Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2025
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Sen. Ernst, Joni [R-IA]
ID: E000295
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Bill Summary
Another exercise in futility, courtesy of our esteemed lawmakers. Let's dissect this monstrosity, shall we?
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2025 is a thinly veiled attempt to increase the already generous benefits afforded to former Presidents. The bill's primary objective is to modernize (read: inflate) the monetary allowance payable to these individuals, because apparently, $200,000 per year isn't enough to keep them in the style to which they've become accustomed.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill amends the Former Presidents Act of 1958 by increasing the annuity and allowance for former Presidents to $200,000 per year. It also introduces a cost-of-living increase, because why not? The bill further complicates matters with a Byzantine system of reduction amounts, disclosure requirements, and confidentiality provisions that would make even the most seasoned tax attorney weep.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** Former Presidents (and their spouses), who will be the primary beneficiaries of this largesse. One can only assume that the sponsors of this bill have been sufficiently... persuaded by these individuals to introduce such a generous measure. The American taxpayer, on the other hand, will foot the bill for this extravagance.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a masterclass in legislative sleight-of-hand. By increasing the allowance and introducing cost-of-living increases, our lawmakers are effectively creating a new entitlement program for former Presidents. The disclosure requirements and confidentiality provisions are merely a fig leaf to conceal the true nature of this giveaway.
In reality, this bill is a symptom of a deeper disease: the corrupting influence of power and the boundless sense of entitlement that afflicts those who have held high office. It's a classic case of "I'm a former President, hear me roar (with laughter all the way to the bank)!"
Diagnosis: Legislative Larceny with a side of Hubris.
Treatment: A healthy dose of skepticism and a strong stomach for the inevitable abuse of power that will follow.
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Sen. Ernst, Joni [R-IA]
Congress 119 ⢠2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
â 7 â Foreword Instead, party leaders negotiate one multitrillion-dollar spending billâseveral thousand pages longâand then vote on it before anyone, literally, has had a chance to read it. Debate time is restricted. Amendments are prohibited. And all of this is backed up against a midnight deadline when the previous âomnibusâ spending bill will run out and the federal government âshuts down.â This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly nego- tiating without any public scrutiny or oversight. In the end, congressional leadersâ behavior and incentives here are no differ- ent from those of global elites insulating policy decisionsâover the climate, trade, public health, you name itâfrom the sovereignty of national electorates. Public scrutiny and democratic accountability make life harder for policymakersâso they skirt it. Itâs not dysfunction; itâs corruption. And despite its gaudy price tag, the federal budget is not even close to the worst example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the âAdministrative State,â the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President. The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal governmentâs departments, agencies, and millions of employees. Under Article I of the Constitution, âAll legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.â That is, federal law is enacted only by elected legislators in both houses of Congress. This exclusive authority was part of the Framersâ doctrine of âseparated powers.â They not only split the federal governmentâs legislative, executive, and judicial powers into different branches. They also gave each branch checks over the others. Under our Constitution, the legislative branchâCongressâis far and away the most powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people. In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsi- bility for its actions. So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter. Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agencyâs bureaucratsânot just unelected but seemingly un-fireableâthen leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congressâs preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountableâeven to the Presidentâevery year. l A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes;
Introduction
â 7 â Foreword Instead, party leaders negotiate one multitrillion-dollar spending billâseveral thousand pages longâand then vote on it before anyone, literally, has had a chance to read it. Debate time is restricted. Amendments are prohibited. And all of this is backed up against a midnight deadline when the previous âomnibusâ spending bill will run out and the federal government âshuts down.â This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly nego- tiating without any public scrutiny or oversight. In the end, congressional leadersâ behavior and incentives here are no differ- ent from those of global elites insulating policy decisionsâover the climate, trade, public health, you name itâfrom the sovereignty of national electorates. Public scrutiny and democratic accountability make life harder for policymakersâso they skirt it. Itâs not dysfunction; itâs corruption. And despite its gaudy price tag, the federal budget is not even close to the worst example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the âAdministrative State,â the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President. The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal governmentâs departments, agencies, and millions of employees. Under Article I of the Constitution, âAll legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.â That is, federal law is enacted only by elected legislators in both houses of Congress. This exclusive authority was part of the Framersâ doctrine of âseparated powers.â They not only split the federal governmentâs legislative, executive, and judicial powers into different branches. They also gave each branch checks over the others. Under our Constitution, the legislative branchâCongressâis far and away the most powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people. In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsi- bility for its actions. So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter. Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agencyâs bureaucratsânot just unelected but seemingly un-fireableâthen leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congressâs preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountableâeven to the Presidentâevery year. l A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes; â 8 â Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity; l Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into Americaâs classrooms; l Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girlsâ sports and parentsâ rights to satisfy transgender extremists; l Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend âtrainingâ seminars about âwhite privilegeâ; and l Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about âintersectionalityâ and abortion.3 Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf. Members of Congress shield themselves from constitutional accountability often when the White House allows them to get away with it. Cultural institutions like public libraries and public health agencies are only as âindependentâ from public accountability as elected officials and voters permit. Letâs be clear: The most egregious regulations promulgated by the current Administration come from one place: the Oval Office. The President cannot hide behind the agencies; as his many executive orders make clear, his is the respon- sibility for the regulations that threaten American communities, schools, and families. A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it. Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and pol- icymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing âexperts,â to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State.
Introduction
â 283 â Section Three THE GENERAL WELFARE When our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government w ould âpromote the general Welfare,â they could not have fathomed a m assive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single yearâroughly the sum, combined, spent by the departments covered in this section in 2022. Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aloneâthe belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state. HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020âaccording to the American Main Street Initia- tiveâs analysis of official federal talliesâMedicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem. HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsibleâalong with President Joe Bidenâfor the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic. All along, it was clear from randomized controlled trialsâ the gold standard of medical researchâthat masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive. Yet the CDC ignored these high-quality RCTs, cherry-picked from politically malleable â 284 â Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise âobservational studies,â and declared that everyone except children and infants below the age of two should don masks. Under COVID, as former director of HHSâs Office of Civil Rights Roger Severino writes in Chapter 14, the CDC exposed itself as âperhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.â Nor is the CDC the only villain in this play. Severino writes of the National Institutes of Health, âDespite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experimentsââin which the genes of humans and animals are mixed, âand gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.â Severino writes that âAnthony Fauciâs division of the NIHââthe National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseasesââowns half the patent for the Moderna COVID- 19 vaccine,â and âseveral NIH employeesâ receive âup to $150,000 annually from Moderna vaccine sales.â That would be the same experimental mRNA vaccine that the CDC now wants to force on children, who are at little to no risk from COVID-19 but at great risk from public health officials. The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makersâwith all of the conflict of interest it entailsâcannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, âFunding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.â Whatâs more, NIH has long âbeen at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.â The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the departmentâs foray into woke transgen- der activism. HHS also pushes abortion as a form of âhealth care,â skirting and sometimes blatantly defying the Hyde Amendment in the process. Severino writes that the âFDA shouldâŚreverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the polit- icized approval process was illegal from the start.â In addition, HHS programs often violate the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of conscience-protection laws. Severino writes that the HHS âSecretary should pursue a robust agenda to pro- tect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.â The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administrationâs focus on ââLGBTQ+ equity,â subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,â replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families. If there is another department that has gone off the rails like HHS during the Obama and Biden Administrations, it is the once proud Department of Justice (DOJ). As former counselor to the attorney general Gene Hamilton writes in Chap- ter 17, the department âhas a long and noble historyââEdmund Randolph, the first attorney general, took office the same year as President Washingtonâyet its
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.