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Source: Congress.gov
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This hearing will come to order. Good morning and welcome to the Budget Committee's Member Day hearing. I want to thank the ranking member for coming. A clear sign of the tremendous support for reforming the budget process, which I know we share is an integral part of restoring fiscal responsibility here in the nation's capital. And today, the purpose of this hearing is to hear testimony from our colleagues on their budget priorities and Ideas for reform and you myself such time as I may consume for an opening statement So good morning and thank you to everyone for being here This is something it's a tradition that we've been doing for a long time Big believer in it, especially in the context of what we're highlighting here today of course none of us has all the answers but each of us brings a different perspective about the nature of the problems that we face and There's one fundamental issue that I think continues to hold Congress back, and that is we simply do not have a healthy functioning budget process. And the reality is we haven't had one in a long time. It's crazy, but dating back to the late 1990s, we've averaged more than five continuing resolutions every single fiscal year. And of course, we're operating under one right now. No serious enterprise could operate this way and expect good outcomes. But for DC, fiscal apathy has become routine. And I think the results speak for themselves. During the recent shutdown, our national debt surpassed $38 trillion. This year, think about it, we're taking in $5 trillion, spending $7 trillion. We're spending a trillion a year on interest alone, which is, of course, more than our entire national defense budget.
Ray Dalio has warned that we're inviting a debt-induced heart attack, his words. Instead of treating the disease, we keep arguing about the symptoms. Part of some fights, over 20% of the budget, while the other 80% are mandatory spending runs on autopilot. A process built for another area just cannot carry the weight of today's fiscal challenges. Just think about how, as we discussed at our last hearing, in more than 50 years, The CBO, Congressional Budget Office, has never undergone a single external operational audit, not one. How can we produce better outcomes if CBO has never been independently evaluated for accuracy, transparency, or performance? There are numerous common sense reforms like this on the table that I think can breathe new life into the process, shake off the cobwebs, and lift the bias back toward action. Last Congress, our committee, the Budget Committee, came together to pass 14 bipartisan reform bills. And we can do a lot more. We need better, more modern rules of the road. We need clear, measurable targets to guide us, which brings me to another idea that's gaining traction. We know that right now deficits are averaging around 6% of GDP. At that level, the debt grows faster than the economy, interest costs accelerate, and we risk drifting toward a sovereign debt crisis. Bringing deficits down to about 3% of GDP, cutting that in half, which is a target endorsed by both Ray Dalio and also by Secretary Bassett has talked about this, that would stabilize the debt and begin to restore credibility. Mandatory spending driven by Social Security and federal health programs' interest on our debt now accounts for about 90 percent of all future spending growth.
In the recent reconciliation bill, we began to move the needle, delivering historic mandatory spending reductions. Social Security and Medicare now face insolvency in 2032 and 2033, respectively. But no long-term fiscal plan is credible if it ignores the health care system. In my view, this conversation must happen on two tracks. First, making Americans genuine consumers of healthcare, able to shop, compare, push the system toward value. And second, tackling the practices that inflate every medical bill. Excessive hospital markups, opaque middlemen, and patent games that keep drug prices artificially high. In time, the broader challenges should be taken up by a fiscal commission. And of course, we've passed the bill out of committee. We've expressed support. I've expressed support for modeling one after the successful Greenspan Commission to confront these issues plainly and without regard for the politics of the moment. This is another area where I welcome the input and ideas of members we'll be hearing from today. Because ultimately, we can't reverse the curse of public debt without exercising the political will to make the tough decisions we all talk about. And while we can't manufacture political will in a hearing room, we can create better conditions for it, certainly better than the tough conditions we have now. So today and in the months to come, I'm hoping to appeal to the better fiscal angels of our nature. There is still a part of this institution and a part of each of us that understands the responsibility that we all carry.
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