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Senate Republicans will introduce a bill Thursday to allow state and local governments to redirect federal government grants they receive to pay off growing national debt.
In particular, the bill would ensure that democratic-led blue states do not end up receiving federal funds that the red states rejected.
GOP Sens. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Rick Scott of Florida are set to introduce the Pay Down the Debt Act of 2021 to give state and local leaders the power to take concrete action to reduce federal debt.
“We are on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory, and right now states and communities are powerless to do anything about it,” Lummis told the Washington Examiner.
“Thanks to our bill, state and local leaders would be able to take the unused or unnecessary funds given to them by the federal government and redirect them to meet our national debt of $ 28 trillion. . the grandchildren will have to pay it later, â€she said.
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Republicans have grown increasingly wary as Congress spent nearly $ 4 trillion on pandemic relief last year, as the Biden administration prepares to spend trillions more.
In April, Senate Republicans, led by Lummis, introduced a bill to create a new bipartite national commission reduce the deficit and balance the federal budget within 10 years.
Lummis and Scott cite President Joe Biden’s $ 1.9 trillion US bailout as an example of government spending that states have partially waived. Many Republican states have now refused the additional unemployment benefits included in the law.
Another example occurred in 2011, when the Obama administration, led by then-Vice President Joe Biden, awarded $ 2 billion in grants for a high-speed train program in California after Scott, who was governor of Florida at the time, refused to take federal government money for his own state’s high-speed rail project.
The Republican governors of Ohio and Wisconsin also rejected federal grants in order to signal their fiscal discipline and score political points.
The high-speed train initiative was unsuccessful. Then-former President Barack Obama’s Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently said it was a significant failure.
Scott and other Republicans say they don’t want the wrong spending on the rail project to be repeated.
“Our nation is approaching $ 30 trillion in debt, and President Biden and the Democrats continue to spend American taxpayer dollars with reckless abandon,” Scott told the Washington Examiner.
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“Our bill promotes fiscal responsibility by allowing them to redirect the subsidies they receive from the federal government, such as the hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts from the Democrats’ US bailout, toward deficit spending cuts. federal, â€he added.
Original location: EXCLUSIVE: Senate Republicans propose allowing states to redirect federal funds to debt reduction
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