U.S. Rep. Aaron Bean, who represents a large part of Jacksonville, is in the thick of the battle to continue funding the government without wasting billions of dollars, as Democrats seek to do.
Bean told Eye on Jacksonville he and others were trying today to formulate a “Plan C” after the pork-laden spending bill favored by House Speaker Mike Johnston failed.
Bean is a key member of the DOGE Caucus, a group of fiscal hawks who are trying to curtail spending. He is from Fernandina and was mayor there and served many years in the Florida Legislature before being elected to Congress last year.
In recent years the fractured federal government has not had a budget but has been funded by continuing resolutions. One of the disastrous results is that it continues to spend more than $400 billion on programs that don’t even exist because they have expired.
Democrats in the lame-duck Congress are trying to shovel as much money out the door as possible to make it more difficult for President Donald Trump’s new administration and the new Republican majority in Congress to carry out their mandate from the American people.
Bean said there about 80 GOP members on the DOGE caucus, including Rep. John Rutherford of Jacksonville, and two Democrats. Bean is co-chairman of the caucus.
The group intends to work in partnership with Trump’s new Dept. of Government Efficiency, which will be dedicated to reining in the wild spending of the Biden administration that has pushed the national debt to more than $36 trillion, which Bean said “should be a wakeup call to all Americans.”
One of the things Republicans have learned is that five years after the pandemic, huge numbers of federal workers don’t even go to work yet the money keeps flowing. This is one of the things the DOGE efforts intend to stop.
This finding coincides with new reports that Democrats knew for years that Joe Biden was incapable of serving as president because of dementia.
The long national nightmare is nearly over but this last fierce budget battle is a signal of the tough four years to come as Trump tries once again to drain the swamp.