On January 22, 2023, Paragon Senior Policy Analyst Drew Keyes was quoted in The New York Times‘s story “The December Omnibus Bill’s Little Secret: It Was Also a Giant Health Bill.”
From the article:
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, had signaled earlier in the year that he hoped for a relatively modest spending bill. But he did not stand in the way of the giant bill in the end.
“Probably a lot of the driver was, ‘Let’s resolve it and accept the reality of a lot of stagnation we’ll see in the next Congress,’” said Drew Keyes, a senior policy analyst at the Paragon Health Institute and a former staffer on the Republican Study Committee. He was critical of the size and scope of the bill, especially given the limited debate on many of its provisions. But he said he understood why it came together: “We saw a lot of pieces that felt like this is the last opportunity.”