As critical November elections quickly approach, some in Congress are already weighing a crowded calendar for 2025, with potentially nasty showdowns over taxes and the national debt on the horizon.
Although Congress still has just over three months until the next government shutdown is due, members on both sides have already acknowledged that some kind of stopgap solution will likely be needed to buy time for spending negotiations.
Conservatives are pushing to delay a deal on annual spending until after the presidential election, believing that if former President Trump is re-elected, they will have more influence.
In two interviews that aired Monday, Reps. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) and Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), chairman and ranking member of the House Budget Committee, respectively, sat down with Bob Cusack from The Hill to discuss the look ahead.
“I think we keep the majority. I think the Senate is the biggest guarantee, if there is one in politics, that they will turn around,” Arrington said in the interview, which was conducted in partnership with the 92nd Street Y in New York City. “And so I think Trump has the momentum, but it will be a close race.”
Arrington said there has been “a lot of talk about what the unified Republican leadership triad would be” and that it is “appropriate” to discuss what a Republican Party agenda would be. He said he believes there is a good chance that full GOP control of Congress and the White House could be “the outcome after November.”
The big fight will be over the tax law signed by Trump, which will expire at the end of 2025.
Democrats have attacked some of the provisions in Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, claiming they give tax cuts to the wealthy while seizing on projections of the legislation’s impact on the nation’s deficits.
Republicans, on the other hand, have pushed to extend the former president’s tax law, which they described as “pro-growth,” while increasing scrutiny around the accuracy of his estimated deficit costs.
In the recent interview, Arrington expressed confidence in the extent of Trump’s tax cuts “across the board,” and that some tax cuts and reforms could broaden the economy and thus bring more revenue to the government. At the same time, he said Republicans have to recognize that tax cuts must be paid for to help the budget.
“We need to recognize positive feedback or what they call dynamic scoring,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they will pay for themselves entirely, and we cannot, as Republicans who claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, have any agenda that will produce larger deficits in the coming years and that we need to be fully committed to reducing deficits and making it the right way.”
Boyle called next year a “once-in-a-decade opportunity to impact tax and fiscal policy.”
“To prepare for that, part of our focus right now on the Democratic side is doing the prep work. So we are ready to start work in January 2025,” Boyle said, adding that he is already holding meetings with some of his Democratic colleagues to help them get up to speed before next year.
“I’ve been calling a series of meetings and sort of informative educational roundtables for my Democratic colleagues on the committee to talk about everything that will expire as set forth by law,” he said. “In 2025, it will truly be a once-in-a-decade opportunity again. So the work on this doesn’t start in 2025. In fact, some of it starts now.”
“What is it about the US economy that has become by far the number one in the world? And this gap between us and everyone else is actually accelerating this,” he said. “So I think it’s important to understand what caused this. This didn’t happen by accident, and what lessons can we learn that can be applied to the conversations happening about 2025 and the rest of the next decade?”
As the country’s debt of more than $34 billion continues to rise, both budget leaders expressed the urgency to do something to reduce the country’s growing red ink.
“If we do nothing, whether on the programmatic reform side or the payment side, on Social Security and Medicare, two of the most important safety net programs for our seniors, they will automatically be cut,” Arrington said, before point to his proposal to create a bipartisan commission to explore ways to tackle the national debt.
Pressed on whether he has spoken with GOP leadership about scheduling a vote on legislation to form such a commission later this year, Arrington said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is “philosophically all for from that”.
“He understands as well as anyone that this kind of bipartisan building is what will have to happen eventually to tackle the big issues,” he said.
In his interview, Boyle also noted that when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, both will be “insolvent within about a decade” if “nothing else happens.”
“So I recognize that we have real challenges,” he said. “Not today, not tomorrow, but in the relatively near future that we need to deal with.”
He said he thinks that in the end it will be “the members who will have to solve these problems – not an independent commission.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
