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Replace the empty demand for a "balanced budget" with a bipartisan, fast-tracked process that forces Congress to vote on spending and revenue changes together.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
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What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
Gross federal debt passed $39 trillion in mid-2026. The FY2025 deficit was $1.8 trillion on $7.0 trillion in spending against $5.2 trillion in revenue, and CBO's February 2026 baseline puts the FY2026 deficit at $1.9 trillion, 5.8% of GDP, with debt held by the public rising from 101% of GDP this year to 120% by 2036, above the prior record set just after World War II. Net interest on the debt passed $1 trillion for the first time in FY2025 and now costs more than national defense. None of that is in dispute. What Congress cannot agree on is a mechanism, and the two live options on the table this year point in opposite directions.
On March 18, 2026, the House voted 211-207 on Rep. Andy Biggs's constitutional balanced-budget amendment, far short of the two-thirds required. It deserved to fail on the merits as well as the math: the amendment pairs mandatory annual balance with a two-thirds supermajority for any tax increase, which forecloses revenue as a lever by design and would force spending cuts precisely when a recession is already cutting tax collections.
The other live mechanism is the Fiscal Commission Act, introduced this Congress by sponsor Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), with Angus King (I-ME), Thom Tillis, Chris Coons, Todd Young, Tim Kaine, Bill Cassidy, Jeanne Shaheen, Kevin Cramer, and Mark Warner as cosponsors (four Republicans, one independent, four Democrats, plus Curtis), and a House companion from Reps. Bill Huizenga and Scott Peters whose predecessor bill cleared the Budget Committee 22-12 in January 2024, three Democrats joining every Republican present. It would create a 16-member, evenly bipartisan commission charged with a debt-stabilization plan, spending and revenue both explicitly in scope, sent to Congress under an expedited procedure. This platform supports that mechanism because it is built to survive the two ways debt-reduction plans usually die: a two-thirds amendment threshold nothing clears, and death by a hundred separate committee markups that never resolve into one vote.
Pass the Fiscal Commission Act, with spending and revenue both explicitly inside the commission's mandate. Neither party gets a preemptive exemption.
Pair the floor vote with a pre-enacted fallback if Congress passes nothing by a fixed deadline: an automatic, evenly split mix of spending cuts and revenue measures, sized to a fixed deficit-reduction target and written into the enabling statute itself (see Extended for why this design draws on a different precedent from BRAC-style approval).
Oppose constitutional amendments built like H.J.Res.139, which pair mandatory balance with a supermajority requirement on new revenue and would turn ordinary recessions into forced austerity.
Restore binding statutory discretionary spending caps to replace the ones that expired after FY2025, requiring any waiver to pass as its own standalone, recorded vote rather than ride through an unrelated must-pass bill, the way the PAYGO Medicare sequester waiver rode through November 2025's shutdown-ending funding bill without receiving its own vote.
Require that any debt-stabilization package move spending and revenue changes in the same vote: non-defense discretionary spending, just over $950 billion of $7.0 trillion in FY2025 outlays, is not large enough on its own to close a $1.8 trillion deficit even if eliminated entirely.
Deficits are not a mood problem to be solved with better manners. They are the sum of specific, recorded votes, and a bipartisan Senate list running from Curtis and Tillis to Kaine and Warner already exists for the mechanism that would make the next vote binding.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
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