EXCLUSIVE — House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said a full committee hearing will be held this month in Texas to discuss a bipartisan fiscal commission, as legislators reckon with the national debt eclipsing $40 trillion.
Arrington told the Washington Examiner Tuesday that the hearing, which has not yet been announced, will be held in Dallas on Sept. 21.
Some budgeteers see a fiscal commission as a path to fiscal adjustments, such as spending cuts or tax increases, that would otherwise be too politically polarizing for members of Congress to vote for.
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“We’re getting out of Washington, where people can’t think out of the bubble,” said Arrington, who is retiring next year.
Arrington said the hearing will be on “how we create this mechanism” to address the fiscal situation, noting that Congress has experience creating bipartisan commissions. He specifically mentioned the Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, commission, the 1983 National Commission on Social Security Reform, and the 2010 National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, known as the Simpson-Bowles Commission.
“Basically, a way to get thoughtful people, thoughtful policymakers, on both sides and outside experts and leaders in the business community, economics, so that we can all work on a long-term plan to deal with the structural deficits, the structural imbalances, in our budgets,” the chairman said.
For years, most members of Congress have shied away from suggesting reforms to the old-age entitlement programs that account for much of federal spending. Arrington made a point of highlighting the demographic drivers of the rising debt.
“It’s 10,000 baby boomers getting on Social Security and Medicare, and until we, as lawmakers and leaders, work on addressing that and bending the curve on the expenses in these big entitlements — we could cut all of discretionary spending, and we’ll still bankrupt the country,” he said.
“So we know what we need to do, but those are political, as you know, third-rail issues — both sides have avoided them when they had total control,” Arrington added.
Yields on long-term Treasurys recently hit multiyear highs, in part, because of underlying fiscal concerns.
Some experts think the best way to address these long-standing problems would be through some form of bipartisan fiscal commission, which would give lawmakers some political cover while showing markets and investors that Congress is serious about righting its fiscal ship.
Arrington’s planned hearing appears to be a key step in that process.
Bipartisan commissions have had mixed results, including the three that Arrington mentioned to the Washington Examiner.
The BRAC commission is an example of Congress using a commission successfully.
In that case, the United States needed to close dozens of military installations across the country in the wake of the Cold War. But individual lawmakers had incentives to keep bases in their districts, so the decision on which bases would be closed or consolidated was left to a commission. Ultimately, more than 350 military installations were closed or consolidated.
The National Commission on Social Security Reform, dubbed the Greenspan Commission after its chairman, Alan Greenspan, was a bipartisan commission formed in the early 1980s to make tough choices as Social Security was facing an imminent financing crisis.
Congress ultimately accepted and enacted the commission’s recommendations, which kept Social Security afloat.
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Meanwhile, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, known as the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which was formed in 2010 and designed to reduce the deficit, was seen largely as a failure.
The bipartisan commission came up with $4 trillion in deficit reduction through spending cuts and through increasing revenues. But Congress never enacted the legislation.