WASHINGTON – Heritage Action, a conservative grassroots organization with two million grassroots activists, released a statement from Executive Director Jessica Anderson following introduction of the bill to lift the debt ceiling.
"Since January, Heritage Action, on behalf of our grassroots members, has called for a robust debt ceiling agreement that caps and cuts spending to Fiscal Year ‘22 levels, includes pro-growth policies that offset a transparent dollar amount increase in the debt ceiling, and adequately addresses the trajectory of spending in Washington. The recent House passed Limit, Save, Grow satisfied all of those requirements and provided a roadmap for Republicans to negotiate across the chambers.
Unfortunately, Democrats refused to take up that bill, and President Biden negotiated against controlling our debt and slowing the Federal government’s rate of spending. The deal in front of the American people fails to achieve many necessary reforms needed to fix a broken Washington, and President Biden is chiefly at fault. Instead of capping overall spending to FY22 levels, the agreement only locks in a minuscule $12 billion in net savings in discretionary spending with a potential for increased spending in the out years of the agreement.
Most importantly, by suspending the debt ceiling until January 2025, this deal relinquishes the necessary pressure of the debt limit and its constraints on executive action. While there are notions of constraints in an administrative PAYGO requirement, many of these provisions can simply be ignored in practice.
While there are some victories like permitting reform that will help unlock pent up construction demand and common sense work requirements for SNAP and TANF, they are smaller and less impactful than all that is needed to grow the economy.
Heritage Action remains concerned about the fiscal trajectory of the country and the burdens it places on each and every American taxpayer. This deal does little to get at the root problems that have led to nearly $32 trillion in debt and it certainly does not meet the requirements Heritage Action defined at the start of this Congress. We remain committed to finding solutions to once and for all bend the spending curve down.”