Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst is one elected politicians who has kept her promise to do some house cleaning in Washington.

The fourth-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate and one of the most powerful women in the country, she has become an excellent role model for a party that has struggled to recruit female candidates and appeal to female voters.

Last year, Ernst became the first woman elected to Senate GOP leadership in eight years, and she’s one of two Republican women on the Senate’s powerful Judiciary Committee, which previously had no GOP women on it.

Ernst came into the job with a disciplined work ethic built up during her 23 years of service in the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard.

Along with that hard-edged military background, Ernst also has an easygoing demeanor which has helped her work across the aisle with some Democrats. That’s a rare quality in the highly charged political climate in Washington.

Ernst will need to use all in her political arsenal to gain re-election in 2020. Although Iowa has been a conservative-leaning state which President Trump carried easily in 2016, it’s now considered a battleground or “purple” state. Ernst is confident that the president will carry Iowa again, but knows it may become a lot harder to win over the state’s large farm community if Trump doesn’t strike trade deals to break the impasse with China.

Among her senate duties, Ernst serves on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship; and she chairs a subcommittee on Jobs, Rural Economic Growth and Energy Innovation.

She feels that Iowans sent her to Congress with a mandate to cut wasteful spending, so last year she introduced the Cost Openness and Spending Transparency Act that would “put a price tag on every project funded by the federal government.”

To further expose the wasteful federal spending, Ernst introduced a “Squeal Award.”

Her own U.S. Senate, which failed to pass legislation that would have put money back in the U.S. Treasury, was one of her first award recipients.

Ernst said this bill would have cut unobligated funds that are not necessary to administer programs and services.

Earlier this year she went after “Binge Buying Bureaucrats” who spent $53 billion in taxpayer money in one week.

One study showed bingers spent $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab; $2.1 million on games, toys and wheeled goods; $11,816 on a commercial foosball table; and many other purchases.

And just last week, Ernst named the Department of Defense for a “Squeal Award.”

Wasteful purchases included:

• 25 coffee cups, valued at $1,220 each.

• $209,000 grant to the Office of Naval Research grant for helping determine the sociability of 18 different dog breeds.

• $3.9 million grant from the DOD to determine if junk food is more distracting than healthy food.

• The Office of Naval Research spent $3.85 million to investigate a study that looks into the “tingling sensation the fictional comic book character Spider-Man experiences”; and a cheating study by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation involving 20 rounds of “Rock-Paper-Scissors” played between 60 humans and a robot designed to cheat.

It’s hard to build a case on how these initiatives would do anything to modernize our military or maintain the safety of our men and women in uniform.

Ernst is one elected official who’s not afraid to shed light on the reckless spending, no matter what political party or group she exposes in the Washington swamp.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com