Dan Rather outsmarts Donald Trump — and it could save U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars

For months, President Donald Trump has lied to the American people about testing causing cases of COVID-19, instead of the reality that testing only reveals the cases that already exist.

"When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing we would have very few cases," Trump argued in May.

On June 20th, he revealed at his Tulsa rally that he had ordered his administration to do less testing.

"When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people. You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down please," Trump admitted.

"If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases," he falsely claimed five days later.

Veteran journalist Dan Rather wondered if Trump's line of thought could be expanded to include other areas of public policy.

"Here’s an idea for the president. We can apparently solve the issue of undocumented immigrants by just not counting them?" Rather wondered.

The federal government spends over 20 billion a year on U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), although not all is spent on immigration enforcement.

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CPB and ICE budgets from the American Immigration Council (PDF)[/caption]