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Forgive me if I’m feeling a little confused (regular readers of this column will probably say “what’s new?”) but aren’t we in a national debt crisis?
Our national debt has ballooned to nearly $37 trillion in recent years, thanks in large part to spending during the COVID-19 pandemic to assure businesses didn’t close and workers could still feed families and pay the bills.
The debt is why, supposedly, that we allowed a team of 20-somethings with no government experience called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE to take a meat cleaver to federal agencies.
In the end, it was more of a butter knife. Instead of cutting $2 trillion, as the president and Elon Musk boasted, it was less than $200 billion.
Regardless, there’s still a need to cut government spending.
So why are we spending $200 million in donated funds to install a ballroom at the White House?
And why are we devoting $400 million to $1 billion in taxpayer money to retrofit (and make sure it’s not full of surveillance bugs) a $400 million plane given to President Trump by Qatar, which he will get to keep after he leaves office?
And why are we spending an additional $170 billion to build dozens of new immigration detention facilities, build more border wall, and hire hundreds of new agents for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement?
I’ve seen lean budget times at the Nebraska Legislature (as have four of our five congressional representatives who served in the Unicameral or the governor’s mansion) and when there’s no money to spend, or a need to cut spending to make the budget balance, guess what, there’s no spending on frills like a ballroom, a fancy new plane or a nearly 300% increase in an agency’s budget for new prisons.
Let’s take immigration enforcement for instance. The flow of immigrants over the border has been reduced to a trickle, so do we really need more border wall right now?
And the effort to round up “the worst of the worst” seems to have done that, and now ICE raids seem to be more about meeting a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, by arresting anyone, than rounding up the so-called “criminal aliens.”
You might recall of the 76 people detained at the ICE raid on an Omaha meat processing plant, fewer than 20 had any arrest records in Nebraska and most of those were for minor offenses, according to the Omaha World-Herald.
People being detained by ICE, for the most part, are working at jobs or at companies that desperately need workers. So rather than ship off such people to new, expensive prisons, figure out a way to keep them on the job, filling jobs that, for the most part, other people won’t do.
That would save a whole lot of taxpayer money. And guess what, if people are still working, they keep paying taxes, and contributing to society. As I recall, they call that a “win-win.” What about the plane? Do we really need a new Air Force One right now? Isn’t that something that can be put off until our debt is under control? And why do we need to disassemble such a plane and reassemble it to assure it’s not filled with listening devices? What happened to “American First?”
The gift from Qatar is unprecedented, and comes after Trump’s company agreed to build a $5.5 billion golf course in that Middle East kingdom. So some folks wonder if it meets the smell test. (And don’t forget, we’ve spent an estimated $70 million so far this year so Trump can golf, and he golfs about once every four days.)
Now we come to the ballroom. There are dozens of them in and around Washington, D.C. Do we really need one at the White House?
OK, so the president and some of his friends will donate the funds to build it.
But when we’re laying off government workers, dragging hard-working immigrants out of workplaces, and cutting off health care and food stamps for millions, the optics of building a “ballroom” – even with donated funds – aren’t good.
If we truly have a debt crisis, by all means cut unnecessary spending. But I’d include a new ballroom, a fancy new plane and dozens of new ICE prisons as unnecessary.
Paul Hammel has covered state government and the state for decades. Prior to his retirement, he was senior contributor with the Nebraska Examiner. He was previously with the Omaha World-Herald.
