$40 trillion debt puts fiscal commission back in congressional spotlight

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(The Center Square) – Members of the House Budget Committee convened offsite Monday in Dallas, Texas, to discuss the possibility of a bipartisan fiscal commission that would focus on addressing the national debt and budget issues.

Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, and others pointed to the national debt, which recently surpassed $40 trillion, and rising interest costs as evidence of the need for Congress to address the nation’s fiscal trajectory.

“It took our nation nearly 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of debt, and today, we add $1 trillion to the national debt every five months,” Arrington said. “We’re borrowing annually more than the operating budget, defense and non-defense, of the United States of America. Our interest on the debt consumes almost 20 cents of every dollar in revenue. That’s three times the amount of interest expense from a decade ago.”

Arrington translated the scale of the national debt into household and individual terms.

“To fully appreciate the magnitude of this level of debt, every American household owes a $300,000 share of the national debt. Even more concerning,” Arrington continued, “if you are 18 years of age and younger, or if you’re born today in this great country of ours, your share of the debt is over a half a million dollars, and it will be a million dollars in just 10 years.”

The choice before the committee is whether to pass legislation from Reps. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., and Scott Peters, D-Calif., for the creation of a new bipartisan fiscal commission. The commission’s job would be to negotiate one comprehensive package for improving the federal government’s long-term finances, to write that package as legislation and then send it to Congress under a fast-track procedure.

The bill has 42 cosponsors – 21 Republicans and 21 Democrats. Under Arrington, the committee passed similar legislation in 2024, but that bill never made it to the House floor for a vote.

Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., the leading Democrat on the committee, questioned whether a commission was the answer to Congress’ persistent budget and debt challenges, calling himself a “commission skeptic” and citing a remark from fellow budget committee member Rep. Tom McClintock R-Calif.

“Now I’m not often in the habit of quoting Tom McClintock, but I will here today,” Boyle said. “He said, ‘The ultimate bipartisan commission in this nation is called the Congress, and the Congress, as imperfect as it is, is where these decisions must be made.’”

Boyle said he was inclined to agree, especially in light of previous efforts to develop bipartisan debt-reduction plans like the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2010 establishing the national commission to address many of the same fiscal challenges the proposed Fiscal Commission Act seeks to tackle. Congress created the joint select committee in 2011 as part of a debt-ceiling agreement, tasking it with developing legislation to reduce federal deficits by at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Both ultimately failed to produce a debt-reduction plan that Congress enacted.

But some hearing witnesses argued that there were structural flaws in that commission and committee that inhibited their success, and that those could or would be addressed in this model.

Rob Portman, a former Republican U.S. senator from Ohio who served in Congress at the time and on the joint select committee, noted some things he described as “obviously glaringly wrong” with the commission. Because Obama created the commission by executive order, its recommendations had no guarantee of congressional consideration.

“One [issue] was it wasn’t statutory, so you know Congress talked about doing something. The president ended up doing it by executive order,” Portman said.

But Portman also said requiring 14 of the commission’s 18 members to approve its final recommendations was too stringent.

“I think that’s a mistake. I think a supermajority is fine,” Portman said, adding that a simple majority with required support from both parties could also work.

“But don’t make it a super-super majority because it was just impossible to reach that number, and they did not reach it,” Portman said.

Unlike the 2010 commission, the proposed legislation from Huizenga and Peters would require congressional action on the commission’s recommendations within a specified timeline.

The overall tone of the hearing seemed to favor creating the commission, with witnesses and committee members arguing that the nation’s fiscal challenges presented an extraordinary moment requiring action from Congress.

Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., along with others and drawing from experience, argued that a commission could devote itself to public education on the issues in ways that individual members of Congress wouldn’t.

“We had a commission on education funding in Pennsylvania on an issue that had existed for like decades, never been able to get solved,” Smucker said. “The key to the commission was we went all around the state and held public hearings, and talked to people about the problem. Everyone got engaged, from the teachers’ unions to the school boards, to school choice folks — everyone started believing that this fiscal commission was going to be the avenue to solve the problem that they knew existed and had seen for a long period of time.”

Leon Panetta, former President Bill Clinton’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said a commission would provide “political cover” in a time of heightened partisanship.

“You've got to ask yourselves, where are you now politically, in terms of your ability to do what needs to be done? And the reality is that you’re in gridlock. You’re paralyzed. It’s the politics of our time,” Panetta said. “And what [the commission] will do is, I think, it will provide at least a degree of cover for the members, so that ultimately, if a commission does come to an agreement, then the members can step up and do what needs to be done in order to deal with the deficit. It's a starting point.”