David Schweikert Reveals Massive Trove Of Money Just 'Sitting In Accounts' That Could Cover Reconciliation

Forbes Breaking News

On "Forbes Newsroom," Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) discussed "forgotten funds" that could actually pay for the reconciliation budget bill.

Transcript

00:00I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is Congressman

00:04David Schweikart. Congressman, thank you so much for joining me. Ms. Lewis, thank you for having me.

00:09I'm excited for the conversation because you are on the House floor time and time again,

00:14raising the alarm on the national debt. And I would love to get that part of the conversation

00:21in here when we're talking about the budget bill. Because the House passed Trump's big,

00:25beautiful bill in a narrow vote last month. The legislation is over a thousand pages long and

00:30it's the signature of President Trump's second term. Now it's in the Senate, but you said you

00:34negotiated this bill for almost 36 hours straight. So talk to us about that. Well, and first off,

00:41I want to go even a bit further. I speak about the debt and deficits and demographics,

00:46but part of that is trying to build the platform for why

00:51redesigning how government delivers services, the use of technology, the looking at things

00:58differently is how you take on debt and deficits. We have a number of our friends, number of reporters

01:04who talk about, you know, here's the bar, you know, we borrow 6 billion a day and we're going to borrow

01:0810 billion a day in nine years, but not talk about why. And, and look, it's interest in healthcare.

01:17So you could revolutionize the way you do things. So part of what we tried to do in our office,

01:23and, you know, we've hired, I have a healthcare PhD and these things is it's not only the debt and deficits,

01:31but how do you stabilize it? How do you move beyond that? And that was part of our battle in this bill

01:38is most folks out there in America don't understand the scale of the expiring provisions.

01:45You know, being one of the people that worked on the 2017 tax reform, you know, first time we

01:51modernized the tax code in what, 30 some years, but a bunch of the provisions expire. That's over,

01:57well over $3 trillion of expiring provisions, meaning our taxes go up that much.

02:05So the base of this legislation is how do you not have taxes go up on American people,

02:10but then how do you find offsets? And that's the controversy. That's the addiction to spending

02:20in Washington, DC is we look the other way when it's borrowed money. You know, what is it? Last year,

02:27for every dollar we took in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. The borrowing is a business model.

02:34And then trying to find ways to modernize government is there's an army of lobbyists to stop it.

02:44Because those inefficiencies, let's be brutally honest, is the profit model of many of the folks

02:50who have government contracts. So then when you're trying to find that delicate dance here in this bill,

02:58I mean, how well do you think you struck this balance as it looked in the House, now it's going

03:03to the Senate? This really was one of those 50.01 to 49 point, you know, not, I mean,

03:16it was one of the hardest votes I've made. Because I did get something and this is an occasion where

03:25I'm often pretty rough on these things. Speaker Johnson was an honest negotiator with me.

03:32You know, we sort of murder board this, we laid it out saying, look, here's our vote problem. We have

03:37these folks who are demanding more spending through SALT. We have these members who are terrified of

03:45trying to explain the perversities, inefficiencies, frauds within Medicaid. We have these members who are

03:52demanding more money for military or border. And when you added it up, it's, there's not a public

04:02outcry saying that the fact we're, we're borrowing this sort of money, the fact that interest rates

04:08are moving up because the US government, but other governments are sopping up much of the available

04:14credit in the world, that doesn't really have a constituency. And so one of the things the speaker did

04:21is saying, we showed up and said, look, here's our Medicare Advantage. You've seen all the articles

04:28about the fraud, the MedPAC reports. It's just, it's out of control. How do we protect the benefits,

04:37but realign the incentives? So the incentive is help people be healthier. Turns out that saves about

04:43a trillion, eight hundred billion dollars over 10 years. We brought a talent-based immigration bill,

04:50because you can't hit the GDP growth numbers without the importation of talent. You know,

04:55if you're going to do, um, expensing of research and development, these things,

05:00we need that talent. We educate them here, and then we send them home to compete with us. It's insane.

05:06And then the third thing I spoke about for the first time last night is we have

05:10a piece of legislation about forgotten funds. We have stunning amounts of money sitting in accounts.

05:16Some of it's been there for a decade plus. That's functionally, we borrowed the money,

05:22we pay interest on it, and it sits idle in these accounts. And it turns out just those would be

05:29enough pay force to cover every dime of this reconciliation budget bill and do more. So we're

05:37trying to sell the idea that there's policy options that actually offset the borrowing.

05:46But Congress is not a particularly creative body, and they're not particularly good at math.

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