Press Releases

Yesterday, Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kansas) published an op-ed in National Review, The Biden Administration’s Budget Disaster, unpacking the damaging provisions in the president’s latest budget request and highlighting the plan put forth by Republicans which, in contrast, balances the budget in 10 years.
 
Highlights of the op-ed are below and you can read the full op-ed here.
 
The Biden Administration’s Budget Disaster
Biden’s belated budget proposal is a fiscal nightmare. But there is a better way.
 
Last week, about a month late, President Joe Biden released his ten-year budget, and it is alarming.
 
For starters, the president pushes for $4.9 trillion in new taxes, expands the Environmental Protection Agency by $900 million and the Department of Energy by $3.6 billion, and creates $82.9 billion in new mandatory spending programs.
 
With proposals like this, you would think there is a money tree in Washington. Unsustainable budgets are proposed, the government spends more than it takes in, which causes deficit spending, and all this spending keeps adding to our ever-growing debt. And the convoluted process means that the terms budget, deficit, and debt are often misused, misunderstood, or completely ignored. …
 
That difference between what the federal government raises in tax revenue and spends is known as a deficit. Our federal government has been deficit spending nonstop since fiscal year 2002. In fact, in the past 50 years, the government has run at a surplus only five times.
 
So deficits aren’t new, but their size has increased. In the ten years prior to the pandemic, deficits averaged $0.83 trillion per year. But post-Covid? The fiscal year 2022 deficit was $1.38 trillion, and the FY2023 deficit was up to $1.7 trillion.
 
In fiscal years 2020 and ’21, there was bipartisan support for aggressively addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, but the response to a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe should not become the new norm. Unfortunately, D.C. big spenders relished the unrestrained indulgence, and they haven’t taken their foot off the pedal. …
 
The national debt is growing each year in large part due to the deficits, but it’s not just the spending and borrowing that’s a problem — we have to pay interest on the debt, too. The interest on President Biden’s massive proposed debt is a whopping $12.2 trillion. Over the ten-year budget window, President Biden’s budget plans to spend $2.5 trillion more on interest from the national debt than it spends on defense programs.
 
Congressional leaders need to exercise fiscal restraint to end the ongoing cycle of bad budgets and trillion-dollar deficits that has produced $34.5 trillion in debt. And the budget that Republicans passed this month shows that this is possible.