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This Congress, Republicans have already taken some of the winning YouCut proposals to the House floor and passed legislation cutting funding for those programs.

For instance, in January the House passed a bill to eliminate the unnecessary printing of new bills that lawmakers introduce.

Under federal law, the Government Printing Office prints and delivers a printed copy of every new bill introduced in Congress, at a cost of $7 million a year. Almost all — 13,683 in the last Congress — end up in the trash. But worst of all, the bills are all available online.

The House passed a bill ending this practice by a vote of 399-0 in January, but so far the Senate hasn’t lifted a finger to help.

The trio of freshmen hope the new, improved YouCut will help catalyze Senate action on non-controversial proposals like that.

“When someone can see that what their recommendation was on eliminating a wasteful program or a wasteful expense was – actually goes through the House of Representatives and passes, through the committee and the full House floor, and then goes to the Senate. And they have the ability to reach out to the senators and again, ask the senators to justify the expenditure if they won’t vote to cut it,” Scott said.

But even with YouCut, and the nation fixated on public debt like never before, it’s still a daunting challenge trying to cut the government down to size.

Asked what most surprised Mulvaney about Washington, he said it was just how bad the deficits really are and how massive the government is.

“Did you know that we spend a million dollars on mohair subsidies? There’s no reason for you to know that. No normal human being would ever know that. The exchange programs for Alaska native Hawaiians and their historical trading partners in Massachusetts is $9 million a year. There’s no way for an ordinary human being to know that the federal government does that,” Mulvaney said.