McClintock Rails Against Federal Government Grant System
Washington, DC — As President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) looks at ways to cut government expenses, Mother Lode Republican Congressman Tom McClintock is providing more input.
We reported last month that McClintock urged Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to look at eliminating government subsidies. McClintock returned to the House Floor this week to speak out against the federal grant system.
He notes that state and local governments are big recipients, and they often fund worthwhile projects, including things like additional law enforcement, wastewater treatment infrastructure, homeless shelters, and school initiatives.
“Yet all of these grant programs beg a fundamental question,” McClintock says. “If a project exclusively benefits a local community, shouldn’t it be paid for exclusively by that local community?”
He continues, “Robbing St. Petersburg to pay St. Paul turns our federal treasury into a grab bag for local pork projects that destroys the entire concept of federalism.”
During the speech, he also stated, “From the $3 million grant to study how hamsters fight each other to the $3.7 million in grants given to the Wuhan virology lab that likely unleashed Covid upon the world — these are the very essence of government waste.”
He concluded the nearly five-minute speech by noting, “So here’s a modest proposal for the DOGE boys: stop the cash bonanza to every self-described deserving cause and influential community with a good grant writer. Budget writers and appropriators should look with extreme skepticism on every grant that awards money without results or that robs taxpayers in one community to pay for projects in another. It is time we protected and reserved the federal treasury for the general welfare of the United States as our Constitution envisioned.”
