Republican Study Committee Budget

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, I am rising also to join my coworkers in advocating for fiscal responsibility as Congress seeks to craft a budget.

The RSC budget is bold, and I am pleased to see it include such proposals as requiring the Congressional Budget Office to account for debt servicing in the cost estimates they prepare for Congress. My bill, H.R. 638, the Cost Estimates Improvement Act, would do that very thing.

Before legislation passes either the House or the Senate, lawmakers should know how much it will actually cost. This would seem to go without saying, but lawmakers consistently overlook one key cost, the new interest payments their spending will create. Folks back home understand how important this is, that we should be honest about the true cost of spending.

If you were budgeting for monthly car payments and only considered the list price of the car itself and didn't factor in the extra cost of interest payments, you would later discover that the total cost is more than you could afford. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Congress does when considering new spending.

Congress relies on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation to estimate the cost of legislation. But Congress does not require either of them to include the cost of servicing the additional debt that is created by authorizing or reauthorizing spending. This results in an incomplete picture of the total actual cost.

Servicing national debt is becoming a substantial part of Federal spending. Within just a few years, our Nation will be spending more on interest payments than on the entire Department of Defense. This should alarm all of us, as this will increasingly crowd out other spending priorities.

I introduced H.R. 638, the Cost Estimates Improvement Act, to address these problems by requiring the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation to add the cost of servicing the debt to the cost estimates of any future legislation.

In essence, Congress is not considering the comprehensive budgetary impact of spending and tax proposals. This distorts congressional decisionmaking in favor of more spending and debt accumulation.

Congress routinely ignores the true costs and overstates the benefits of new spending. The American people have to account for the cost of debt in their family budgets, and providing Congress with accurate cost estimates that include the cost of debt servicing is a commonsense reform that would hold Congress to the same standard, forcing lawmakers to reckon with the actual cost of raising our national debt.

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