Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett told radio host Charlamagne Tha God on Friday that she does not believe there is widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has cut an estimated $55 billion in government spending, including fraud, according to its website. When Charlamagne, on “The Breakfast Club,” said, “There is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government,” Crockett disagreed, acknowledging its existence while minimizing the extent of the issue and its effect on the national debt.
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“I’m not going to say that there’s a lot — I’m going to say that it does exist,” Crockett said. “I’m going to say that it exists. I don’t think that there’s a lot.”
Charlamagne asked why the U.S. is “so in debt” if there is not a major issue with waste, fraud and abuse. America’s debt is over $36 trillion, according to the national debt clock.
Crockett blamed the national debt on President Donald Trump’s first-term tax cuts rather than spending.
“We’re in debt because we decided that we’re going to reduce the income, right? So under Trump, in his first administration, we went into debt $8 trillion,” she said. “Now, he wanted to say it was because of COVID — it really wasn’t.”
“Obviously, there was money that we sent out because people were in need during COVID to make sure that we didn’t go into a recession,” she continued. “But at the end of the day, it was because he said, ‘Oh, wait a minute, that income — we’re going to stop bringing that in from the top one percenters.’”
Moreover, the Government Accountability Office has found that the federal government could be hemorrhaging between $233 and $521 million to fraud each year, according to its website. Federal agencies also “reported an estimated $236 billion in improper payments” in fiscal year 2023 and since fiscal year 2003, the combined improper payment estimates have reached around $2.7 trillion.
Democrats launched an eight-figure campaign in January in an effort to combat Trump’s tax-cutting agenda. “Families Over Billionaires,” the nonprofit behind the campaign, intends to act as a strategic “war room” focused on countering Trump and House Republicans’ efforts to extend and expand Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.
Crockett also said that if Trump is successful at extending and expanding the tax cuts, the national debt will surge further.
DOGE’s largest savings have come from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Education, along with mass firings and resignations through Trump’s federal employee buyout initiative, which roughly 75,000 federal workers accepted, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“People ask me, ‘What’s the most surprising thing that you’ve encountered when you go to D.C.? You know, when you’re in D.C.’ and I said, ‘Well, the most surprising thing is the scale of the expenditures and actually how easy it is to, just when you add caring and competence where it was absent before, you can actually save billions of dollars, sometimes in an hour.’ It’s wild,” DOGE head Elon Musk said on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
“But, obviously, it just shows that they really lack empathy for the average taxpayer who’s working hard, paying taxes,” he added. “Then and then they say, ‘Oh, a million dollars doesn’t matter.’ I’m like, ‘I think it matters a lot to people, you know? So what are you talking about?’”
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
