On the recordMay 15, 2019
I am rising also to join my coworkers in advocating for fiscal responsibility as Congress seeks to craft a budget. The RSC budget is bold, and I am pleased to see it include such proposals as requiring the Congressional Budget Office to account for debt servicing in the cost estimates they prepare for Congress. My bill, H.R. 638, the Cost Estimates Improvement Act, would do that very thing. Before legislation passes either the House or the Senate, lawmakers should know how much it will actually cost. This would seem to go without saying, but lawmakers consistently overlook one key cost, the new interest payments their spending will create. Folks back home understand how important this is, that we should be honest about the true cost of spending. If you were budgeting for monthly car payments and only considered the list price of the car itself and didn't factor in the extra cost of interest payments, you would later discover that the total cost is more than you could afford. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Congress does when considering new spending. Congress relies on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation to estimate the cost of legislation. But Congress does not require either of them to include the cost of servicing the additional debt that is created by authorizing or reauthorizing spending. This results in an incomplete picture of the total actual cost.…
