Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said that the 1,700-page deal reached by lawmakers this week to keep the government open “is not the right way to spend the taxpayer dollars,” during an interview Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Cotton, who noted that he is disappointed in the budget bargain, said he hasn’t yet decided whether he will vote for the gargantuan bill.

“We should not be making long-lasting immigration policy in a spending bill that’s going to last four months.”

“As you know, they don’t hide the good things in 1,700 pages. They only hide the bad things,” Cotton said. “So, of course, the press releases on Sunday didn’t trumpet the fact that it once again uses a spending bill to expand the H2-B program, which hurts American wages and takes jobs from Americans through temporary guest workers and is the subject of a lot of abuses as well.”

“That’s just one example of the kind of provisions you’ve got to read it through completely to identify,” Cotton said, adding, “There’s other things in there that I have my reservations about.”

The Arkansas Republican insisted “at a minimum” that the H2-B provision, an expansion of a controversial visa program, must be omitted before lawmakers pass the bill.

“We should not be making long-lasting immigration policy in a spending bill that’s going to last four months,” Cotton said.

“This is not the right way to spend the taxpayer dollars, to have these big bills that fund the entire government and take a lot of the ability to allocate your tax dollars wisely out of the hands of your elected representatives,” Cotton also said.

Cotton returned to the inclusion of a visa-program expansion in the omnibus package as a glaring example of how conservatives shouldn’t be governing.

“What’s most galling to me, Laura, is the thing like the H2-B provision — it’s one thing to acknowledge that the Democrats, because of the Senate and the filibuster, have a veto over our pet projects,” Cotton added, saying it was nevertheless inappropriate to appease the Democrats by tacking that onto the 1,700-page continuing resolution.

“Whose vote are we getting because we are expanding an abusive guest-worker program? I just don’t understand who that is,” Cotton said. “Maybe the Democrats want it, but why are we giving that to them? That’s not something that should be in a spending bill to begin with.”

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When Ingraham asked Cotton about the U.S.’s continued presence in Afghanistan and why troops weren’t being removed while billions of dollars continued to pour in, Cotton insisted that the U.S. is “trying to ensure that it doesn’t become what it was before 2001, which was an unfettered safe haven for al-Qaida.”

“We don’t have to be there forever, and we wouldn’t be there as long as we have been if President Obama hadn’t made so many unwise decisions earlier,” Cotton said, adding, “It’s never going to be Norway or Sweden, and that’s not what our objective should be there. But what we should be worried about is the American blood that will be spilled on our own shores if it becomes once again what it was in the late 1990s and early 2000, which was a safe haven for groups like al-Qaida and ISIS that can launch mass-casualty attacks against us.”

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“But that doesn’t require us to have a hundred thousand troops there on the ground for decades at a time,” Cotton said. “Afghanistan remains the one place where we ejected al-Qaida from and where they have not yet returned to the ability to launch those kind of attacks against us.”

When Ingraham noted that Congress “can’t allocate a billion dollars in a down payment on a [border] wall, and yet they’re willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in a remote area of the world,” Cotton responded that this is “one reason why we shouldn’t make ill-advised decisions like President Obama did in 2011 when we overthrew the government of Libya and turned that into an ungoverned terrorist zone as well.”

The U.S. must continue to increase its efforts in working more closely with local governments in the Middle East to stop terrorist groups from taking root, Cotton said, so that the U.S. can focus on domestic issues.

“But I, like every other American, want to see American troops come home from Afghanistan,” Cotton added. “I don’t want to see terrorists follow behind them, though.”