What do federal prisoners, Japanese citizens, and illegal immigrants have in common? They all received billions of your tax dollars in federal stimulus checks from the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that liberals in Washington passed under one-party Democrat rule last year.
You’re probably wondering how on earth could federal prisoners – including the Boston Marathon Bomber – have received stimulus checks that were paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars. But this is the kind of abuse you get from a bill that was crafted to reward the friends, allies and political donors of Democrat Leaders in Washington. As Republican Leader of the Budget Committee, that’s exactly the kind of abuse I’ve been exposing for the last 65 straight weeks.
If there were nothing to hide, then there would be no opposition to my efforts to oversee this money. As part of my fight to hold Washington Democrats accountable, I introduced a measure that would force the Biden administration to turn over records and documents, including correspondence, related to the number and total dollar amount of stimulus checks from ARPA that were sent to convicted prisoners, non-U.S. citizens living abroad, illegal immigrants, and deceased individuals. Unfortunately, this week, every single Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee voted to block it – meaning there will be no sunlight on this spending while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) is in charge of your House of Representatives.
To date, I have uncovered that $783 million in stimulus checks were sent to over half a million federal prisoners; up to $4.38 billion in checks were sent to illegal immigrants; $13 million in checks were sent to people without verifying whether they were still alive; and thousands of $1,400 checks were sent to Japanese citizens living in Japan.
And that’s just the waste we know about. With numerous examples of waste, fraud, and abuse across that $2 trillion spending bill, the American people deserve the answers to how this could have occurred. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in a Washington controlled by one-party Democrat rule of Congress and the White House.