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Over the past year, President Joe Biden has repeatedly attacked Republicans over Florida Senator Rick Scott’s proposal to repeal all federal laws for five years. warned that it could mean the end of Medicare and Social Security. I supported the version of the bill.
The year was 1978. Jimmy Carter was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. In the Senate, the top legislative priority was to pass the Jobs Bill S.1, which was intended to ease the unemployment rate. His S.2 was his second most pressing priority after bill S.3 to reform health care. S.2 is a bill that controls spending by putting his 10-year sunset clause in all federal programs.
The main sponsor of the bill was Maine’s legendary Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie. His supporters ranged from Republicans Barry Goldwater and Jesse Helms to Democrats George McGovern and Edward Kennedy. President Kennedy said, “I believe the sunset concept is one of the most imaginative and innovative approaches to government reform that has been proposed in years. Overall, S.2 has 62 Senate voters. With 32 Democrats, 29 Republicans and 1 independent, the bill was approved by an overwhelming majority of 87 to 1 in the October 11 vote.
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The bill was never voted on by the House of Representatives and was never seriously considered again, but one of the bill’s supporters was a first-term Delaware senator who, on Election Day, sat on the floor of the Senate. It is worth noting that he went out to and submitted the bill. Why he supported the Federal Sundown Act. It would provide Congress with an essential tool to ease the burden and curb a sprawling federal bureaucracy.”
Delaware Senator Joseph Biden greets Drexel University graduates. Biden was the youngest U.S. Senator at the time to support limiting government spending. .
(Getty Images)
The junior senator then explained how the Sunset Bill would work. After careful review by an important Senate committee, the Senate and Congress will decide whether to continue or modify the program,” he said. The possibility of termination forces a review, and the review ensures that the decision to continue or not to continue the program is a rational one. It’s really a very simple mechanism.
Biden has been pushing passage of the Sunset Bill since 1974, pointing to an “unacceptable prospect of an increase in federal spending of $100 billion over the next two years,” citing congressional action. He concluded his remarks by saying it was time to do it. , I have convinced myself that the Sunset Act is an essential tool.Federal spending is not readily available.
More than 40 years later, Mr. Biden appears to have changed his mind about the need for federal sunset legislation. To be fair — Bill S.2, which he endorsed in 1978, exempted Social Security and Medicare from the repealing clause. This exemption gave the president a window through which he could attack Scott’s proposal. In reality, it was a carelessly drafted bullet point rather than a carefully drafted bill.
But given that the country’s deficit has topped $1.5 trillion and Congress is scurrying toward the fiscal cliff again over whether to raise the debt ceiling, signing a bill similar to the one the president praised It would be a good time to ask the president if And he voted 45 years ago. This meant he would abolish all federal programs, except Social Security and Medicare, in ten years as a way to control federal spending.
The idea isn’t that far-fetched. After all, sunset laws have proven to work at the state level: his 2015 report by the Mercatus Center found that 36 states had some kind of sunset review process for books. I was.
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Texas has perhaps the most successful sunset program in the nation. According to the state government website, “Surveys conducted between 1982 and 2019 have yielded $19 in interest for every dollar allocated to the Sunset Commission since 1985, providing state and federal government estimated to have had a fiscal impact of $1 billion in increased savings and revenues for
Additionally, the concept of reviewing federal programs to determine their efficiency and continued value has gained public support. A 2017 American voter survey by the Ripon Association bears this out. When asked, “Do federal programs need to undergo periodic performance reviews to ensure they provide Americans with value for money?”, the American’s 94 % said they should.
The poll also asked whether federal regulations should have a “retirement date or a date when Congress decides to renew.” Nearly 80% of her Americans said she should.
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“It is imperative that we develop tools to keep our spending under control if we are not to stay in the red forever. I am convinced that federal spending will not come soon.” – Joe Biden
You can’t go wrong. The Sunset Act will not, by itself, eliminate the country’s debt and deficit. That will require Republicans and Democrats in Washington to come together and find ways to reform entitlement spending. But by providing Congress with a “simple mechanism” to cut federal spending, the Sunset Act begins to change the culture of Washington.
Joe Biden once championed this kind of mechanism. Now that Republicans control the House, Republicans must pass a sunset bill similar to the one they voted for as a Senator in 1978 and see if they sign it today as President.
