Sen. Joni Ernst is pushing a new transparency bill, the COST Act, that forces anyone who spends federal tax dollars to spell out the line-item price of each project, and she says this will help stop schemes like the alleged Minneapolis daycare fraud. The proposal arrives alongside a White House announcement of a state-federal anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance, described as a “whole of government effort to fight fraud at the state and federal level.” This piece explains the bill’s core requirements, enforcement plan, and how it aims to give citizens a role in exposing waste.
The core of the COST Act is straightforward: make spending obvious and traceable. The bill’s stated purpose is “to put a public price tag on all projects supported with taxpayer dollars,” and it requires recipients of federal funds to publicly report the share of federal support, the dollar amount, and any private contributions.
Under the proposal, federal, state, local entities, research grant holders, and any business receiving federal money would need to disclose in a press release or other approved documentation what the government funded and how much. That level of line-item clarity would expose suspicious patterns much earlier than buried paperwork and opaque invoices ever do.
Ernst is taking this to the Senate Small Business Committee, where watchdog groups will be on the record and lawmakers will press agencies on compliance. “As I always say, if you can’t find waste in Washington, there can only be one reason – you didn’t look,” she told reporters, making the point that transparency is the first step to accountability.
She didn’t stop there. “But after years of fighting to hold Washington accountable, I’ve also learned that you can’t stop what you can’t see. That’s why this Sunshine Week, I’m leading the COST ACT to post the price on every single project the American public is footing the bill for,” she said, framing the bill as a practical, common-sense fix rather than a partisan stunt.
The Office of Management and Budget would be charged with enforcement duties, including reviewing a random sample of recipients to verify disclosures and publicly reporting the results. The bill names current OMB leader Russell Vought as the official to set up reviews and to stand up a channel for citizen reports, which the measure says should be operational within a year.
That citizen reporting component grew out of attention drawn by community investigators who uncovered alleged fraud in Minnesota and elsewhere, and the bill explicitly creates a route for anonymous tips. “Calling taxpayers’ attention to how and where their hard-earned money is being spent exposes fraudulent spending, like what we saw at the Quality ‘Learing’ Center in Minnesota, so it can no longer fester in the shadows,” Ernst said on that account, highlighting the power of public scrutiny.
From a Republican perspective, this is about fiscal stewardship and restoring trust by forcing transparency, not piling on red tape for small actors. If taxpayers can see the price tag on projects, elected officials and auditors can prioritize enforcement where the numbers point, and a simple disclosure regime could make scams much harder to hide.
The result is a practical accountability tool: clearer budgets, faster detection, and a public record that makes it easier for citizens, watchdogs, and agencies to spot abuse. The next step is the committee hearing where lawmakers will test the mechanics, demand clarity on implementation, and see whether this transparency push can turn a political promise into enforceable practice.
