Just weeks after Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave Joe Biden unlimited borrowing authority in the debt ceiling negotiations, the U.S. government national debt has risen by over one trillion dollars according to publicly available Treasury Department records.
On June 2, the day before Biden signed the debt deal onto law, the national debt stood at $31,467,099,921,028.51. As of July 7, the last date available, the debt was $32,477,557,021,205.00.
McCarthy went into the homestretch of negotiations with Biden in May with strong public support for the Republican position of cutting spending but ended up giving Biden unlimited borrowing authority until January 1, 2025–putting the issue safely past the 2024 elections while leaving it to a lame duck Congress to increase the debt ceiling.
Fox News first reported the trillion dollar increase in the debt on Monday (excerpt):
The national debt has increased $4.7 trillion since Biden took office in January 2021, and is expected to keep rising in the face of annual budget shortfalls of at least $1 trillion per year. So far in fiscal year 2023, the government has spent $1.16 trillion more than it has collected and the Biden administration is predicting a $1.5 trillion budget deficit when the fiscal year ends in September.
…As the debt ceiling deal was being negotiated between Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., several conservatives argued that the GOP should be pushing for much steeper cuts to federal spending.
Russ Vought, former President Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, criticized Republicans for moving away from a House-passed plan that would have capped the growth in federal spending to a maximum of 1% per year over the next decade.
“They have never been in a stronger place,” Vought said in May. “They have passed a bill that this town and the country did not think was possible, they kept their team together, they have 75-25 polling to their backs, they had the Democrats in a situation where they had said you did not negotiate for months, and yet up against a deadline that’s not a real deadline… they just completely caved.”
When the deal was announced in late May, several Republican Congressmen estimated the McCarthy-Biden deal would add four trillion to the debt by the time the unlimited borrowing authorization ends at the end of 2024 (New York Post excerpt):
Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale became the first lawmaker to expressly commit to voting against the deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling — calling it an “insult” to Americans.
The Montana politician made the promise in a defiant official statement Sunday.
“The D.C. Swamp has proposed the largest debt ceiling increase in our nation’s history, adding $4 trillion to the existing $31 trillion national debt,” he said.
…“This ‘deal’ is insanity. A $4T debt ceiling increase with virtually no cuts is not what we agreed to. Not gonna vote to bankrupt our country. The American people deserve better,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) tweeted Saturday.
