A Message to the 119th Congress from One of Your Employers

By Nolan Lewallen Published on January 10, 2025

As a taxpayer in the United States, I have a message for the 119^th Congress. Since your salaries are paid by me, along with the other 346,375,312 citizens, you should listen. I have no experience in Congress, but I have a good idea of “how the sausage is made” behind the scenes.

I’m not an economist, but neither are most of you. And being of a sound mind with common sense, I feel perfectly qualified to lecture with this simple rule: You can’t repeatedly spend more that you take in! That’s true whether you’re running a kid’s lemonade stand, a family budget, a corporation, or the largest national economy in the world.

We are now more than $36 trillion in debt. That’s $106,024.00 for every single person in America. In 2024, the interest alone reached $1.2 trillion, the highest amount ever recorded. That even more than the entire budget for the Department of Defense. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is about to be implemented in the new Trump administration, is a step in the right direction.

But it was Trump who came up with the idea; without it, you all would have kept spending into oblivion.

Senator Paul’s Festivus Report

Just before Christmas, Senator Rand Paul (R̶̶̶-KY) released the tenth edition of his annual Festivus Report revealing more than a trillion dollars of frivolous spending by the government in 2024.

Below are some of the highlights:

$12 million on a Las Vegas pickleball complex. (Nonsense like this has put our economy in a real pickle.)
$419,470 to determine if lonely rats seek cocaine more often than happy rats (Seriously? Who gives a … never mind.)
$15.5 billion to push Americans toward electric vehicles they don’t want. (Ford has been losing $100,000 per electric vehicle, and in 2024, lost over $5 billion in its EV division. The government is “amping up” our national debt over this stupid policy.)
$365,000 to promote circuses in city parks (They could rent The Greatest Showman on Amazon for $3.99. Or better yet, they could just watch Congress on CSPAN!)
$345,434 on football engagement to counter terrorism. (Do terrorists engage in terrorism because they are just bored? They wake up every morning thinking about slaughtering Americans and Israelis. Even Taylor Swift and the Chiefs couldn’t appease these savages. This spending initiative is inflicting “unnecessary roughness” to our economy.)
$288,563 to ensure bird-watching groups have safe spaces. (I don’t know about you, but that ruffles my feathers.)
$2.1 million for border security. (Finally, some money spent on border security! Oh wait, this was to ensure that Paraguay’s borders are secure.)
$123,066 to teach kids how to go viral on social media. (What could be worse than that? Well, the youth were in Kyrgyzstan. That gets a frowny face.)
$720,479 on wetland conservation projects for ducks in Mexico. (They are killing “the golden goose” for ducks in Mexico.)
$20 million on Ahlan Simsim, a new Sesame Street-style kids’ show in Iraq. (Now that I would like to see—the Cookie Monster in a keffiyeh.)

Business as Usual

I like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). I believe he’s a good man and could potentially be one of our most consequential Speakers. I also acknowledge he has a very tough job to get even Republicans on the same page. It’s a lot like penning chickens! But I must say, I wasn’t happy when he brought to the floor a 1,500-page bill with only three days to pass it if we wanted to avert a government shutdown. Quite frankly, that page was taken from the Nancy Pelosi playbook.

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This same old Washington “business as usual” has to stop! Our representatives in Congress attach numerous rider bills (aka “pork barrel” costs) to the main bills and bury them deep into several reams of paper (the record for one of these omnibus spending bills is 5,593 pages). In most cases, these riders are not even related to the original bills. Sadly, they usually benefit the sponsor’s local constituents, which translates into votes in those politicians’ reelection campaigns.

Members of Congress, What’s Buried Under Your Tents?

In Joshua 6, we read the story of the battle of Jericho. Before going into battle, Joshua commanded the Israelites not to take any spoils for themselves because they were to go into the Lord’s treasury (verses 18-19).

But Achan disobeyed Joshua. He stole some of the spoils and hid them under his tent for his personal benefit (verses 7:1, 21), which brought a curse on Israel. The Lord revealed to Joshua that it was Achan who had sinned, so the people took him out and stoned him (verse 25).

I believe that by hiding these pork-barrel earmarks, members of Congress have, in essence, “hidden spoils under their tents” to benefit themselves instead of allowing the money funding their pet projects to go into our nation’s treasury. In so doing, they have brought a financial “curse” on the United States. I’m not proposing that we stone them — but we should vote them out of office.

Keep It Simple

Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Einstein would be proud of DOGE leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. As light bends to gravity in his Theory of Relativity, Congress bent to Musk and Ramaswamy shining the light on the its recent 1,547-page bill; their influence got it simplified to only 118 pages. Musk said, “Unless DOGE ends the careers of deceitful, pork-barrel politicians, the waste and corruption will never stop.”

We need to codify simplicity into law concerning Congress. I would propose these three changes:

First, every bill should be a stand-alone bill. There’s no good reason not to do this, except to hide something. This may sound unrealistic, but it’s not.

During the 118^th Congress (2023-2024), there were 548 bills, including bills that were incorporated into other bills. That’s about 274 pieces of legislation per year. Congress’s average days in session over the two-year period were 155 in the Senate and 148 in the House. They could probably vote on several of these simplified bills in a day — but even if they only voted on one bill per meeting, that would still mean they put in about a five-day work week, like most Americans. (Come to think of it, maybe our elected officials should spend more dedicated time in Washington during the week while the session is ongoing.)

Second, the number of words and pages for every bill should have specific limits. The Constitution of the United States — the foundation of our entire government — is only four pages long. The Bill of Rights is one page long. The Declaration of Independence contains approximately the same number of words as this article. It doesn’t take many words to say a lot when you get right to the point, hiding nothing. With a “stand-alone” approach, some bills could be written very succinctly.

Third, there should be a minimum time period (at least 15 days, maybe 30) for members of Congress to read and consider the bills before they are put to a vote. Let’s be clear, under the current modus operandi, members of Congress don’t (in most cases, can’t) even read the bills! This is insane. Nancy Pelosi once famously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” At best, our legislators might have their staffers read the bills and summarize them for them — but do you really want young interns running our country?

I don’t. You employ them – but my fellow voters and I employ you.

Nolan Lewallen is a retired pilot of a major airline who lives near Stephenville, Texas. His two great passions are the Bible and politics. He is the author of The Integration of Church & State: How We Transform “In God We Trust” From Motto to Reality, and Yeshua Is Still the King of the Jews.