Congress Has a Chance to Show It’s Serious About Spending

For decades, Washington has made a habit of talking about fiscal responsibility while doing the opposite. Our national debt has crossed $37 trillion. Interest payments are now on track to surpass defense spending. And yet, every time Congress is given an opportunity to reverse course, it flinches.

The current rescissions package—which is a process the President uses to request Congress to cancel or rescind previously appropriated funds—is a rare opportunity to do the right thing. It rolls back billions of dollars in unspent and wasteful federal funds, it doesn’t take away support from the truly vulnerable. It simply begins the long-overdue process of cleaning up the mess.

This is not a radical proposal. In fact, if Congress cannot bring itself to pass these basic, good-government reforms, it sends a dangerous message: that even the easiest savings are politically impossible. If we can’t trim unused funds and outdated subsidies, what hope is there for tackling the broader drivers of our fiscal crisis?

The House has already acted. We passed the rescissions package, which is now in the Senate for consideration. Every week of delay allows more waste to pile up, and makes clear to taxpayers that fiscal restraint remains more rhetoric than reality.

Critics argue this package is too small to matter. That’s precisely the point. If Congress won’t approve even modest savings, how can it credibly promise larger reforms later?

Others claim it’s the wrong time. However, Washington has used that excuse for decades—during recessions and recoveries, crises and calm. The result: debt and deficits as far as the eye can see, and a federal budget increasingly dominated by interest payments and automatic spending.

The Biden administration and many in Congress have shown no appetite for course correction. In less than four years, under Biden’s administration, the federal government added over $6 trillion in new debt. Inflation, once dismissed as “transitory,” became a tax on hard-working Americans. And yet the appetite for more spending—more subsidies, more mandates, more programs—remains insatiable.

This rescission package is not a comprehensive solution, but it is a start. And it’s a necessary one. It would restore a measure of integrity to the budget process and demonstrate to taxpayers that Congress is capable of self-discipline.

The House majority ran on fiscal sanity. Now is the time to prove it. That starts by eliminating what we don’t need, streamlining what we do, and setting a higher bar for every taxpayer dollar spent. The American people expect accountability. They expect results.

Congress must pass the rescissions. Not because it solves everything, but because it finally starts something.