Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Thursday that legislators should focus on reducing the federal budget to “a pre-pandemic level,” adding that the domestic policy package under consideration in Congress must “justify why we’re spending so much.”
House Republicans last week passed a wide-ranging domestic policy bill that, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, would raise the national debt by $3.3 trillion.
Johnson has become one of the Senate’s leading Republican voices against the bill, warning on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases it.”
The Wisconsin Republican told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America” on Thursday: “Listen, I support the president, I support his agenda. We want to grow our economy. So what I’ve been suggesting is we need to have the full debate here.”
He added that “in the House, about the only number you heard in a budget reconciliation process where we ought to be talking about a bunch of numbers is $1.5 trillion.”
Johnson said that figure “was completely without context,” adding that “It sounds like a lot of money, but over ten years, it’s only $150 billion a year, when we’ve increased spending from 4.4 trillion to $7 trillion in just the last six years.”
He added that the U.S. has “basically doubled spending in the last 10 or 11 years,” saying that “it’s completely out of control. There’s no justification to continue to spend what we spent during an emergency pandemic.”
Johnson noted that “after World War II,” U.S. leaders “actually reduced spending to below pre-war levels. We need to have that same kind of commitment from leaders in Congress, as well as the president, to return to a pre-pandemic level of spending.”
He added, “Don’t start at a completely unrealized, unjustified level, spending over $7 trillion, and suffer death by a thousand cuts.”
Johnson said that legislators should “start from a reasonable baseline” and “justify” any spending increases from 2019.
“From my standpoint, what we need to do is we need to break this into a couple parts,” the senator said. “Let’s focus on things we have to get done, let’s make sure we maintain leverage on the process to get to pre-pandemic level, but let’s take the time to go through the budget line by line, like Elon Musk did with [the Department of Government Efficiency].”
Johnson said that Musk “showed us how to do it. You have to focus on all spending every line item and make these agencies and the federal government justify why we’re spending so much.”
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