Rep. Smucker Offers Opening Remarks at Budget Committee Member Day Hearing

Rep. Lloyd Smucker (PA-11), Vice Chair of the House Budget Committee, offered opening remarks during the Committee's Member Day hearing held on December 3, 2025. His remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below: 

Good morning and thank you to everyone for being here. 

Member Day is a great tradition. I’m a big believer in it–especially in the context of what we’re highlighting here today. None of us has all the answers, and each of us brings a different perspective about the nature of the problems. 

If there is one fundamental issue that continues to hold Congress back, it’s that we simply don’t have a healthy, functioning budget process. And the reality is, we haven’t had one in a long time. 

Dating back to the late 1990s, we’ve averaged more than five continuing resolutions every single fiscal year. We are operating under one right now. No serious enterprise could operate this way and expect good outcomes. But for Washington, fiscal apathy has become routine, and the results speak for themselves. During the recent shutdown, our national debt surpassed $38 trillion. 

We’re spending $1 trillion a year on interest alone—more than our entire national defense budget. Ray Dalio has warned that we are inviting a “debt-induced heart attack.” And instead of treating the disease, we keep arguing about the symptoms—partisan fights over 20 percent of the budget while the other 80 percent runs on autopilot. 

A process built for another era cannot carry the weight of today’s fiscal challenges. Just think about how, as we discussed at our last hearing, in more than 50 years the Congressional Budget Office has never undergone a single external, operational audit. Not one. 
How can we produce better outcomes if CBO has never been independently evaluated for accuracy, transparency, or performance? 

There are numerous common-sense reforms like this on the table to breathe new life into this process, shake off the cobwebs, and shift the bias back toward action. 

Last Congress, our committee came together to pass 14 bipartisan reform bills. We can do more. We need better, more modern rules of the road, and clear, measurable targets to guide us–which brings me to another idea that is gaining traction. We know that right now, deficits are averaging somewhere around 6 percent of GDP. 

At that level, the debt grows faster than the economy, interest costs accelerate, and we risk drifting toward a sovereign debt crisis. Bringing deficits down to about 3 percent of GDP—a target endorsed by both Ray Dalio and Secretary Bessent—would stabilize the debt and begin to restore credibility. Mandatory spending, driven by Social Security and federal health programs, and interest on our debt now accounts for 90 percent of all future spending growth. 

In the recent reconciliation bill, we began to move the needle, delivering historic mandatory spending reductions. Social Security and Medicare now face insolvency in 2032 and 2033, respectively. But no long-term fiscal plan is credible if it ignores the health care system. 

In my view, this conversation must happen on two tracks: first, making Americans genuine consumers of health care—able to shop, compare, and push the system toward value. And second, tackling the practices that inflate every medical bill—excessive hospital markups, opaque middlemen, and patent games that keep drug prices artificially high. 

In time, the broader challenges may have to be taken up by a fiscal commission. I’ve expressed support for modeling one after the successful Greenspan Commission—to confront these issues plainly and without regard for the politics of the moment. This is another area where I welcome the input and ideas of our members. 

Because ultimately, we can’t reverse the curse of public debt without exercising the political will to make the tough decisions we all talk about. And while we can’t manufacture political will in a hearing room, we can create better conditions for it–certainly better than the tough sod we have now. 

So today, and in the months to come, I am hoping to appeal to the better fiscal angels of our nature. 

There is still a part of this institution and in each of us that understands the responsibility we carry. We did not come here to preside over decline. We came here to leave the country stronger than we found it. And if we can summon those better fiscal angels—discipline, transparency, stewardship—we can begin to make choices that protect the next generation. 

That, to me, is the mission of this Committee, and it is the urgency of this moment. I look forward to our discussion today.