Jay Obernolte: Fiscal Responsibility Act is a step forward, but more work remains to be done

The words “we have a deal” echoed through the halls of Congress after 97 days of waiting for the White House to engage in negotiations, several weeks of intense talks, and decades of out-of-control government spending that had been left completely unchecked.

The final product of those negotiations was named the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a bill to raise the debt ceiling until January 2025 while enacting measures to reduce non-defense spending and shrink the deficit without raising taxes. This is the first debt ceiling increase in the last decade that achieves all of these goals.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act is the largest spending reduction Congress has ever enacted at more than $2.1 trillion, and it is a step forward in the fight for fiscal sanity. However, I wish this bill had gone several steps further. Thanks to our rate of deficit spending in recent years, this level of spending reduction is still far from a long-term solution to America’s fiscal problems. However, it is at least one step in the right direction, and one is better than none.

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