'Drain the Swamp'
Presidential candidate Donald Trump promised to "drain the swamp!"
The "swamp" is the permanent Washington bureaucracy working to perpetuate itself.
In 2020, then-President Trump said he was succeeding: "We're draining the Washington swamp!"
But it's not true.
"He made government bigger," Economist Ed Stringham says in my new video. 'That's going in the wrong direction. Looking through a list of agencies, every single one I could see, there were more employees after his presidency than before."
Trump added almost 2 million jobs to the federal workforce.
He did make some cuts at the State Department, Labor Department, Education Department and his own office. But total spending under Trump nearly doubled. Some was in response to COVID, but billions in extra spending came before.
That spending increased the size of the swamp. New programs filled Washington with more bureaucrats.
Trump launched a $6 billion "Farmers to Families" Food Box Program to bring food from farmers to families.
"Last I checked," jokes Stringham, "we have an industry for that. It's called the supermarket industry. It exists for a reason. Markets are good at getting things from farmer to consumer."
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