As the national media help President Biden whip Americans into a frenzy with claims of “defaulting on our debt” that can result only from a self-fulfilling prophecy, House Republicans are presented with a choice. Will we cave to the president, Wall Street, massive corporations, swamp lobbyists, and the corporate media to continue America’s borrow-and-spend death spiral? Or will we instead take this opportunity to stand up for the American people to demand their “leaders” stop irresponsibly spending money we do not have?
In his 1801 inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson identified certain “blessings” that he found “necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people.” Among them was “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
The elected officials that have plunged the nation into nearly $32 trillion in debt to fund destructive, woke federal programs and endless wars — fueling record inflation in the process — exemplify the antithesis of wisdom and frugality. Federal agencies originally established to “restrain men from injuring one another” are instead weaponized against the American people. Unelected bureaucrats now regulate every aspect of “industry and improvement” to the detriment of freedom and prosperity. And we fund every last bit of it with taxpayer dollars and more government debt — the proverbial “bread” labor has earned.
Our choice, then, is clear.
While Biden and congressional Democrats fiddle, House Republicans must exhibit common-sense leadership to end the federal spending spree that’s harming families with debt and costly inflation. We must rally around a plan to shrink the Washington bureaucracy undermining liberty and economic growth — one that can save approximately $1 trillion in year one and $4.5 trillion over a decade — to take one first step toward sanity and responsibility.
The plan on the table now reduces, by about $131 billion, total fiscal year 2024 “discretionary” spending to 2022 levels. This allows us to continue to fortify national defense at current levels while limiting funding for the federal bureaucracy to pre-Covid spending, which happens to be about the 2024 non-defense levels proposed by that “MAGA extremist” Barack Obama in his final budget. If we then impose spending caps at 1 percent annual growth from there, we will save a massive $3.6 trillion over the next decade just by limiting discretionary spending.
Perhaps even more important than the taxpayer dollars this would save are the limits this would place on woke and weaponized federal agencies and programs that are restricting individual Americans’ ability to prosper economically and live free.
It means limiting funding for federal agencies like the anti-energy EPA, the pro-critical race theory Department of Education, the anti-Second Amendment ATF, and the Covid tyrants at public health agencies like the CDC, NIH, and FDA.
It means encouraging the removal of every last woke, so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” program in the federal government, like those that provided $16,000 to a pro-prostitution LGBT group in Colombia and $50,000 to establish corporate transgender activist groups in India.
It means reconsidering the tens of millions we provide to Mexico each year while the Mexican government allows thousands of migrants to pass through the country and flood our southern border, and the hundreds of millions we provide to corrupt groups that fuel the abuse of migrants by cartels.
It would allow us to cut off the more than $100 million we gave the World Health Organization (WHO) last year, while it does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party — and now, thanks to President Biden, the WHO stands poised to play an even larger role in crafting worldwide “public health” policy and silencing anyone who disagrees.
And it should mean forcing the politicized FBI to get its house in order by cutting the $3.5 billion Biden proposed for a new swamp headquarters while the agency is targeting Americans for speaking up at school board meetings and expressing pro-life beliefs.
Americans rightly don’t trust “future” cuts, so we maximize upfront cuts to inflationary spending right now. We do this by ending Biden’s unfair roughly $500 billion student loan bailout, clawing back the $80 billion Democrats gave the IRS in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to hire 87,000 new agents, rescinding at least $50 billion in unspent Covid dollars, and recouping tens of billions of dollars immediately from the IRA’s crony climate programs.
Finally, it is imperative we supercharge economic growth — or we cannot slay the debt dragon.
The first step is to unleash American energy, crush the climate cult’s anti-human policies, and empower the working class. This includes fully repealing the IRA’s climate-cronyism energy subsidies, which funnel U.S. taxpayer dollars into Chinese solar companies, pay blue-state elites making six figures to buy Teslas, and distort markets to massively favor grid-destroying wind and solar energy. According to Goldman Sachs, repealing the IRA’s climate subsidies and programs could save some $1.2 trillion — nearly three times their original cost estimate — over 10 years.
The second step is for Congress to reassert its authority over the federal bureaucracy. In addition to spending constraints, the House Republican plan includes a simple reform called the REINS Act, which requires any significant bureaucratic regulation to require congressional approval.
The third and final step is to enact and strengthen work requirements for federal programs — which President Biden himself has supported — like SNAP and Medicaid to get Americans back to work and leading fulfilling lives. The truth is that years of anti-work subsidies have left our labor force participation below pre-Covid levels, and individuals, businesses, and communities are suffering for it.
Republicans have been promising to cut spending and shrink the federal government for decades, and our track record has been beyond pathetic. The debt ceiling is an opportunity for my colleagues to stand up and fight to keep the promises we made to get elected.
Enough talk, enough lip service, enough promises; it’s time to take action to radically re-empower the American people, unleash our economy, and pull this country back from self-imposed decline. Now is the time for bold action rooted in the vision of the founders; we can do that by shrinking Washington to grow America.
Chip Roy is the Republican representative for the 21st congressional district in Texas.
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