vote in a Republican held US Senate on his bill called the penny bill it would cut one cent of actual spending year over a year and it failed because Republican US senators voted against it we have time for one more question thank you very much putting numbers to this problem helps us all many many years ago old late 60s I was a young army and then we were doing some budget work in Washington DC found out that each army headquarters had a different accounting system I suspect it's never got changed so there's no way that the Department of Defense would know exactly what was going on because they couldn't compare one army to the one army first army to the Third Army the other comment I have is I think one of the biggest problems we have is in Congress because as soon as you get a new Congress person in there the first thing they do is they sign them to a subcommittee and that subcommittee usually has some kind of a budget requirement and apparently their their main project is to protect their own budget so I wondered if you could comment whether we can change or modify Congress in any way to eliminate because Congress is the one that writes the budget and they're the ones that are willing to apparently shut down the government to prevent changes so our role in this on Congress said open the books calm is one of China net white-hot spotlight and I'm prepared to say to you today that Congress in 2019 was the number one most wasteful federal expenditure they spent 1.3 billion dollars running Congress and all their subcommittees and everything else but they were only in session in the house was only in session for 850 hours on the year they didn't they're lazy on the budget bills think about this speaker Pelosi dropped a 20 318 page spending bill spending 1.4 trillion dollars they dropped the bill a couple of days ahead of Christmas 24 hours before they voted on it and it was written by lobbyists that contained all kinds of pork and taxpayer giveaways nobody even knew what was in it there was no time to read it when they passed it the Senate passed it sent it to the president he's under impeachment it's a couple of days before Christmas he felt boxed in so he signed it and look it's not representative government in Congress if you don't know what you're voting on so these things we need to raise our voice we need to call our member of Congress and we need to ask them how we're specifically are you defending the United States taxpayer against waste fraud corruption and abuse thank you thank you very much this was great I really enjoyed it thank you [Applause]
