President Trump never mentioned the national debt, the federal deficit. or wasteful spending in his State of the Union message, and Democrats also dodged the issues in their response.  A leading fiscal watchdog says that was a big mistake.

"I really think the president missed an opportunity here to take his own party to task on spending," said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and Founder of OpentheBooks.com.

Andrzejewski joined dozens of other conservative allies in taking out an ad in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, imploring Trump to address the issue.  The letter included many former lawmakers and public officials, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III.

The base of his party wants the president to hone the budget.  They want him to go after waste, fraud, corruption, and abuse," said Andrzejewski.

Trump is hamstrung on the issue in multiple ways:  He refuses to reform entitlements and Democrats now control the U.S. House of Representatives.  Andrzejewski says the president is also facing stiff resistance within his own administration to his call for five percent spending cuts.

"We hear that the cabinet secretaries aren't serious about the five percent cuts.  That's the purpose of coming back to this topic to encourage the president to really make this a signature part of his administration," said Andrzejewski.

Andrzejewski says Trump could also pressure Congress to cut way back on the $600 billion spent every year on grants.  Those grants include $1.4 to teach sex education to California prostitutes, and nearly a million dollars each for Cornell University to study where it hurts most to get stung by a bee and Harvard to breed pugilistic mice.

He also says taxpayers lost $136 billion on mistaken payments and that the average pay and benefits for a federal bureaucrat now exceeds $100,000.

Listen to the full podcast to hear Andrzejewski explain other bad habits in Washington that cost us money and how citizens must be the ones to demand better.