Govt. shutdown likely because ‘holdouts’ want to ‘sabotage’ spending cuts, Rep. Moore says

Rep. Blake Moore said Wednesday the country was at a “watershed moment” as national debt exceeded $33 trillion for the first time and spending talks stalled among House Republicans with a government shutdown on the horizon.

The inability of the Republican conference to unite around a reasonable stopgap funding measure and pass appropriations bills that already contain sizable spending cuts is a sign his colleagues are not taking the problems of government spending seriously, Moore said in an interview with the Deseret News.

“When you look at the table of all 12 appropriations bills, we are cutting an enormous amount of spending,” Moore said. “If the handful of Republicans want to sabotage that and make it so we don’t have the opportunity to cut spending, they should have to answer to their constituents on how they’re allowing for more spending to take place.”

Moore said government shutdowns typically result in greater federal spending and effectively boot House Republicans from the negotiating table.

“If you’re one of the holdouts in the next few weeks, you’re actually creating more opportunities to spend more. And it’s hilarious that people can think otherwise about it, but that’s the reality. That’s the truth,” he said.

House GOP edges towards shutdown

Republican disagreements in the House over how to cut spending seem to be pulling the country towards a government shutdown on Oct. 1.

The House GOP conference has struggled to cobble together a stopgap funding measure to give them more time to work through the 11 remaining annual spending bills before government funding expires at midnight on Sept. 30.

Multiple versions of a “continuing resolution” have failed to gain support in the House, where Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy enjoys a bare three-seat majority.

A handful of members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus have stymied McCarthy at every turn, rejecting the speaker’s concessions, sabotaging multiple votes on the Pentagon spending bill and causing the House to close shop for the week on Thursday — effectively canceling a vote on a continuing resolution originally scheduled for Saturday.

Even if the House GOP were to pass a continuing resolution when lawmakers return next week, the Senate will likely amend the bill to remove spending reductions and include Ukraine and disaster funding — essentially sending back a “clean CR” that conservative House members are unlikely to accept.

If the dysfunction continues, moderate House Republicans have said they would consider joining forces with their Democratic colleagues to circumvent McCarthy and approve a continuing resolution, which would likely result in a conservative backlash and McCarthy losing his speakership.

Republicans pass budget resolution out of committee

On Wednesday, the House Budget Committee, on which Moore serves, passed a budget proposal, with recommendations for each of the 12 appropriations bills and a 10-year plan with guidelines for how Congress can reduce the deficit “so we can put our country on a plan that gets us back into that semblance of reality where we can even discuss a balanced budget,” Moore said during Wednesday’s hearing.

The budget resolution will now advance to a floor vote.

The budget resolution is different from the appropriations bills that need to be passed in order to stave off a shutdown. It is a non-binding statement of spending priorities, upon which the appropriation bills are based.

Despite the committee being tasked with producing a budget outline every year to guide the appropriations process, this is the first to see the light of day since Democratic leadership took charge of the committee in 2019.

While missing its target deadline by several months, Moore says the committee’s “Reverse the Curse” Blueprint still played a large role in shaping the FY 2024 appropriations bills to meet the top line number decided in May’s debt ceiling deal of $1.471 trillion, bringing spending back down to FY 2022 levels.

“It’s important to put the marker down,” Moore said to the Deseret News. “That’s what the budget committee is supposed to do. They’re supposed to set the levels, and then all the other committees are supposed to adhere to it.”

The proposal would rescind the energy subsidies approved under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Moore says have been used to fund “pet projects” and wasteful spending. The bill, which despite its name, is mostly focused on funding environmental projects, was originally predicted to cost $400 billion. A year after its passage, it is projected to cost the government more than $1 trillion, according to estimates by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Moore says the budget resolution also proposes cuts to long-term spending programs like Highway Trust Fund and canceling student loan repayment plans.

Moore, a second-term congressman who campaigned on reversing “Washington’s dangerous debt culture,” delivered remarks Wednesday shortly before the House Budget Committee passed its first budget resolution in four years.

Moore: Time to stop deficit spending

“For too long we’ve simply spent money we did not have,” said Moore, who represents Utah’s 1st Congressional District. “We need to act now to reverse this curse.”

While it’s not a solution to Republican infighting over next year’s spending bills, Moore says the budget resolution is a significant step towards giving Americans “hope” that there is a way out of ever-growing debt and interest payments that will cause economic stagnation.

“Every single American, regardless of your party affiliation, your ideology, knows that debt is a curse, that interest overtakes too much of your budget so you can’t invest in the things you want to invest in,” Moore said at the hearing.

America’s national debt hit $33 trillion for the first time Monday and is expected to top $50 trillion by the end of the decade. This level of borrowing comes with serious consequences, Moore explained, forcing the U.S. government to devote an ever-greater portion of its budget to paying interest on its loans.

Interest payments are projected to total more than $650 billion in 2023, $750 billion in 2024, and $10.6 trillion over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office projections. Moore pointed out that this means interest payments are on track to overtake defense, Medicare and Social Security as the largest line item in our budget.

“These numbers are so hard for folks to grapple with,” Moore said in an interview with the Deseret News, adding, “And there’s nothing else that’s more important.”

Shortfalls and surpluses for the budget

Shortly after the committee’s budget “blueprint” was unveiled on Tuesday, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit organization focused on educating the public about fiscal policy, applauded Moore and his colleagues for “finally” producing “an actual budget.”

However, the organization criticized the plan as too little, too late, saying it fell  “far short of the serious effort that will be needed to truly bring deficits under control” because of its unrealistic economic assumptions and unwillingness to rethink the nation’s largest spending programs.

Moore concedes there is much more to be done but says the budget sends an important message to Congress. What Moore, as a former business consultant, is most concerned with, he says, is changing the conversation around debt — and the country’s interest payments on that debt — to make its reduction a priority among lawmakers and voters alike.

“That’s the thing I think is most important, is getting out of the head of the interest juggernaut, because if that ultimately takes over and is the top budget item we have, like we’re in a whole new paradigm of fiscal insanity once that happens,” Moore said. “But we’re not there yet. And I think we have a chance to sort of curb that. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”