Trump is totally right to call the stimulus deal a ‘disgrace’

“This bill contains $85.5 million for assistance to Cambodia, $134 million to Burma, $1.3 billion for Egypt and the Egyptian military, which will go out and buy, almost exclusively, Russian military equipment,” the president continued, calling out “$25 million for democracy and gender programs in Pakistan, $505 million to Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.”

Trump concluded, “I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000, or $4,000 for a couple. I’m also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items from this legislation and to send me a suitable bill or else the next administration will have to deliver a COVID relief package.”

While some of the bizarre expenditures Trump cited are technically in the spending bills that were attached alongside COVID-19 relief, not in the relief package itself, his critique of the bloated package is spot on nonetheless. I detailed everything that’s in the massive bill and all its glaring problems in an in-depth analysis for the Foundation for Economic Education, which you can read here.

Here’s the short version: One main problem is that the 5,500-plus page legislative package was drafted behind closed doors by party leaders, then quickly unveiled hours before a vote.

As voices as disparate as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash have pointed out, this meant that most members of Congress had to vote for or against the package before actually getting to read the legislation.

That’s right: Trillions of taxpayer dollars were doled out, and the members of Congress who voted for it don’t even know where much of it is going.

This bill pours hundreds of billions of dollars into preexisting stimulus programs that were rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, without meaningfully addressing any of the problems. You can expect more stimulus checks sent to dead people and more runaway fraud to plague the expanded unemployment benefits.

Moreover, the efficacy of the stimulus package’s core programs is seriously in doubt. For example, it pours hundreds of billions more into the (fraud-rife) Paycheck Protection Program that was created in the spring, hoping to help small businesses stay afloat and keep employees on the payroll.

Yet, more than 25% of the PPP money went to the top 1% of companies the last time around, including sweetheart deals for politicians’ own business interests (California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s company offers a glaring example). And an MIT economist found that PPP largely affected jobs that would have remained anyway, costing $224,000 in taxpayer money per job “preserved.”

So, while we can quibble about specifics, Trump’s general sentiment that the bloated bill is a “disgrace” is completely correct. One should also note that Trump-appointed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin played a key role in stimulus negotiations, meaning the administration really should have fought for these valid concerns before the bill got to the president’s desk.

But Trump is still right. This bill delivers little for the actual people in need, yet contains all sorts of waste, corruption, fraud, cronyism, and abuse.

It remains to be seen: Will Trump put action behind his words, veto the bill, and demand better? Or will he simply cave to the swamp at the taxpayers’ expense?

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Washington Examiner contributor and host of the Breaking Boundaries podcast.