Today, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released its Fiscal Year 2024 budget. This is not just a grocery list of ways to spend our federal taxpayer dollars, but a blueprint of policy priorities that conservatives want to enact over the next budget year.

Overall, the budget delivers solid fiscally-responsible ideas, such as balancing the budget in seven years, reforming the government to reduce its regulatory footprint, and combatting waste and fraud in the system.

The RSC budget also highlights important policy areas such as right-sizing welfare programs to help those who actually need it, funding border security and public safety, saving taxpayers through tax policy and cost-cutting measures, promoting growth, and unwinding the regulatory onslaught of two with President Biden in office. 

Take a look at some of these measures included in the RSC budget proposal:

  • Reduces spending by over $16 trillion.
  • Defunds Biden’s woke policies on abortion, CRT, and gender politics.
  • Ensures the military has the resources to combat adversaries and global threats.
  • Fully funds a Southern border wall.
  • Ensures American energy security.
  • Rescinds IRS funding to harass and spy on taxpayers.
  • Makes permanent the 2017 tax cuts and provisions set to start expiring soon.
  • Cuts taxes by $5 trillion over ten years and provides tax benefits to promote R&D.
  • Adopts bipartisan measures to support Social Security solvency without affecting seniors in or near retirement.

President Biden’s budget was introduced (late) in March. We can now compare and contrast. Biden’s $6.9 trillion budget:

  • Increases spending by $2.2 trillion. 
  • Does not balance the budget.
  • Imposes $4.7 trillion in NEW taxes. 
  • Boosting funding to “process” asylum caseloads and sending $1 billion for Central America and Haiti, again with no policy changes.
  • Hikes taxes on corporations (from 21% to 28%).

Inflation may be moderating, but Biden’s budget would push inflation higher. As I noted in March, 

This budget would accelerate inflation by raising the costs of doing business and injecting more cash into the economy.  Americans simply cannot afford this irresponsible and ill-conceived budget.

Biden’s budget also does not take controlling reckless spending now or stabilizing the future of our entitlement programs seriously. Analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) found that debt would grow by $19 trillion to $43.6 trillion by 2027. Debt would rise from 98 percent of GDP at the end of 2023 to 110 percent by 2033.

In comparison, the RSC budget would reduce the debt from 98 percent today to 68 percent by FY 2033. This “would make significant progress toward improving our nation’s fiscal health by putting debt on a downward path as a share of GDP,” said CRFB president Maya MacGuineas who joins a host of nonprofit leaders in support of the budget.

The RSC budget also fights back against one of Biden’s signature agenda: Environmental Social Governance (ESG). As our colleague, Gabriella Hoffman wrote in Real Clear Policy:

President Joe Biden’s newly-unveiled Fiscal Year 2024 budget, stacked with costly and problematic climate-centric provisions, comes with a steep price tag of $6.9 trillion dollars. Contained in this hefty sum is $52.2 billion in discretionary spending to go to causes such as “tackling the climate crisis” and seeking environmental justice.

…

Equally concerning is the budget’s push to fund so-called environmental justice and equity initiatives—or the S in ESG—to the tune of $1.8 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency and $150 million to the Department of Energy.”

These two budgets could not be more stark highlighting the varying policy priorities of the left and right.

We will see how the budget process unfolds, but conservatives have put forward a good plan to provide relief today, spark economic growth tomorrow, and move us onto a path of sustainability in the future.