Happy Festivus! Another year gone already. It seems like just yesterday I was sounding the alarm over a $20 trillion debt, and now the U.S. has pushed past $23 trillion! The more things changed in 2019, the more they stayed the same. Hollywood continued going back to tried and true classics, releasing hits like

The Lion King

and

Aladdin

. And the federal government clung to old ideas such as failing to fund the government on time and spendi ng even more taxpayer dollars. Americans rang in 2019 with a government shutdown. Democrats, perhaps bolstered by a new House majority, instantly blocked funding to stop Republican action on the border. Worse than that, in August, Congress undermined the Budget Control Act of 2011, throwing out the budget caps and suspending the debt ceiling for two whole years

—

setting the stage for even more reckless spending! Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office projects more than $1 trillion annual deficits as far as the eye can see. Needless to say, it

’s been a bad

year for federal spending. In fact, a November review of Fiscal Year 2019 from the CBO states Congress spent $4.4 trillion in FY2019, 8 percent more than 2018. Net interest payments on the debt also skyrocketed to $423 billion, $52 billion more than FY2018.

It’s easy if you’re a conservative to get depressed. But don’t give up. I will continue to fight the

wasteful spending. In the future, I will rate each waste of taxpayer dollars I cover on a sca le of 1 to 5 pigs as I hand out

the “Platinum Pig Awards

.

”

Stay tuned for more about that. Meanwhile, this year, I am highlighting a whopping $50,463,462,292.35 of waste, including a study of Panamanian frog mating calls, sending low-quality textbooks to Afghan students, and a grant to fund a Peruvian Green New Deal. It must need exporting after the Senate unanimously opposed it! So, before we get to the Feats of Strength,

it’s time for my

Airing of (spending) Grievances!

I got a lotta

problems with federal spending, and n ow you’re gonna