John Kennedy slams govt spending, says it’d be better spent on ‘scratch tickets and blackjack’ instead of waste

Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy called out the government’s wasteful spending Friday evening on Fox News, saying it would’ve been better if it were spent on “scratch tickets and blackjack.”

Since February, Democrats have ramped up their pushback against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk, as DOGE decides which departments need to have their government spending cut back. On “The Ingraham Angle,” guest host Judge Jeanine Pirro asked Kennedy about the efforts to stop Musk and DOGE.

“I think, Judge, that Mr. Musk and his team’s efforts to control spending are the most important in the history of ever, certainly in my lifetime,” Kennedy said. “My Democratic colleagues would prefer that we ask, ‘Who needs to pay more in taxes?’ The American people want us to ask, ‘What the hell happened to the money?’”

“Since 2019, America’s population is up 2%. Spending’s up 55%. President Biden’s favorite type of spending was more,” Kennedy added. “This led to inflation and debt. But it wasn’t just the quantity. It was the quality, as Mr. Musk is showing us.”

During a recent interview on Fox News, Musk sat with his DOGE team to discuss the issues with federal spending, saying how agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration could be better managed.

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Kennedy went on to say that the government is guilty of “spending porn.”

“A lot of this money that we’re spending, things that we’re spending money on, are just money sucks. They’re spending porn. We’d be better off spending this money on scratch tickets and blackjack,” Kennedy said.

“We will never get prices down and control inflation until we deregulate the economy so goods and services will cost less, until we design a tax code that looks like somebody designed it on purpose, and until we control spending. That’s just Econ 101,” Kennedy said.

In an example of wasteful spending, Musk told Fox’s Bret Baier on Thursday evening that the federal government spent almost a billion dollars on a “10 question” survey that could have easily just cost thousands of dollars.

“A billion dollars for a simple online survey — ‘Do you like the National Park?,’ and then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey,” Musk told Baier. “So the survey would just go into nothing. It was insane.”

Pushback against DOGE and Musk’s involvement began in February after Musk announced that he and President Donald Trump had agreed to upend the U.S. Agency for International Development after finding the department wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Lawmakers have since protested DOGE’s efforts, with some saying they were now at “war” with the administration.

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