America turns 250, and the fiscal ledger is sobering: $39.3 trillion in national debt — 85% of it accumulated in just the last 25 years. TCS President Steve Ellis and Director of Research & Policy Josh Sewell set aside the holiday Wastebasket they planned to write and instead take a hard look at how the republic arrived here. From the $430 million in daily debt averaged across 250 years, to $8 trillion in interest payments since 2010, to a new $88 billion emergency supplemental that stretches the definition of “emergency,” Ellis and Sewell make the case that the nation’s fiscal trajectory is a bipartisan problem requiring bipartisan solutions — and that the next 250 years depend on the choices made now.
announcer (00:02):
Welcome to Budget Watchdog All Federal, the podcast dedicated to making sense of the budget, spending, and tax issues facing the nation. Cut through the partisan rhetoric and talking points for the facts about what’s being talked about, bandied about, and pushed to Washington. Brought to you by taxpayers for common sense. And now the host of Budget Watchdog AF. TCS President Steve Ellis.
Steve Ellis (00:40):
Welcome to all American taxpayers seeking common sense. You’ve made it to the right place. For more than 30 years, TCS, that’s Taxpayers for Common Sense, has served as an independent nonpartisan budget watchdog group based in Washington, DC. We believe in fiscal policy for America that is based on facts. We believe in transparency and accountability because no matter where you are on the political spectrum, no one wants to see their tax dollars wasted. It’s late June 2026 and America’s about to turn 250 years old. Most of us will spend the holiday weekend at cookouts on beaches watching fireworks. Josh Sewell, our director of research and policy, sat down this week to write something fun to mark the occasion. He’s done it before, themed weekly waste baskets for the fourth, listicles, the whole thing. But then he looked up the numbers and he couldn’t stop reading. Josh, welcome back to Budget Watchdog AF and tell me what you found.
Josh Sewell (01:36):
Well, I mean, it’s a holiday. So my original plan, a 250 themed waste basket. So it’s 250th anniversary of our country, so 250 ways to declare independence from debt. It may be one of those listicles, which we all love. That usual fun but pointed holiday format that we’ve done numerous times. Subsidies you’ll see on your vacation, beach nourishment, timber sales, gas flaring on public lands, that kind of fun stuff.
Steve Ellis (02:04):
Subsidized corn growing by the side of the road.
Josh Sewell (02:06):
Oh yeah. Ethanol. Fields of ethanol everywhere you can see.
Steve Ellis (02:10):
So what happened to it?
Josh Sewell (02:13):
Well, honestly, I pulled up the 2019 4th of July waste basket I wrote or one of us wrote and reviewed it and saw the numbers from that year.
Steve Ellis (02:24):
And what were the numbers?
Josh Sewell (02:26):
Well, in 2019 we called essentially an $896 billion deficit astounding. And we seem to refer to a $22 trillion in debt as mind boggling. And we meant it. We definitely meant that.
Steve Ellis (02:41):
And now?
Josh Sewell (02:43):
Well, $39.3 trillion. That’s our debt. We’ve added 17 trillion to the national debt in just seven years.
Steve Ellis (02:52):
Well, having deficits that are over $2 trillion will kind of do that to you. And that certainly is kind of a joykill for a buzzkill for a wastebasket idea.
Josh Sewell (03:04):
It definitely was for me.
Steve Ellis (03:06):
Okay. Josh, let’s do this right. The country turns 250 this week. That’s actually the right frame for this conversation. Not just what happened last year, not just the latest deficit number. Let’s go all the way back. Because I think when you zoom out to the full 250 years, the picture gets even more uncomfortable. So Josh, give me the macro view. July 4th, 1776 to today. What does the ledger look like?
Josh Sewell (03:41):
So again, $39.3 trillion in debt. And it’s so mind boggling that I just, first thing I did said, let’s divide that over every single day since the Declaration of Independence happened July 4th, 1776 to today, or I guess technically yesterday since we’re recording. That’s $430 million per day. Every day from the beginning of this country until today added onto our national debt. 430 million?
Steve Ellis (04:16):
$430 million a day.
Josh Sewell (04:20):
Yeah. And averaged over the entire life of this Republic. Now, obviously our forefathers didn’t spend that evenly every single day, but for most of American history, in fact, that was actually modest, taken on an award time, paid down afterwards. That was really the model. Well, at least that was the aspiration.
Steve Ellis (04:42):
Yeah. I mean, the truth is that we’ve run a debt almost the entire history of our republic through a few years in the Andrew Jackson administration back in the early 19th century that he eradicated the debt, but the debt is kind of a convenient instrument. It’s just you want it to be contained. So when did that model of containing the debt break?
Josh Sewell (05:02):
Well, that leads to some deep debates on economic theory that I don’t think we should get into, but I can tell you the debt has started piling up this century. At the end of the year in 2000, debt stood at $5.6 trillion. So in this new millennium, it began at a pile of $5.6 trillion and the budget was technically in surplus. We were on track to pay it down in theory.
Steve Ellis (05:31):
Yes, I can remember there were concerns about what would happen if we paid off all the debt and what would be those impacts being? And obviously our policymakers saved us from that apocalypse of having no debt. And I say apocalypse, but I mean that idea of five and a half trillion, 5.6 trillion dollar debt, which was shortly after I started at TCS almost feels fictional at this point.
Josh Sewell (05:58):
Yeah. And save us, they sure did. So from 2001 through right now, 85% of all the debt that the United States has ever accumulated has been added. So that’s over 25 years, 85% of our debt.
Steve Ellis (06:12):
Say that again.
Josh Sewell (06:14):
Again, over our first 225 years as a nation, we ran up $5.6 trillion in debt. So we got a revolution, a second war to keep our independents, a westward expansion, a Civil War, a World War, the Great Depression, a Second World War, even a Cold War, hammer pants, you name it, all kinds of stuff happened. $5.6 trillion. Over the next 25 years, another $33 trillion.
Steve Ellis (06:40):
It’s just that policymakers took a leave from their fiscal sanity. In the Reagan administration, he had tax cuts, but then when he saw how much the deficit was increasing, he increased taxes. He had spending programs and people were concerned about the deficit then, but you had Graham Rudmans Hollings trying to reign in the debt. It’s just that sometime once we had that surplus, that brief surplus, it was like debt fever broke out where we had to give the money back and then we had the tax cuts and then more tax cuts and they weren’t paid for and wars. It’s just we have to get this under control. It’s just mind boggling at how much this has grown and there’s a lot of reasons for it and we’re going to be getting into that. And to be fair, there’s some context to this. So walk me through the major inflection points here, Josh, for our listeners at Budge Washington AF Faithful.
Josh Sewell (07:37):
Well, you started to touch on it. To be fair, some big things have happened since 2000. So obviously nine eleven on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, you had that 2008 financial crisis and recovery, which started really at the beginning of my career and we all had COVID-19. And so once that occurred in the year 2020 alone, we added four and a half trillion dollars to our debt, mostly in COVID response. And that was the single biggest annual jump in US history and crises, not just one crisis, multiple crises, they are real and we’ve had a few of them and they was a little compressed, but they used to be the exception and now they don’t seem to be.
Steve Ellis (08:21):
Yeah, because those crises had intervals where there wasn’t a crisis. I mean, we know that crises drive debt, that’s not new, but it wasn’t always a crisis.
Josh Sewell (08:34):
Yeah. And even in this relatively compressed time period between say 2010 and 2019, which was really economic recovery from the Great Recession until COVID-19 really hit us in 2020, there was no recession by any measure. We didn’t have a world war. The Iraq war was winding down. There was, again, no pandemic. And so when you actually look at the numbers, there was slow but steady growth consistently, basically almost every quarter and certainly every year, yet we still as a country added $14 trillion in debt and that’s because of choices, not because of circumstances.
Steve Ellis (09:15):
I just like that Afghanistan war was still going on during that
Josh Sewell (09:17):
Period.That’s
Steve Ellis (09:19):
Fair. That’s true. But the bottom line I think that we’re getting at is that as you said, the debt came from choices that were made by Democratic and Republican administrations abetted by Congresses. Spending we didn’t pay for unfunded tax cuts.
Josh Sewell (09:38):
Yeah. And Afghanistan is actually a good example of, at least at the beginning of for many years in that in the war on terrorism, it was an unexpected expense and so it makes sense to be an emergency. But once you’re in it for seven, eight, 10 years, it’s no longer unexpected. So we need to pay for it and plan for it. And there were many years where we were not actually budgeting for that expense, even though we knew it was coming. But it’s also spending is easy to see. So folks might remember TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which was how we responded to the bank bailout and other parts of the economy from the Great Recession, President Obama’s stimulus, the pandemic response, but that’s easy to see. But there’s also, like you said, 2001 and 2003 tax cuts under Georgia Bush. Then Obama made some of those cuts permanent in 2010 and changed a few others.
(10:28):
Then you had the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which we’ve now done again and expanded in this last Congress and each one of those added substantially to the debt. And again, there weren’t corresponding spending reductions. We just borrowed more money to get those tax cuts through.
Steve Ellis (10:46):
Yeah. I think back to the ’90s and you had this tag team of President George H. W. Bush and the deal that he made at Andrews Air Force Base with the Democrats that raised some taxes that really set a course. And then you had the Clinton administration working with the Republican Congress or maybe not working, but eventually coming up with agreements that really constrained some of the spending and government and that’s where you got the surplus. But unfortunately, the reverse is true that they were complicit in looking the other way when they were unpaid for tax cuts and when there was unpaid for spending. So it’s easy to blame the other party, but both of them had their hands on the debt bomb triggered. As I said, Dems point to the unpaid tax cuts and ours point to increased spending. And in reality, it was some of both, but one thing we saw was the rise of spending in the tax code.
(11:51):
Tax expenditures cost $2.2 trillion in 2025.
Josh Sewell (11:58):
Yeah. It’s like the worst of both worlds. It’s tax expenditures have the same effect as spending, but they’re in the tax code. They’re tax breaks oftentimes, but they might as well be spending. And so you can both claim victory apparently by, even though we’re both getting a defeat.
Steve Ellis (12:14):
Right. It’s foregone revenue, but it adds to the deficit. That’s the thing that we have to keep in mind. And there’s a piece of this all, Josh, that doesn’t get enough attention and that’s interest because we’re not just talking about principle anymore.
Josh Sewell (12:33):
Yeah, exactly. And using another one of those inflection points of, we’ll say 2010, so coming out of the recession, still some having some stimulative response to that great recession. Since 2010, we’ve paid $8 trillion as a country in interest on the national debt just to service the debt, not paying for roads, not getting new weapons, not assisting veterans, not research, not anything that you may support or oppose, just pure debt service.
Steve Ellis (13:02):
And eight trillion is, well, it’s accelerated that we’re looking at a trillion dollars a year in net interest payments. And part of that is because the rate environment has changed, right, Josh?
Josh Sewell (13:17):
Yeah, dramatically. And I think a lot of people see this in their personal life, but those higher interest rates are affecting the federal government too. So 2020 to 2021, I looked up borrowing was at historic lows. So during that pandemic, it was 1.6 and 1.7% average, I believe, per year. That really masked how bad things were getting and it really covered up the potential cost of that massive response to COVID-19. Needed or not, it happened and you could argue a lot of it was needed, but the fact that money was so cheap to borrow really did not put into focus for folks what it would actually cost us in the long run because now it’s at 3.3, 3.4%, some of that federal debt service. So it’s nearly doubled and who knows, be able to go up, maybe it’ll go down. But in 2024, interest, I think for the first time, topped $1 trillion.
(14:20):
$1 trillion in one year just on interest in 2024. These numbers are just mind boggling.
Steve Ellis (14:27):
It really is. And a trillion dollars just in interest. And until recently that was more than we spent on the Pentagon, but the Pentagon’s angling to take the lead back from net interest in a horse race we really don’t want to watch.
Josh Sewell (14:43):
Yeah. And even if the Pentagon does outpays interest a little bit this year, we’re going to still spend more than on Medicare, more than Medicaid. And just some of that, it’s just one of, if not the largest, one of the top line items in the federal budget and it doesn’t actually get you anything today or tomorrow.
Steve Ellis (15:04):
Yeah. And the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s scorekeeper has looked at this and it’s just going to keep going up and up and they’re looking at dates like 2040, 2050, but just people know this the whole compounding interest, except in this case, it’s the wrong kind of compounding interest. It’s not more money in your account. It’s more drain on the treasury and we’re looking at trillions of dollars that are going to go just to interest payments if we don’t write the ship and try to shrink the size of debt as a percentage of GDP. So Josh, let’s talk about something current because this isn’t just a historical problem, emergency spending because I think what we’re seeing right now with this emergency supplemental that got proposed on the 24th of June is a live example of a very old bad habit.
Josh Sewell (16:02):
Yeah. No, I think this is emergency creep or disaster creep or whatever you want to call it. So the designation of an emergency in federal spending, it was supposed to be for genuine disasters. So your natural disasters like hurricanes, terror attacks, things that you can’t expect, a financial meltdown of the entire banking system. These are things that you as an individual, as a community, as a country, you don’t plan for Black Swan offense, they’re often called. It’s reasonable to have an emergency response as far as not budgeting for it because it’s supposed to be rare and critical and threatening to life, all these kind of criteria, but really disaster or emergency spending has become a, it’s a budgetary convenience.
Steve Ellis (16:52):
So I tease this, Josh, but give me the current example
Josh Sewell (16:56):
Yeah, I think the absolute most current example is the supplemental spending package that the president has requested and I guess the Senate and House will think about when they’re on, when they’re out of the city for the next couple of weeks. So right now there’s a $67 billion request for the Pentagon portion of Iran’s military campaign that’s stamped emergency and that’s within an overall $88 billion package. So there’s some other money for certain other agencies that have been impacted by the war in Iran. I think there’s actually $3 billion for the Coast Guard. It’s either two or $3 billion. So some spillover effects. Yeah.
(17:34):
And so it probably should be three, right, Steve, because they need more. But of course, it’s picked up other bobbles for this Christmas tree as we call them. So there’s $11.1 billion in quote emergency aid for farmers. But any economic crisis or financial challenge for farmers right now, as well as the war in Iran, these aren’t surprise events, not at this point. Both of these are actually policy choices that the president and Congress to extent have made and this choice is being laundered through an emergency label, frankly, just to evade spending caps, just to evade the requirement that you have to be responsible for the spending and either find an offset or cut another program or do some other way of accounting for this unmet need.
Steve Ellis (18:29):
And Josh, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you told me that in the last five years agriculture has gotten $60 billion in emergency disaster assistance. Clearly some of that is predictable.
Josh Sewell (18:43):
Yeah. And a portion of that is from the farm bill programs as well. And so about half of it was done under, a little over half of it was done under emergency and under half of it was done in a budgeted in a manner. But the fact that you have such a generous ag safety net, which also by the way in the non-emergency portion is expected to double even before any of this because of the last farm bill. So it would get to that 60 billion over the next 10 years. It just shows you that you’re getting it in both ways.
Steve Ellis (19:14):
Okay. Sorry to make you digress into agriculture, but I figured it was going to happen some way, so I might as well drive that train a little bit. But let’s loop back to the Iran war because there’s some funny math in here, right?
Josh Sewell (19:28):
Yeah. So on May 12th after, I guess it was a little more than 70 days of a shooting war in Iran, the Department of Defense or Department of War, I guess depends on how you want to call it. They testified to the war costs before Congress. And at that point they said the fighting had cost $29 billion. Now that didn’t account for some of the rebuilding and some of the other things, but the fighting cost was according to them $29 billion. Well, it’s been 40 days since that testimony and those days have been mostly or all perhaps under a ceasefire and the request is now $67 billion just for that war cost portion of the request. Is it all an emergency or is it appropriations, opportunism? I have an answer.
Steve Ellis (20:17):
Yeah. Well, especially considering the Pentagon every which way is trying to get more money. They still have money from last summer’s reconciliation bill, like $100 billion sloshing around that they could have used for this. They are asking for $250 billion more than what they got in their huge appropriations last year and then they want another $350 billion in another reconciliation package and that’s been floundering and there have been criticisms about this $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget. And so to me, this is like another cash grab that they are trying to say and it’s not that I fully concede there were obviously expenses that are related to the Iran War. We lost several fighters, fighter jets, expended a lot of munitions. And so that isn’t surprising to me that they need to refill the coffers, refill the armory, but they’ve got the money, but you never want to let an emergency go to waste.
(21:24):
So this is like, okay, they expect us we should just try to grab while the getting’s good. And you have a comptroller that came in and gave that testimony saying it was only $29 billion trying to downplay the impact. And then shortly thereafter is asking for more than twice that amount just weeks later and using this emergency designation to get around the regular budget order and this affect compounds. I mean, every time you use the emergency designation for something that really isn’t an emergency, you’ve added to the baseline with no accountability.
Josh Sewell (21:59):
Yeah. And I think importantly too, is that there’s no correction mechanism with the emergency spending. Nobody’s ever required to go back and evaluate it and say, “Well, the emergency is over. Let’s offset what we did.” Or turns out we didn’t need as much money as we thought we did, so let’s pull it back. It just becomes debt. That emergency lives on forever and we just move on.
Steve Ellis (22:24):
And there’s no lawmakers, very few of them anyway, are having any accountability on this issue that are taking it seriously. It just becomes, “Oh, here’s this chunk and here’s this chunk and we’re just going to keep spending money in these various areas. And because it’s only a little bit or maybe a lot bigger than last year, you haven’t taken into account what we’re doing in this podcast of the long-term effects, what has been happening over the last couple decades and how it’s put us in this situation. And the old saying is when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging, but yet that seems to be every lawmaker seems to have their own shovel ready to keep digging us into a deeper hole. All right, let’s zoom back out, Josh. People are at cookouts right now, fireworks tonight, celebrating.
(23:19):
What do you actually want to say to them?
Josh Sewell (23:22):
250 years I think it’s an extraordinary accomplishment for what we’ve done as a country, but now I think we’re at this point where we as a country are doing something that has not happened before. No generation before the current environment has ever spent like this and operated at this scale, like knowingly spending seemingly to an unending appetite money that we don’t have and sending that bill to people who have no vote in that matter. So us in the future, my kids in the future, it’s just mind boggling that this is happening and it doesn’t have to.
Steve Ellis (24:00):
So Josh, there’s a founding era principle that’s relevant here, right?
Josh Sewell (24:05):
Yeah. I’ll see your Jackson and pull out the Jefferson, I think who it was who wrote about this. The idea that one generation should not bind the next with its debts. I don’t know the exact quote, but that was a principle, not a slogan.
Steve Ellis (24:19):
Our elected officials, I truly believe they come into office with an intention to do good and to do good by their constituents and it’s time for them to look in the mirror, look in the debt mirror. And I’m not saying all of them are responsible for this dramatic increase in debt in the 21st century, but they’re the ones who are here and are elected and are having to deal with it. And there are some lawmakers that are trying to tackle this and there was no one reason as we talked about that we got this huge debt and there’s not going to be one silver bullet that’s going to solve it. There has been proposals of trying … Most recently, and I mean just the other day you had representatives, a bipartisan group, representative Womack, Republican from Arkansas, Ed Case, a Democrat from Hawaii. Bill Zinga was a Republican from Michigan and Scott Peters, a Democrat from California, all came together and they did the Budgeting for a Better America Act.
(25:26):
And that it was to strengthen the congressional budget process, improve transparency of the real fiscal state and establish a fiscal commission that would recommend policies to improve the nation’s fiscal outlook, including getting to a 3% deficit to GDP ratio within 10 years. Now, bills are not going to solve this. It’s going to be the intestinal fortitude of lawmakers of actually trying to tackle these issues and it’s going to be all of the above. We’re going to have to look at revenue. We had a massive tax cut piled on another massive tax cut, which also had other tax cuts. And that doesn’t mean that we need to go back to Kennedy era, 90% tax rates and things like that. It does mean that we need to be looking at some of these areas and having responsible policy solutions to try to make sure that everybody’s paying their fair share and it’s fair to taxpayers.
(26:27):
But then also we’ve got to look at spending and do we need to be spending the way we are at the Pentagon and that anything if we learned anything from the Ukraine war and from the Iran war that’s ongoing is that we don’t need these really expensive, very precious weapon systems. They’re being defeated, or at least stymied by very cheap, easy to produce other systems. And so that’s when we should be looking at pivoting at least a part of our investments to going to that rather than more F-15 Eagles that were destroyed in the Iran war. And then also it’s interesting your home state Senator, Senator Hawle, when people were talking about we need to look at Social Security and Medicare to make them more fiscally sound, he said, that sounds like people who have carried interest loopholes and things like that that are picking on the poor elderly rather than dealing with some of the other issues.
(27:27):
And actually, I half agree with Senator Hawley because I think we have to look at carried interest in some of these other provisions, but we also have to look at Social Security and Medicare so it’s actually there for people when they actually need it. So I feel like we’re at an inflection point where there needs to be a really come to Jesus moment of let’s deal with this debt. I just don’t know if we’re going to see it soon enough, unfortunately, but I have faith that we’re going to get there and that there is leadership that’s coming from members of Congress and we just have to push it through. Okay. I don’t want to leave people depressed. It is a birthday celebration for America and because if this show has a point, it’s not that everything is broken. It’s here’s what’s happening, here’s who responsible and here’s what accountability looks like.
(28:19):
So what does getting serious actually require, Josh?
Josh Sewell (28:23):
Well, I think you really hit on a lot of it in your soapbox there a minute ago, which I thought was going to be mine, but we do agree on a lot, but I think it really comes down to both parties contributed to our debt, maybe not equally, certainly not identically, but the debt is definitely a bipartisan problem in its origins and opposition to doing something about it is a bipartisan affliction as well. And so we just have to move on in this sense. No one’s coming to save us. And so fixing it’s going to have to be up to us and the people who choose to run for Congress, who choose to run for the Senate, they’re taking on this job and whatever title, whatever letter comes after their name, whether it’s R or D or I, whether changes when they’re in office or not, we all have to do this together.
(29:13):
And I just think everything has to be on the table. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not working, but you just cited, you named a number of members of Congress who are very diverse in their ideological beliefs, very diverse in their geographical representation and there’s many more. We worked a lot with Chairman Arrington from North Texas and I guess maybe you’d consider West Texas, but who’s the chair of the House Budget Committee until he’s retiring and the sincere on these issues and we’ve done it with other folks in the past and I just think it’s time to fix it. I’m tired of talking about these things, right? We’re tired of having these kind of conversations. And so whether it’s tax expenditures, the entitlement structure, national security, discretionary programs, SNAP, I Farm bill, every aspect of it. You can’t close this cap. You cannot get a reign of the deficits and you certainly can’t deal with our debt if you’re just looking at waste and fraud and abuse.
(30:09):
And especially if that waste, fraud and abuse is something that’s only supported by the other side. The numbers don’t work.
Steve Ellis (30:16):
No, they don’t. And so much of that, even when you talk about, for instance, more than a half a trillion dollars going to improper payments, well, that just means that they either got too much or too little or shouldn’t have gotten the money, but it’s not exactly, oh, here’s a way to get to save $500 billion. And it’s easy to demagogue on things like that. And Budget Watchdog AF Faithful, one thing I’ve always said is that you have to be an optimist to be a budget watchdog. I mean, we’re coming into this and we think that we can help fix and change the trajectory of the debt. And that’s what it’s about. It’s about changing to trajectory. It is not about eliminating the debt. It is not about even having a balanced budget though would be nice to get to that point. It’s really about slowing down the rate of growth of debt as a percentage of GDP to where it is manageable.
(31:10):
And that is what is a reasonable target. It’s not about cutting everything. It is really about narrowing the focus and ensuring that we have enough revenue and reducing spending so that that rate of growth, which we documented in the podcast went so dramatically higher this century that we slow that down so that $39 trillion isn’t a debt that’s the size of the economy, that we have a debt that’s more like 80% of the economy and that we can manage that and we can take the shocks of an emergency going in there. So Josh, this is a tricky episode to do and it’s a hard episode and talking about some of these issues. So I want to thank you. I know you sat down to write a waste basket and I hijacked you to actually do a podcast about some of the real issues that we’re facing here in the nation’s 250th birthday.
Josh Sewell (32:09):
I’m happy to do it and you know I don’t write my waste baskets until the morning they’re due, so I still have plenty of time.
Steve Ellis (32:16):
All right. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing that tomorrow before you go away. BudgetWatch.a Faithful, 250 years. Go enjoy the fireworks and think about what we want the next 250 to look like. And there you have it podcast listeners. This is The Frequency. Market on your dial, subscribe and share and know this. Taxpayers for Common Sense has your back America. We read the bills, monitor the yearmarks, and highlight the wasteful programs that poorly spend your money and shift long-term risk to taxpayers. As promised, we’ll be back with a new episode soon. I hope you’ll meet us right here to learn more.
