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Bringing gravy trains to a squealing halt

Do you hear that, folks? That’s the sound of California’s Gravy Train coming to a squealing halt. The rail project is about $100 billion over budget. It was supposed to be completed five years ago, but not even a single track has been laid. I’ve been railing against this train to nowhere since 2019 and I worked with President Trump to slam the brakes on it. That’s right, the California Crazy Train will no longer be choo choo chewing up taxpayer money. We’re taking back the billions of tax dollars put on board this runaway train by the Biden administration. For too ...

Fort Dodge’s Boys of Summer remember their Demons days

Fort Dodge’s Boys of Summer, now in the autumn of their years, still remember vividly those days of the 1950s and 1960s when they proudly wore the uniform of the Demons baseball team. A lot of life – good and bad - has happened to the hundreds of boys who were coached by the beloved ...

Cinching the purse strings

My predecessor in Iowa’s Third Congressional District was known as “a watchdog to the Treasury.” During 13 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Harold Royce (H.R.) Gross kept a tight-fisted grip on the federal purse strings, pulling no punches on pork-barrel spending. Just three months before I was elected to Congress in 1974, President Gerald Ford delivered an address to a joint session of Congress. He spoke about the urgent need to rein in federal spending to bring down inflation. Like H.R. Gross, President Ford believed in limited government. In his address ...

Fighting back against California’s harmful Prop 12 mandates on Iowa hog farmers

On Wednesday, July 23, I spoke at a House Agriculture Committee hearing to discuss the harmful impacts of California’s Proposition 12, or Prop 12, on Iowa hog farmers and our rural communities. Enacted in 2018, this notorious state measure is incredibly detrimental to producers in Iowa and nationwide. Since I was elected to Congress, I have been fighting back against this dangerous regulation of our agricultural economy and way of life. As it stands, Prop 12 demands that pork producers in Iowa, and across the nation, comply with the demands of liberal activists who have weaponized ...

Is this Heaven? No, it’s Fort Dodge.

This time of year, Fort Dodge fills with the sound of cheers, the smell of concession stand grub, and the electric feeling only a state tournament can bring. For a few days, our community becomes the heart of girls’ high school softball in Iowa. I love it. There’s something special about teams taking the field at Harlan and Hazel Rogers Sports Complex - some making their first state appearance, others carrying on a legacy. You see fans in coordinating shirts, siblings with homemade signs, and coaches who’ve likely been through more sunburn and bags of sunflower seeds than ...

Eliminating $9 billion of waste in Washington

Over the past decade since my fellow Iowans sent me to Washington to make the big spenders squeal, I’ve been exposing waste, fraud, and abuse almost too insane to believe. This week, I was proud to see some of that work deliver a win for Iowa taxpayers. Both the Senate and House passed the first Trump rescissions package to claw back $9 billion in wasteful foreign aid and funding for partisan propaganda masquerading as public broadcasting. As a result of my years of oversight, I found that the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, is a rogue bureaucracy, operating ...