Require Presidential Leadership and No Deficit Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Chair, the amendment that I bring forward just puts some additional transparency into a piece of legislation that I strongly support that just requires the President to lay out a detailed plan of how his budget would balance.
What this amendment would do would be to specifically carve out direct spending. Direct spending, Madam Chair, represents more than 60 percent of all Federal expenditures. So more than 60 percent of our budget is direct spending, both means tested and non-means tested. All we ask for with this amendment is the transparency that as that supplemental budget is produced, that it also breaks out how means-tested spending and non-means-tested spending, number one, was averaged over the prior 10 years, but also, in this supplemental budget the President would lay out, what would happen to those direct spending programs over the course of the period that the President would lay out in that supplemental budget.
One other thing it does is it makes sure that if there are any reforms, just like in the House budget, if we lay out any reforms, those would have to be spelled out in the language of this amendment. So if any reforms to direct spending would be included in the President's supplemental budget, that those reforms would have to be spelled out in an actual text of that document.
This is something we already included in the House rules package. It's part of the House rules when a House budget is presented, so we felt like the American people deserve this kind of transparency, especially when you're talking about more than 60 percent of the budget. Let's just make sure it's laid out.
With that, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Chair, clearly, if you look at what happened, we don't have the numbers from the President because he missed his statutory deadline, so we're hoping that he at least puts forth a budget. It would be ideal if he puts forth a budget that shows balance in some period of time, as we've done; but at the same time, we also expect transparency so that the American taxpayers can see where more than 60 percent of the budget is spent.
So I urge adoption of this amendment and the underlying bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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