Issue Position: Fiscal Sanity

Issue Position

Pete Sessions Plan for Restoring America's Future

Washington has a spending problem that has placed our nation on an unsustainable path of trillion dollar deficits and a $17 trillion national debt. That is why I have consistently voted to limit federal spending, reform entitlement programs, and am a co-sponsor of a bill that calls for the passage of the balanced budget amendment. Thanks to the Republican majority in the House, we have been able to hold the line of federal spending, putting total expenditures on a slightly downward path. Declines of total federal expenditures for the past two fiscal years are the first back-to-back annual spending reductions since the Korean War. While these reductions in spending are important, we still have a long way to go.

In 2009 and 2010, when Democrats had control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the federal government went on a spending binge. Through an $831 billion stimulus package, ObamaCare, and Dodd-Frank, Democrats dedicated themselves to more federal spending and increased government interference in the private sector. In 2009, the federal government spent $3.77 trillion and ran a $1.5 trillion deficit, both of which were the largest of all time. The federal government spent $3.67 trillion in 2010 and $3.75 trillion in 2011 and added an additional $2.7 trillion to the national debt.

In 2010, I led the effort by Republicans to take back the House and halt this spending spree. Under my leadership as Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Republicans elected 89 freshman Members of Congress and switched 63 Democrat-held seats to the Republican column. Republicans quickly went to work reining in federal spending after removing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. To begin, House Republicans forced a virtual freeze in the growth of federal spending. Despite opposition from the Democrat-controlled Senate and the White House, total spending by the federal government is now growing by the slowest amount annually in over sixty years.

Since Republicans took back control of the House, I have voted for the Budget Control Act of 2011, which cut nearly one trillion in spending over a decade and led to another $1.2 trillion in sequester cuts, and the "Cut, Cap, and Balance Act," which would have cut discretionary spending by an additional $111 billion, reduced mandatory spending by $51 billion, and capped federal spending at 20% of GDP. I was also a cosponsor of a proposal for a balance budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States. While our annual spending is still too high, thanks to House Republicans the federal government is spending $317 billion a year less than it was in 2009.

In this Congress, I voted for Rep. Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity Budget, which would have balanced the budget within 10 years, reformed the tax code, and taken our country off a path of fiscal insolvency and onto a path towards fiscal success. This budget would also take smart and responsible steps to reform our entitlement programs. When the Democrat-controlled Senate refused to pass a budget, I backed "No Budget, No Pay" legislation that forced Senate Democrats to pass a budget or else have their pay withheld.

While the new Republican majority has succeeded in capping federal spending, Congress must continue to take even more steps to control unsustainable deficits, which, if left unchecked, will place too much of a burden on future generations of Americans. That is why I remain fully committed to taking the important steps toward fiscal reform and additional spending cuts in order to get our fiscal house in order.

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