Last week, the House passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. This bill raises the debt ceiling to prevent a default on our debt – an event that would jeopardize Social Security, Medicare, Veterans benefits, and your 401K. Look, this bill is far from perfect. But we got about half of what we wanted and President Biden got zero. Plus, the CBO estimates that the bill will cut the deficit by $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Once again, it's not everything we wanted--but Republicans only hold control of the House. Not the Senate and not the White House. You can read the CBO's analysis of the bill here.

Some other highlights? We clawed back $29 trillion in unspent COVID pandemic funds, cut funding for the IRS additional agents sought by the Biden administration in 2024, ensured our veterans will receive the care they earned, no cuts to mandatory spending such as Social Security, and it is the biggest deficit cut in history. We held non-defense discretionary spending below FY22 levels.

You may be hearing from those who opposed this bill say that we didn't get enough, that we should have let the country go into default on its bills. A default would seriously hurt our economy and crush most people’s savings. The impact would have caused Congress to do a clean debt ceiling increase which is the very thing the GOP didn’t want to happen. The choice was a negotiated reduction in spending, a default or a clean debt ceiling increase. Raising the debt ceiling a modest amount to pay the bills we already agreed to while making some cuts was the responsible thing to do.

Now that we have the debt ceiling addressed, we can look ahead at balancing our budget and I am a cosponsor of H.J.Res.12 - Proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States. You and I have to balance our budgets at home and the federal government should as well. We can't keep finding ourselves in this situation and we have to move towards trimming more the of the deficit.

We took a great first step, and I know we have much more to do