Kansas congressman hails actions of Trump, Musk and DOGE, but with errors | Opinion
Ron Estes made a public appearance in Wichita on Thursday night.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t lead with that, but our congressman’s aversion to speaking in open forums makes that probably the most newsworthy thing that happened.
Estes spoke at the meeting of the Republican Party of Sedgwick County, continuing his longstanding tradition of appearing only in front of the friendliest of crowds.
He wasn’t supposed to be the evening’s keynote speaker, but stepped in when retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who was supposed to appear via Zoom, backed out at the last minute because he was traveling, according to county Republican Chairman John Whitmer.
Flynn, you might remember, was appointed as national security advisor during Donald Trump’s first term as president, but then pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, and was later pardoned by Trump.
But I digress, because this column’s about Ron Estes’ speech.
Estes started out mainly talking about extending tax cuts passed in 2017 during the first Trump administration.
“If we do nothing around taxes, next year, everybody across America is going to get an average of a 22% tax increase, which means for the average Kansan taxpayer, it’s over $2,200,” Estes said. “It varies a little bit by each congressional district, but that’s because of the expiration of the provisions that were in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from 2017. So what we’re going to be focusing on on the Ways and Means Committee now is, how do we make sure that we extend those provisions?”
It’s kind of a self-created problem for Congress and the Trump administration. Back when it passed, a lot of people were asking why the tax cuts for individuals would sunset, but corporate tax cuts were made permanent.
Nobody asked that at the Republican meeting Thursday.
Defending Musk, DOGE
Estes also gamely sought to defend the work of Trump and multi-billionaire Elon Musk, who’s been taking a meat ax to federal departments and their employees via the intentionally misnamed Department of Government Efficiency — which so far has created zero efficiency, but has spread boundless chaos for Americans and American companies.
Estes was particularly complimentary of the administration’s action to fire about 2,000 employees and shut down USAID, the agency that provided humanitarian relief and promoted American values around the globe.
“I mean, I think there’s value in the United States having a place in the world and having an impact in the world and talking about issues and actually supporting good things around the world,” Estes said. “But we need to make sure that they are smart decisions around what we do, that . . . we’re not necessarily funding Sesame Street projects in Iran, and we’re not funding DEI initiatives in Burma. And I know there’s some folks out in the western part of my district that would love to have the $4 million that was sent to study groundwater issues in Mauritania, instead of addressing groundwater issues in in Kansas through that.”
I decided to fact-check this, which wasn’t easy because USAID.gov, the agency’s website, is nothing but a blank screen these days (there’s nothing Trump and Musk hate more than fact-checking, and for good reason).
But fortunately, the “Wayback Machine” at web.archive.org had saved snapshots of most of the relevant pages, so here‘s what I was able to glean from my research:
▪ “Sesame Street projects in Iran” — First, it was not Iran, but Iraq. And second, it wasn’t Sesame Street, but a contract with the U.S.-based Sesame Workshop, Mercy Corps and Save the Children, to “produce Ahlan Simsim Iraq, a program designed to promote inclusion, mutual respect, and understanding across ethnic, religious, and sectarian groups.” One might think teaching Iraqi kids to be more tolerant would be a “good thing,” but apparently not.
▪ “DEI initiatives in Burma” — This was actually a college scholarship program, to help promising young Burmese students pursue educational opportunities in the Philippines and online through the University of Arizona. It got tagged as the dreaded “DEI” because apparently someone on Team Musk/MAGA ran a word search and found it was called the “Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship Program.”
▪ “The $4 million that was sent to study groundwater issues in Mauritania” — As far as I can tell, this wasn’t even USAID. I did find a U.S. ambassadorial press release about a partnership between that country and the U.S. Geological Survey to map water resources in the nation that’s 90% Sahara Desert, to try to keep the local population and about 200,000 Malian war refugees from dying of thirst. I guess when it comes to U.S.-Africa relations, Black lives really don’t matter. As for Western Kansas, USGS has already mapped the water resources there.
Social Security and DOGE
Estes also made a somewhat chilling comment about interest on the national debt, rising from $280 billion in 2023 to $1 trillion this year.
“It’s the second largest line item in the budget, is our interest cost,” Estes said. “Social Security is first, in terms of the checks that are sent to Social Security recipients. Second is interest. Third is Medicare, and fourth is defense. So if you look at what’s the primary role of federal government, it’s fourth in that list of things that are that are being spent.”
Now, one could argue that Social Security and Medicare are pretty primary roles of the federal government, and defining them otherwise seems like priming the pump for cuts.
But at Thursday’s Republican meeting, nobody did.
This isn’t a theoretical exercise for Estes, who chairs the Social Security Subcommittee of House Ways and Means.
He again tossed out some DOGE misinformation.
“A lot of what they’re gathering now, that DOGE is gathering, is using the technology to query databases and pull up information,” Estes said. “Now the deep dive starts into, OK, why is there records of 9 million people over (age) 130 in the system? Now, the data that they pulled up didn’t say there were getting checks. Some of them might be, probably very few are. But the question then becomes, is why? Why is the process not working to report that they passed away, if they passed away.”
That was actually asked and answered in a Social Security Inspector General’s report in 2023, so DOGE’s big “discovery” isn’t exactly breaking news.
The 2023 report found there were nearly 19 million number holders whose deaths had not been recorded into the agency database.
“We believe it likely SSA did not receive or record most of the 18.9 million individuals’ death information primarily because the individuals died decades ago — before the use of electronic death reporting,” the report said.
Social Security officials declined to spend an estimated $9 million to try to clean up the death list, because it was essentially a pointless exercise.
“The records identified by the OIG (Office of Inspector General) involve non-beneficiaries and do not involve improper payments,” the agency response said. “Correcting records for nonbeneficiaries would divert resources from work necessary to administer and manage our programs, which we cannot afford.”
No live Town Halls
Issues like these could probably be cleared up if Estes would ever take anything other than softball questions from his most ardent supporters.
Unfortunately, that is apparently not to be.
I asked him after the GOP meeting if he’d hold an open Town Hall, but he said he would probably continue to have periodic “telephone town halls” instead.
I’ve listened to a couple of those, and it seemed like the people who got to ask questions were as much in Estes’ amen corner as the GOP stalwarts and precinct captains at Thursday’s meeting.
As far as I can tell, Estes never answers questions on his Facebook page, where he’s been getting pummeled on every post lately as concerned constituents try to get his attention.
We can only conclude that if you’re not predisposed to agree with Estes (and DOGE and Trump and Musk) he’d just as soon not hear from you at all.
And that’s pretty sad.
