By Daniel DePetris
An agreement on the debt ceiling and future budgets was finally struck over the weekend between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The deal would lift the debt ceiling past the 2024 presidential election and cap discretionary spending over the next two years. If this framework sounds familiar, that’s because it is; President Obama and House Republicans passed a similar fiscal arrangement, known as the Budget Control Act, in August 2011, which aimed to reduce U.S. deficits by $2.1 trillion over ten years by slashing government spending across the board.
The big difference between that larger accord and the one Biden and McCarthy are working on, however, is that U.S. defense spending was included in the Obama-era caps (although lawmakers found ways of avoiding caps on defense partly by relying on a wartime fund called the Overseas Contingency Operations account). From what we know, Biden and McCarthy’s terms would insulate the U.S. military from whatever spending freezes are instituted.
This piece was originally published in The Chicago Tribune on May 30, 2023. Read more HERE.