Former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) won the position as the 55th House speaker on the 15th ballot in January 2023, after House Republicans won a narrow majority during President Joe Biden’s 2022 midterm elections.
McCarthy, a well-regarded House member since 2007 and solid fundraiser from California, made a fatal concession in cobbling his majority together by allowing a change in House rules that any individual, dissatisfied member of the body, could move to vacate the office of Speaker, opening a new contest for the job. When the body has 435 members, keeping everybody happy turned out to be no easy task.
While wrangling over raising the U.S. debt ceiling again in 2023, McCarthy had to make concessions to House Democrats to put together a passing vote on the House floor.GOP budget hawks pounced, and by October 2023, McCarthy had been ousted as Speaker, with the third shortest tenure in U.S. history.
It’s telling that President Donald Trump wanted a substantial increase in the current U.S. debt ceiling, before even beginning discussions about his Big Beautiful Budget Bill. That, unfortunately, did not occur for him and the Trump agenda.
While running on fiscal conservatism, DOGE, and shrinking the size of the federal government, the Big Beautiful Bill, a budget by continuing resolution, does not actually do that.
Yes, there are massive grant reductions, spending cuts, and federal government layoffs. Still, those are offset by deep and permanent tax cuts, a shrinking of Medicare rolls and our social safety net, significant reductions in medical research and R&D spending, as well as some ideologically driven budget hikes, such as $350 billion more for immigration reform and border security.
The incredible Golden Dome “space shield” that Trump also wants is not even part of this act.
I am not here to debate the merits of the bill, but more its structure and process. Following McCarthy's departure, House and Senate Republicans agreed that the American people, as well as their own colleagues, deserved greater transparency in the budget.
To return to fiscal sanity, the budget should be divided up into large segments, such as healthcare, national defense spending, discretionary domestic spending, and the like, they said. This would better enable the committee structures on the Hill to scrutinize and review existing inefficiencies and waste, as well as potentially reduce the nearly automatic annual increases in agency spending, which have tended to exceed inflation.
That also didn’t happen.
Current House SpeakerMike Johnson, a five-term incumbent from Louisiana, was elected to succeed McCarthy, in part based on an agenda of breaking up the massive federal budget into chunks and passing those across the course of the calendar and fiscal years.
This, versus the seemingly endless mad rush to the cliffs of omnibus reconciliation bills or again raising the U.S. debt ceiling, which always seem to occur at the 11th hour and typically reach the president’s desk just before another potential bond rating downgrade.
Yet, despite the work of DOGE and after passing the U.S. House with only one vote to spare, the Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to add an additional $1 trillion in debt ($3.3 trillion total) over the next decade to the U.S. budget.
It remains difficult for me to wrap my head around the concept of $1 trillion, but to put that in more relatable terms, all federal government spending from 1776 until the first term of President Ronald Reagan (1981-85), adds up to $1 trillion. We are now forecasting a deficit of roughly $1.7 trillion for the current fiscal year, based on the current budget.
This spending path is not sustainable. The Senate bill is likely to receive a vote by the end of the week and is on track to meet Trump’s agenda and Reconciliation Budget deadline of July 4.
I am certain the D.C. fireworks budget will be spectacular.
But the Senate version will need to return to the House, due to some substantial revisions, and three to five House members, including some strong and vocal Trump allies, are wavering.
Former Tesla CEO Elon Musk is publicly calling the reconciliation bill, including numerous non-budget items, “political suicide.”Perhaps it will be for future White House visits by Musk, as this president takes his arm-twisting and enemies list pretty seriously.
And with one of the largest budget gaps forecast in history, things are about to get pretty ugly around that One Big Beautiful Bill.