House rules package is a first step to fiscal sanity  

In their campaigns leading up to the midterm elections, Republican candidates across the country promised voters they would bring back sound fiscal policies if they won control of one or both chambers of Congress. Voters rewarded the Republicans with a majority in the House of Representatives and the GOP immediately took a big first step to restore fiscal sanity in Washington. On Jan. 9, 2023, the House approved the rules for the 118th Congress, and passed H.R. 23, the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, both of which will reduce wasteful government spending and help taxpayers.  

The rules package establishes the parameters of the operations of the House of Representatives for the 118th Congress. The package includes several commonsense provisions that will allow members to do far more than they did under the Democrats’ majority to rein in government spending. One provision is the re-institution of “cut-as-you-go,” which was established when the Republicans held the House in the 112th Congress. It requires any increase in mandatory spending over the next five or ten years be offset with equal or greater decreases in mandatory spending. It also reinstates the Holman Rule, which allows members of Congress to offer amendments to appropriations bills that reduce the salary of or terminate specific federal employees or eliminate a specific government program. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will also be required to include a report on the inflationary impact any new spending bill will have. This will force Congress to be more mindful of the harm government spending has on the economy.   

The 118th Congress will also immediately be engaged in increased oversight and transparency. House committees, except for the Appropriations, Ethics and Rules committees, are required under the rules to adopt an oversight plan by March 1, 2023. This plan must include a list of unauthorized programs and agencies that fall within the jurisdiction of the committee, and detail how the committee plans to conduct oversight of these programs before they are reauthorized or suggest which programs can be consolidated to reduce overlapping and duplicative spending. There is also a provision regarding limitations on funding for programs that have not been authorized, which alone has the potential to save taxpayers billions of dollars. According to the CBO, $461 billion was spent on 422 expired authorizations in 2022 and there were 1,118 authorizations that expired before the beginning of fiscal year 2022.   

The new rules also require an increased effort to publish legislative documents in machine-readable formats. This will make Congress more transparent and accountable to public scrutiny and help in assemble publications like CAGW’s Congressional Pig Book.   

During its first full week of business, the House of Representatives took a significant step toward helping taxpayers by passing H.R. 23, the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act. The legislation fulfills a promise made before the elections by House Speaker McCarthy (R-Calif.) to consider this as the first bill in the 118th Congress. H.R. 23 rescinds all unobligated funds from the $80 billion provided to the IRS to hire 87,000 new IRS agents and the $15 million provided for a study to allow the IRS to create its own tax filing software as provided in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The IRS has continually failed to process tax returns and provide quality customer service to taxpayers, yet the 117th Congress was determined to reward the agency for these inefficiencies. The agency is still working through its massive backlog of unprocessed tax returns and only answers about 10 percent of calls from taxpayers. It is unthinkable that Congress would increase funding for tax audits rather than improve customer service and upgrade outdated technology, some of which dates back to the 1960s. There have been continuous objections to the idea that the IRS should be judge, jury, and executioner for tax returns, particularly given the success of the Free File Program, which allows 70 percent of taxpayers to file their taxes for free through a private company. 

After two years of runaway spending and rising inflation across the country, voters were yearning for a restoration of fiscal sanity. In their Commitment to America, House Republicans promised to bring an end to the Biden administration’s disastrous tax and spending policies. Republicans have been in the House majority for less than two weeks and are already taking steps to bring fiscal sanity back to Washington. 

Eric Maus is CAGW‘s Federal Government Affairs Associate.