“Without exaggeration, America’s debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The debt ceiling debate is about more than debt:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy speaks during an event at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, April 17, 2023.
More than half of the 320 pages of legislative text are a rehash of an energy bill Republicans passed earlier this year, which aimed to speed up leasing and permitting for oil and gas drilling. Republicans say the bill would boost economic growth and bring in more revenue for the federal government, although the Congressional Budget Office projected it would slightly lose revenue.
Even if the entire estimated savings from the plan came to pass, it would still leave the nation a decade from now with total debt that is larger than the annual output of the economy — a level that McCarthy and other Republicans have frequently labeled a crisis. At the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, McCarthy accused the president and his party of already adding “$6 trillion to our nation’s debt burden,” ignoring the bipartisan support enjoyed by most of the spending Biden has signed into law.
Taken together, those efforts reduce deficits by a bit over $100 billion, suggesting that debt levels are not the primary consideration in targeting those provisions. The bill’s next 200 pages show what actually is: a sustained push to tilt federal support away from low-emission energy and further toward fossil fuels, including mandating new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and reducing barriers to the construction of new pipelines.
The legislation, which Republicans plan to vote on next week, is meant to force Biden to negotiate over raising the debt limit, which is currently capped at $31.4 trillion. Unless the cap is lifted, the federal government — which borrows huge sums of money to pay its bills — is expected to run out of cash as early as June.The House Rules Committee said Friday that it would meet on April 25 to consider the bill and possibly advance it to a floor vote.
The bill would claw back some unspent COVID relief money and impose new work requirements that could reduce federal spending on Medicaid and food assistance. It would block Biden’s proposal to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt and a related plan to reduce loan payments for low-income college graduates.
Those reductions are a far cry from Republicans’ promises, after winning control of the House in November, to balance the budget in 10 years. That lowering of ambitions is partly the product of Republican leaders ruling out any cuts to the fast-rising costs of Social Security or Medicare, bowing to an onslaught of political attacks from Biden.
Some of that spending could potentially be reduced by congressional appropriators working under the proposed spending caps, but much of it is exempt from the cap or already out the door. Most of the $1.9 trillion economic aid plan Biden signed in March 2021, which Republicans blame for fueling high inflation, is already spent as well.
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