Dear Oklahoma friends and neighbors:
Before you get ready for a great weekend, I wanted to take a moment to quickly update you on the outcome of the debt limit conversation in Washington, DC, this week and why I opposed the bill to raise the debt limit.
The United States is one of only two nations in the world that has a legislative “debt ceiling” vote. The debt ceiling is a moment when government leaders in Washington, DC, and the American people could have a serious conversation about the direction of our debt and how our tax dollars are spent—since we are currently overspending more than $1 trillion a year.
Our spending is not sustainable, and everyone knows it. But we also recognize that we are the United States of America. We should never fail to pay our debts.
Five months ago on January 19, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter saying that we had reached our $31.4 trillion borrowing limit as a nation, and she used “extraordinary measures,” which are accounting tricks to shuffle money around accounts, until the Treasury ran out of options this week.
Until the last couple of weeks, President Biden rigidly maintained that we should just raise the debt limit with no reforms and we would talk about ways to cut spending later. I have said throughout my time in Congress that any debt ceiling increase needs to come with reforms and spending reductions to change the direction of our over spending. I have voted for debt ceiling increases in the past when they were accompanied by spending reforms or concrete spending reductions.
We cannot fix everything at once, but we can at least get started. What we cannot do during a debt ceiling vote is maintain the status quo.
After three months of delay, President Biden eventually came to the negotiating table with leadership in the House of Representatives and their staffs to discuss legislation to raise the debt ceiling. Last weekend we saw the final product of those negotiations. When I read the first summary of the debt ceiling proposal last weekend, it appeared that we had made some spending progress.
But when the 99 pages of text were released, I was very disappointed.
Instead of cutting spending, as advertised, this bill actually increased spending and even created new funds for future spending. There are also numerous waivers and exceptions that make the bill’s permitting, work requirements, and other policy changes easy for the Administration to ignore. During the debate on the floor last night, a Democratic Senator privately said to me that he could not believe that this bill was going to pass with all the loopholes in it for the Administration.
I do not want the United States to fail to pay our debts on time, but I also do not want our nation to ignore the real future consequences of our overspending year after year.
I voted against the bill, but it passed the Senate and now heads to the President’s desk.
No rational person—Democrat or Republican—believes the federal government is perfectly efficient and there’s no spending we can cut. Washington overspending is saddling future generations with more and more debt, and unfortunately this bill does not significantly change the direction of federal spending.
A few weeks ago, I released my Federal Fumbles waste book (CLICK HERE to check out Volume 7 of Federal Fumbles). There are 50 examples of wasteful spending that are the tip of the iceberg of federal waste in the past year.
We should come to the table like adults and have the hard conversation about our skyrocketing $31.4 trillion debt. I hope you will join me in continuing to focus on how we can actually reduce our debt and deficit. Please continue to send me your ideas and solutions on ways to address these issues together.
You can CLICK HERE to watch or listen to a video of my remarks on the Senate floor yesterday where I laid out the specific areas of the bill that were concerning to me and more on why I opposed it.
In God We Trust,
James Lankford
United States Senator for Oklahoma
