The House Freedom Caucus, by outlining its spending demands, is not asking for anything that's "outrageous or crazy," Rep. Andy Biggs, a caucus member, said on Newsmax Saturday.
"It's just good fiscal planning, and we're hoping that our colleagues will join us," the Arizona Republican said. "We have a structural problem where we spend over $100 billion more every month than we bring in, and a lot of that's going right into the executive branch and the bureaucracy."
The plan calls for several cost-cutting measures, including setting a cap on discretionary spending for 10 years, stopping President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, and pulling back the $80 billion approved late last year to expand the IRS.
Biggs noted that the House has already introduced legislation to claw back $325 billion in subsidies for Biden's Green New Deal plans, as well as legislation that rescinds the Inflation Reduction Act's $80 billion allocated to hire IRS agents.
"You have to have real cuts up front," Biggs said. "You can't wait and push those cuts off any longer ... for just one year if we said we're going to go through it without a single month of deficit spending in a month, I think we can do that."
Meanwhile, the caucus members, with their plan, "didn't go radical and say to go back to 2019 pre-COVID levels," said Biggs. "We just said now that COVID is over, let's go back to 2022 levels."
The Biden administration, he added, "grew some departments and agencies by 30% last year; so you start saying, 'Look.' You start ratcheting down."
The bureaucracy has also led to different programs, including one in the State Department for $12 billion that Biden included for international climate change programs, said Biggs.
"Those aren't even in the United States of America, so I think those are the types of line items that we're going to get consensus on," he continued. "I think everybody tends to agree on the student loan forgiveness program being unconstitutional and unfair."
Biggs also discussed the Jan. 6 video footage that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has released through Fox News in recent days and said he agrees that all the evidence should be released of what went on that day.
"For two years we've been listening to the Democrats shape a narrative," he said. "They called everybody an armed insurrectionist."
However, he said, only some of the crowd was "thuggish and violent," and Democrats crafted what happened to make it appear all who were involved were the same way.
"They've taken away the due process rights of those [people]," Biggs said. "I believe everybody gets due process ... nobody can contextualize this unless you see the whole picture."
About NEWSMAX TV:
NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.