12/23 - Ryan Schmelz, FOX News

Even though the Congress is out for the holidays, there are some members who are still around on Capitol Hill. Foxes Ryan Schmels is there. And you're going to be listening into the annual Festivist Report today? No, the Festivist Report is out, Rich. So, yeah. This is Senator Rand Paul's annual report. How long has he been doing this? I believe it's seven years or so. So, yeah, we've got the list here. I actually just tweeted this out just a moment ago. Let me take a look here. I should have this pulled up. I apologize. So includes, there's one, it's interesting, teenage ferrets and their drinking habits. They pretty much spend $1 million, according to Senator Paul, on teaching teenage ferrets to binge drink alcohol. There's a study on the effects of screen time on the parent-child relationship, and there's this promoting of insects as food for humans. This is kind of like one of those annual lists, the pork, the watchdog groups that will put out where they say the government is, you know, misspending funds and whatnot. How much weight, I guess, does this ultimately get in a Senate where you have, you know, 99 others, obviously? Yeah, I mean, well, this was something that that Doge was supposed to address. And, you know, so far that that only led to about the codification of maybe $10 billion. And a lot of that was a lot more politically divisive than people wanted it to be, you know, when they went after NPR, PBS, and of course USAID, which is probably been one of the biggest targets of the Doge effort. But, you know, Brent and Paul's focus, a lot of it is on, you know, there's some, there's the military, which is, you know, never fun. politically for for senators to go after but there's a lot of stuff here related to NIH and uh the department of health and human services now of course there are some senators who would argue that you know this is a lot easier to get rid of some of this stuff and then one might think you know they have what's called a a rescission's process which is how they codified those that 10 billion dollars in cuts i just mentioned well Legally, it comes from the White House and Congress can pass it with a simple majority in both chambers. No 60 votes needed. It's filibuster proof. But, you know, I think there's been, and not a lot of Republicans have been outright, you know. speaking out on this, but I think there is a little bit of frustration with the White House for not sending over a rescission package, including some of these things that we just mentioned and doing it, you know, and avoiding maybe some of the other topics that might be a little more divisive because I think they can put Democrats on the record with this and be like, hey, vote yes or vote no to this.

Let's see what you want to do. Decisions is one, and then you have the tried and true method of actually putting together a budget. Three of the 12-yearly government funding bills have been signed into law as we see things gather back in January. Is there a concerted effort to try to actually get each of those areas of the government funded? Oh, they were trying to get on the bills. right before the Senate left for the holiday, but, you know, they couldn't come to an agreement on floor time. So it looks like that'll be maybe the first order of business when they get back is, you know, trying to avoid a government shutdown at the end of January. So, yeah, there is progress on about four of them. We'll see if they can get the rest of them done and ultimately get the government funded through the end of the fiscal year. All right. We will see where the path goes in the days ahead. Fox is Ryan Schmelz, our guy on Capitol Hill.