While many lawmakers have preached for years the need for federal spending cuts, the amount of taxpayer money that Congress spends on its own operations has swelled 38% since FY2014 from $4.3 billion to $6.9 billion this year, according to a Just the News review of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports on annual federal budgets.
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The Senate voted to pass the House’s stopgap funding bill on Saturday night by a vote of 88 to 9, avoiding a government shutdown that would have occurred at midnight, the end of the fiscal year. The bill will now go to the White House for President Biden’s signature.
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Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz sparred with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday over the impeachment probe of President Joe Biden and the potential government shutdown. Bartiromo said in her opening monologue on “Sunday Morning Futures” that Gaetz was disrupting “the Republican wins” by standing against stopgap funding measures.
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The House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers in the House, outlined Monday what conditions would need to be met for them to vote for a new spending bill.
The group is calling for spending bills to include provisions on border security, the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and FBI, and the Pentagon’s “cancerous woke polices.” The lawmakers also oppose “any blank check for Ukraine in any supplemental appropriations bill.”
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the House Republican majority have unveiled their spending plan for the next decade, the Limit, Save, Grow Act, that will be tied to a $1.5 trillion increase in the $31.4 trillion national debt ceiling, the centerpiece of which imposes discretionary budget caps beginning in 2024, but which will be set at 2022 levels, which could save more than $3.2 trillion over the next decade, according to an estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
While an official score still has not come in from the Congressional Budget Office, the proposal stands out as a promise kept on McCarthy’s part to use the must-pass debt ceiling to restore some semblance of fiscal sanity to the out-of-control federal budget and national debt, the latter of which the White House Office of Management and Budget projects will rise to a gargantuan $50.7 trillion by 2033.
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U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Thursday grilled Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on whether she still believes inflation is a positive for Americans and the economy.
During the Senate Finance Committee hearing on President Joe Biden’s $6.9 trillion budget proposal, Grassley also asked Yellen whether her boss has it in him to rise about politics and lead on shoring up a troubled Social Security system headed down the road to insolvency.
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The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the now-released President’s Budget is projecting just 0.6 percent in inflation-adjusted real growth of the U.S. economy in 2023 as the unemployment rate is expected to rise to 4.3 percent in 2023 and peak at 4.6 percent in 2024 after the economy is finished overheating from the continued, elevated inflation, consumers max out on credit and spending falls off a cliff.
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