On Saturday, Joe Biden signed the McCarthy-Biden Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill into law. The bill includes an increase in US debt by up to 4 trillion dollars over the next two years. The House and the Senate Democrats voted in favor of the bill.
On Sunday, Speaker McCarthy appeared on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. McCarthy declared the new spending bill as a great success for Republicans and the country.
Maria Bartiromo confronted McCarthy on the spending bill, which includes funding for an IRS force that has a history of targeting conservatives and Trump voters. Despite this, McCarthy defended the bill, which had the support of the Democrat Party.
Maria Bartiromo: I want to go through some of the criticism of this bill because some people say it really was different. For example, you had in your bill that passed the House limit Save, Grow, an ability to have work requirements for Medicaid recipients that did not end up in the bill that the President signed. You had in your bill the ability to rescind that $80 billion of IRS funding that the President wants to hire 87,000 agents. That wasn’t in the bill the President signed. It was 1.9 billion of the 80 billion.
Speaker McCarthy: Well, that’s not true. Maria. Maria, you’re saying things that are not true. So let’s first walk through what’s in the bill, because I can always vote against the bill for what’s not in it. But let’s see what’s in it. First of all, in Limits Save Grow, we said we wanted to take the spending levels back to 2022. Well, we actually increased defense and increased the veterans. But non-defense with veterans out, we took it below the 22 level. That gave Democrats a lot of problems. We wanted to repeal all the IRS agents. They’ve already put that money in there. We repealed the 1.4 billion they would spend on hiring new agents this year. So no new agents are being hired. But we also repealed another 20 billion going in the future. What we can redirect, I think that money would be better used instead of hiring IRS agents than hiring Border Patrol agents. So that’s a whole debate that forward. But we already got more than 21 billion. We’ll come back the next year, no new IRS agents are hired. This is scored as a large cut, I heard you earlier say. Yeah, but more Democrats voted for it.
Maria Bartiromo: To be clear, the bulk of that money in the IRS, which was your priority, which was conservatives priorities, they do not want this president to hire 87,000 agents. The bulk of that money is still in the Inflation Reduction Act, and he could use that. So you’re talking about the 20 billion over the following year. To be clear, the bulk of that money is still in the bill that the President signed, and then there’s the defense spending.
Speaker McCarthy: Okay, Maria, pause for one moment. That was already in law. We do not have the Senate, we do not have the presidency. But we just stopped them from hiring any IRS agents, and we also took another 20 billion going into the future, and now we only have the House. So we need the Senate and the presidency. The next time we’ll address this, we have an opportunity to win the Senate and the presidency.
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