Brad Finstad

In this current round of appropriations, we have been very strong on the fact that, you know, this whole bridge to nowhere type funding has to end.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

You know, so for the first time in many years, we're getting back to what we in Congress call regular order.

The appropriations bills that we have in front of us this week are a reflection of our intent in Congress to reduce spending, to try to get some fiscal sanity back.

We know there's a lot of work to be done, but we're looking at a 16% decrease in funding.

And it's an opportunity for us to kind of right-size government and really get to some of the things that are really frustrating to the average everyday Americans.

And that is, how do we have a government that has fraud at every corner?

How can we get kind of a handle again on our spending in Congress?

And so we're looking forward to passing these bills one at a time through Congress in the next couple weeks here.

Yeah, so a couple of the specific packages call for a defunding of the USAID programs that we saw an enormous amount of fraud, enormous amount of mismanagement, lack of audits.

We've also seen a lot of just asking for additional reporting.

A lot of these funds are federally funded.

The

taxpayers of our nation are funding these programs, but then they're administered by the states or by NGOs.

And what we're saying is no longer will you have free reign to take our federal tax dollars and run willy-nilly with it.

We're going to ask for some reports.

We're going to ask for data.

And if you can't provide that, you're not going to get the funds.

So a lot of those pieces of teeth, I would say, are put into these bills that make it a lot more clear to be able to follow these dollars to ultimately go to where I think most Americans would say, if our neighbors are in need, we would give the shirt off our back to help our neighbors in need.