President Biden Reveals Budget Proposal For 2024

President Joe Biden formally unveiled his spending proposal for fiscal year 2024 Thursday, the opening move in what’s certain to be a contentious and drawn-out negotiation with Republicans to not only produce a final budget, but avoid going into default on the national debt.

The administration and Republicans in Congress both frame their budget goals in terms of being fiscally responsible and reducing debt, but the two sides have fundamentally different views on how that should be done.

Fulfilling his Constitutional role of presenting Congress with a budget plan, President Biden Thursday fired the opening salvo in the battle.

"I will protect Social Security and Medicare without any changes," the president said to a cheering crowd at a northeast Philadelphia union hall. "Guaranteed."

The president threw down the gauntlet, daring Republicans to slice up and pare down a budget that, as proposed, would preserve the things he believes Americans care most about.

Biden's proposal totals just about $6.8 trillion and would increase spending on social programs, as well as, on the military (3.2%). 

The increases would be paid for, largely, through a series of tax increases on wealthy corporations and individuals totaling about $5 trillion. And the president said under this plan, annual deficits would decline by close to $3 trillion over the next ten years.

Members of Oklahoma's congressional delegation said this is exactly the wrong way to go.

"The president doesn’t want to do anything about cutting spending," Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK1), Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said, "he wants to try and tax our way out of the problems we’re in."

"It’s the same playbook of more revenue generation by higher taxation," Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK2), a member of the House Budget Committee, said, "and I don’t believe we can tax and spend our way into prosperity."

Congressmen Brecheen, Hern and the House Republican majority said the president's proposal is dead on arrival. 

They intend to use the looming debt ceiling crisis to force discretionary spending cuts, which could present them with their own challenge.

In the run-up to Rep. Kevin McCarthy's election as Speaker, members of the GOP caucus -- Rep. Becheen among them -- were able to obtain a pledge that discretionary spending for FY 2024 would be reduced to FY 2022 levels, meaning a reduction of more than $130 billion in domestic spending, including on defense.

Congressman Hern said Congress must work responsibly toward balancing the budget, and that will likely mean making some tough decisions. He said fulfilling that pledge shouldn't actually be that difficult.

"If you just go back to October of last year when [discretionary spending] got increased by $138 billion," he said Thursday morning. "We haven’t even started spending that money, so there’s not gonna be any recognized cuts."

Rep. Brecheen said there's plenty of wasteful spending right now and that all areas, including the military, need to be carefully reviewed.

"There’s plenty of areas to cut," Brecheen said in an interview Thursday, "we’re going through it line by line right now in the Budget Committee."

President Biden remains firmly opposed to tying an increase in the debt ceiling to a guarantee of spending cuts, but Thursday he did repeat the pledge he made in the State of the Union address that he's willing to sit down with Speaker McCarthy to negotiate.

"I want to make it clear I'm ready to meet with the Speaker anytime--tomorrow, if he has his budget," the president said.

The expectation is that Republicans will release their budget proposal in the next couple of weeks. 

The question will then be, if, when or how long it takes for the two sides to sit down for serious budget talks.