Members of Congress are set to vote this week on the contentious debt ceiling deal reached by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Joe Biden over the Memorial Day weekend.
[RELATED: Biden, McCarthy Fiercely Divided Over Debt Ceiling Crisis Before May 9 Meeting]
The details of the deal between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy were released Sunday in a 99-page bill called the “Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.”
The proposed bill includes several hard-fought compromises with which neither congressional Republicans nor Democrats are likely to be entirely satisfied.
Biden and McCarthy will work to win bipartisan approval to push their deal through the House and Senate by the end of this week, ahead of the June 5 deadline at which time Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the United States would default on its debt obligations if the debt limit was not suspended or raised.
What is in Biden and McCarthy’s debt ceiling deal?
Biden and McCarthy’s bill would suspend the debt limit until January 2025, preventing another debt limit crisis until after the 2024 presidential election—an important political victory for Biden’s reelection bid.
In exchange for suspending the debt limit, McCarthy was able to secure several key spending cuts and policy changes Republican lawmakers were pushing for throughout the negotiation process.
The package freezes non-defense spending to 2022 levels, and sets a 1 percent growth limit on topline federal spending for the next six years.
Additionally, the bill would rescind almost $30 billion in unspent COVID relief funds, as well as slashing $400 million from the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) “Global Health Fund.”
McCarthy was also able to negotiate a $1.4 billion reduction of Biden’s proposed increased Internal Revenue Service (IRS) funding.
Aside from spending limits and cuts, the package would impose tougher work requirements on recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Currently, work requirements exist to receive food stamps for able-bodied adults aged 18 to 49. The package would raise the upper age limit of the work requirement to 54 by 2025.
On Sunday McCarthy released an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explaining how the bill achieves the spending cuts Republicans were looking for.
“We will spend less money next year than we did this year – stopping inflationary spending while fully funding our national defense, meeting our obligations to our veterans, and preserving and protecting Social Security and Medicare,” McCarthy said.
“By comparison, no other debt limit increase in the past decade has accomplished these three things: reduces overall spending, reduces non-defense spending, and reduces the deficit,” he said.
A more unexpected provision of the debt ceiling package is the inclusion of changes to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The first changes to NEPA in almost 40 years, Biden and McCarthy’s package would streamline the environmental review process by establishing a lead environmental assessment agency and placing time limits on environmental impact statements for certain projects.
The bill also would aid the expedited completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia promoted by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), by approving all permits and authorizations for its construction.
“I am pleased Speaker McCarthy and his leadership team see the tremendous value in completing the MVP to increase domestic energy production and drive down costs across America and especially in WV,” Manchin said in a statement Sunday.
Mixed reactions to the debt ceiling deal
Several Republican lawmakers have expressed their disapproval of McCarthy’s compromises, saying that the modest spending cuts in the bill do not go far enough.
On Monday Sen. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said in a Fox News interview that he will not support the Biden-McCarthy bill, and will urge fellow congressional Republicans to vote against it.
“Instead of pre-COVID levels, we are now going up the post-COVID curve, and we’re flattening it out,” Sen. Roy said, “basically freezing spending for two years for a $4 trillion dollar debt increase.”
“My constituents at home do not want that, so I’m going to be making that loud and clear to my Republican colleagues that this is not a deal we should be taking,” he said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) voiced similar concerns about the deal on the Monday episode of his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
“And so if you just think in terms of big picture comparison, increasing the debt limit from 1.5 trillion to 4 trillion is a big increase. And the spending reductions are much, much smaller,” Cruz said. “That’s the biggest reason I’m disappointed by what we’re looking at.”
Florida Governor and candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination Ron DeSantis also weighed in on the deal on Fox and Friends Monday.
DeSantis said the deal is inadequate for preventing the U.S. from “careening towards bankruptcy,” and simply delays the debt limit issue to get lawmakers through the next election cycle.
While Republicans remain split over the debt limit deal, President Biden said in a press briefing Sunday that the deal was “good news for the American people.”
“The agreement prevents the worst possible crisis, a default, for the the first time in our Nation’s history,” Biden said.
“[The deal] protects key priorities and accomplishments and values that congressional Democrats and I have fought long and hard for,” he said.
“I strongly urge both chambers to pass that agreement. Let’s keep moving forward on meeting our obligations and building the strongest economy in the history of the world,” he added.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act will be considered by House Rules Committee Tuesday afternoon, before receiving a full vote in the Republican-controlled House on Wednesday.
The bill, if passed in the House, will then move on to the Senate where party leaders Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will try to win bipartisan approval for the deal before the end of the week, in advance of the June 5 default deadline.
