In 2021 Barr said he'd 'always be an advocate' for opening foreign markets to Kentucky distillers. Then exports to Canada fell 42%, Jim Beam paused production at Clermont for all of 2026 — and Barr voted against ending the Canada tariffs and called the damage 'short-term turbulence.'
He said it on a Republican Study Committee golf podcast during Masters Week. He sits on the House Oversight Committee's DOGE subcommittee — a panel its own chairwoman said was built to work 'hand in hand' with DOGE, and he cheered right along.
He represents Huntsville, home to roughly 21,000 federal workers. He told them Space Command and the Iron Dome would make up for whatever DOGE took. Then 279 senior Marshall employees were listed to go.
DOGE fired all 10 federal predator-control workers in Oklahoma and 15 of 61 scientists at the El Reno research station. Frank Lucas got them their jobs back — then went to a breakfast in Washington and praised the program that fired them.
Three days into the shutdown he went on public radio and asked the president to cut up to 200,000 jobs. A week later the firings started. And back in 2019 he was one of only seven members of Congress to vote against guaranteeing federal workers their back pay.
His bill strips out the 2014 protections that stop teenagers with disabilities from being funneled straight into subminimum-wage jobs. The government's own data says those jobs pay a median of $3.46 an hour.
He chairs the subcommittee that funds schools, health care and worker training. His FY27 bill eliminates adult job training, eliminates youth job training, and cuts Title I for low-income schools by $1.9 billion. Then he talked up the money for hospitals.
On July 31, delta-8 became a felony in Texas — seven years after Abbott signed the law that made it legal. A month earlier, the head of the country's largest Anheuser-Busch distributor gave him $500,000.
One union polled its Forest Service members on relocating. Seven percent said yes. Forty percent of the people facing the choice have wildfire qualifications — during a bad fire season.