McCarthy Says Debt Ceiling Deal Offers ‘Biggest Cut in History’

Tuesday on FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) defended the debt ceiling deal brokered between him and President Joe Biden.

McCarthy told Fox News Channel’s Brian Kilmeade that according to the Congressional Budget Office, the deal gave the biggest cuts in the history of the U.S. government.

“Well, look, it’s a different Congress. It’s a new day,” he said. “It’s not that you have to pass a bill to find out what’s in it. You’ve got 72 hours. This isn’t a thousand-page bill. This is 99 pages. And this is different than we’ve ever had before. We’re actually going to spend less money this year than we spent last year. And your viewers have heard me give this analogy before. A debt limit is like the family having a credit card, but you’ve been charging it up every year and just keep lifting the limit.

This year’s different. We now say we’re going to spend less. Now, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to look at all of what we spend our money on because the mandatory spending, Social Security, Medicare, that’s all off to the side. So, I can only look at about 15 percent of what we spend our money on.

“So, what we did is, in elements like non-defense, that’s going to go below 2022 levels, so that’s a very positive,” McCarthy continued. “But the other thing we did, we put ourselves on a spending plan.