RSC Releases Budget Proposal, Calls For $16.7 Trillion Spending Cut Over 10 Years

As Congress races the clock to finalize appropriations for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, the Republican Study Committee, the largest GOP caucus on Capitol Hill, released its budget proposal Friday for 2025, with one Oklahoma member playing a prominent role.

Oklahoma Congressman Kevin Hern chairs the RSC and says there’s no higher priority for him than returning to the long-forgotten days of, not only doing a budget in regular order but passing a budget that actually balances. "We haven’t done this since the '90s," Rep. Hern (R-Okla.) said in an interview Wednesday. "We had a budget in the black, we were paying back our debt."

Hern notes that when he first arrived in Washington in 2018 the budget deficit was about half a trillion dollars; he says this year it will be almost six times as much – and estimated $2.8 trillion. "And then when you look at that and say, that only happened in six years--we can’t keep going like we’re going," Hern said, "spending has got to change."

At a news conference Thursday morning, Hern and other members of the RSC, laid out their latest plan for such change, a budget proposal titled Fiscal Sanity to Save America. From this year's $1.66 trillion total discretionary budget, a modest cut of $20 billion in non-defense discretionary spending for fiscal year 2025, with bigger cuts to follow. helping lead, Hern says, to a balanced budget by 2031.

The budget blueprint, they say, is a thorough plan to address federal spending and start paying down the national debt by cutting spending by $16.7 trillion over 10 years. "My guess is there will be some that will ask about how aggressive it is," Hern said, "and I would say to them that this is a pathway forward to a balanced budget, one that balances in seven years."

That can't happen, though, Hern says, unless D.C. politicians -- Democrats and Republicans -- get real about the mandatory spending tied to Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. "If nothing is done, they have grave worries," Hern said, "because within the next seven years, both will take a 20 percent cut across the board."

Under the RSC budget, Hern says they would phase in reforms that would only impact those now entering the workforce, like changes to the Primary Insurance Amount benefit formula and the retirement age. "We’re securing this for the people that are in retirement or near retirement," he said, "and for those others entering the workforce, we have got to do something different."

As for the current appropriations mess, Hern says House leadership would have been better off agreeing to the deal that’s before them now back in the fall, so they could have moved on and gotten to work in earnest on 2025 spending.