Billy Long: The government needs to be put on an actual budget

(From Seventh District Congressman Billy Long)

All you have to do is read a newspaper or magazine and there is a good chance you will find an example of out of control spending in our nation’s capital. Families across our district, state and country make sacrifices with their spending, but the federal government never seems to want to cut any spending.

I recently came across an article in the Washington Free Beacon about the National Science Foundation (NSF) spending $300,000 to study humans and bikes with the goal to come up with a new plan to encourage more Americans to ride bicycles to lower their carbon footprints. While the amount of money might sound small, this is just one example of the government wasting your tax dollars. Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith of Texas called this $300,000 study unnecessary and said, “The NSF has gone off the road, and taxpayers are paying for it. Scarce public funds were awarded for an ill-conceived study to improve bicycle designs. Peddling their proposal, the researchers asserted that bicycle riding dynamics are ‘poorly understood.’ Yet bicycling is a $65 billion per year global industry that invests hundreds of millions in research and development. What’s really poorly understood is why the NSF wasted $300,000 of taxpayer money on this project.”

The $300,000 waste of taxpayer dollars is a drop in the bucket, but these wasteful spending activities of the government adds up to lots of money over time. This is why I have been working to rein in out of control spending and put this country on a budget.

The easiest way to rein in out of control spending is actually adopting a budget. In April, the House passed H. Con. Res. 96, also known as the Ryan budget, which would reduce spending by $5.1 trillion over ten years and balance the budget. It does this while protecting important government functions such as defense spending and veterans benefits. The budget resolution repeals the president’s health care law, including the law’s tax increases, and calls for fundamental tax reform. The House budget blueprint gives states more flexibility to tailor programs to their people’s needs and protects the promises made to senior citizens.

In April, I also voted in favor of the budget plan developed by the Republican Study Committee (RSC), which would have accelerated the return to balanced budgets. The RSC proposed budget would balance in four years and freezes discretionary spending at $950 billion, pre-2008 levels until the budget is balanced. This proposal also repeals the president’s health care law replacing it with the American Health Care Reform Act. The RSC budget was proposed as an alternative to the Ryan budget. The RSC plan contained more aggressive spending controls which would solve many of our fiscal problems on a faster timetable. However, the RSC budget failed to pass the House of Representatives when it was considered in April.

Putting the U.S. government on an actual budget would go a long way to reining in out of control spending like the NSF using $300,000 to study humans and bicycles. American families have to budget and make the difficult choices with their finances, and Washington should do the same.