Blog

We’re supposed to vote shortly on $40 billion in financial assistance for Ukraine.

$40 billion! This is a STAGGERING amount of money, even for our federal government. It’s more than the ~combined~ budgets of the Labor Department, EPA, and Commerce Department. In fact, $40 billion is more than what we appropriate to the Justice Department each year. So obviously I did a double-take with the $40 billion price tag in today’s legislation.

Get this:

We finally received the text of this bill a little over two hours ago. There were no briefings from experts. No hearings on whether this amount of money is appropriate. No real strategy from ANYONE in leadership other than, “We’re voting around 8 PM. Please vote yes.”

Let me pause here and reiterate what I’ve said on multiple occasions. Short of our military being directly involved, I believe the U.S. should do what it responsibly can to assist Ukraine in its efforts to whip Russia’s military.

But friends, this is anything but responsible. Without offsets elsewhere in our spending, our nation is NOT in a position to pour tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine to help float its government and military operations. Where is this money coming from?!

The answer is this money will come from additional U.S. debt. That’s not okay given our disastrous fiscal situation. If we’re going to allocate $40 billion in new spending – as worthwhile as that money may be – it MUST be accompanied by reductions in spending elsewhere in our budget.

But there are no offsets here. And Congress has NO IDEA whether this is an appropriate use of $40 billion in borrowed funds. That’s why I’ll be voting NO in just a little while. As much as I want to see a victorious Ukraine, that cannot come at the expense of our own nation.