Illinois lawmaker defends rescinded funding freeze; transparency provision remains
(The Center Square) – While the White House rescinded its federal funding freeze, an Illinois lawmaker is echoing the comments president Donald Trump made about the order.
Trump said the freeze didn’t affect Social Security and Medicaid. Rather, his administration was looking at parts of the “big bureaucracy” where there has been waste and abuse.
Illinois state Rep. Chris Miller, R-Oakland, said one of the reasons why the administration walked it back is because of what he called the dishonest media and “fear mongering politicians” like U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL.
“It was right out of the Democrat playbook with Durbin trying to fearmonger and cast a false narrative. Because this won’t affect Medicare, it won’t affect Social Security, it won’t affect child programs or school lunch programs, et cetera,” said Miller.
On social media, Durbin said Trump’s federal funding freeze stunt put the welfare of Americans on the line.
“If your goal is to make America great again, why would you start by cutting these basic services for families and deserving people across this country? For goodness sake, we’re better than that. I’m proud of a nation that cares for people who need a helping hand. I’m not ashamed to say that and some of these people, particularly veterans, earned it,” said Durbin.
Miller said the thing that people need to understand is that the Trump administration is trying to ensure that federal dollars are spent wisely because during the Biden-Harris administration, there were no checks and balances.
Miller said portions of the order that require accountability and transparency are still in effect.
“The reason why the left is apoplectic is because they’re pulling back the layers of the onion and they know that the emperor has no clothes and they have no leg to stand on. They are not interested in transparency or accountability because it exposes the ridiculous programs that they’ve been funding,” Miller said.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said during a news gaggle last week that it’s important to understand that the freeze was a review process of discretionary spending that’s not directed by Congress or required by law.
“So this would be, for example, something like a contract to a non-governmental organization to teach, say, critical race theory,” Stephen Miller said. “That there has to be a politically appointed individual in the departments or agencies who simply reviews and approves the expenditure so that we have democratic control over the operations of government.”
Chris Miller said non-government organizations, for example, use the federal funding to bring immigrant children to the United States to illegally work, making them vulnerable to child-sex trafficking.
Recently, HelloFresh, a meal-kit provider, has faced accusations from the U.S. Department of Labor of employing migrant children at a factory located in Aurora, Illinois.
Hellofresh is a partner of Tent Partnership for Refugees, a non-profit organization, who Miller says “supplies Hellofresh with cheap migrant labor.”