Tuesday on FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) defended the debt ceiling deal brokered between him and President Joe Biden.
McCarthy told Fox News Channel’s Brian Kilmeade that according to the Congressional Budget Office, the deal gave the biggest cuts in the history of the U.S. government.
“Well, look, it’s a different Congress. It’s a new day,” he said. “It’s not that you have to pass a bill to find out what’s in it. You’ve got 72 hours. This isn’t a thousand-page bill. This is 99 pages. And this is different than we’ve ever had before. We’re actually going to spend less money this year than we spent last year. And your viewers have heard me give this analogy before. A debt limit is like the family having a credit card, but you’ve been charging it up every year and just keep lifting the limit. This year’s different. We now say we’re going to spend less. Now, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to look at all of what we spend our money on because the mandatory spending, Social Security, Medicare, that’s all off to the side. So, I can only look at about 15 percent of what we spend our money on.
“So, what we did is, in elements like non-defense, that’s going to go below 2022 levels, so that’s a very positive,” McCarthy continued. “But the other thing we did, we put ourselves on a spending plan. We cap how much we can spend for the next six years with government. But we also did something different. In this family, we may have a child that — able-bodied, not married, no kids, but he’s sitting on the couch collecting welfare. We’re going to put work requirements on that individual, so he’s going to have work requirements, he’s going to get a job, and it’s going to make life easier. But we’re also going to look at places we’ve been spending our money that we’ve wasted that we’re going to return, right? Like all that COVID money that we didn’t spend, we’re going to bring it back.”
“But one of my favorites here is $400 million for CDC, the Global Fund, where we’d use that hard-working taxpayer money over to China — we’re not going to do that,” he explained. “We’re going to send that back. And then we did a number of other things here, right? One of the very interesting things we did is is that the president has been spending money wildly. If he wants to put a new regulation in, we took an executive order of President Trump’s, and now we’re putting it into law and making it a little tougher, where if he wants to put a new regulation in, he has to cut government if it costs more than $100 million. And then we looked at things about cutting the red tape that we get so frustrated. We can’t build the roads. It takes seven years. We now reformed NEPA, the environmental review. Instead of waiting seven years now, the studies are only one to two years. This hasn’t been done in 40 years.”
“And then we did something interesting to make government or make Congress — consequences for their lack of action,” McCarthy explained. “They have 12 appropriation bills that they have to pass every year, and they never do, and they come back with that omnibus. Now we say, if you don’t do your job, it’s a 1% cut across the board. So, encourage members of Congress, not now with the new Congress who actually show up, now you’re going to have to work. This is going to be the biggest cut by — the Congressional Budget Office says, in history of where we’re going forward. To do all that, we allowed the debt ceiling to go forward for the next 18 months. And we’ll readdress it, hopefully with a Republican president and a Republican Senate, and even make it stronger.”
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