After President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced that a deal had been reached to increase the debt limit and avoid a default, a number of conservative leaders have raised alarms that the negotiated agreement does not go far enough to address Democrats’ out-of-control spending. Among them is Florida Governor and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.
Joining Fox & Friends on Monday morning, DeSantis criticized what he called a “massive amount of spending” in the Biden-McCarthy deal, one that is “totally inadequate” to get America’s fiscal house “in a better spot.”
“Prior to this deal our country was careening towards bankruptcy, and after this deal our country will still be careening towards bankruptcy,” DeSantis said.
“To say you can do $4 trillion of increases in the next year and a half, I mean that’s a massive amount of spending,” the Florida Republican noted.
“I think that we’ve gotten ourselves on a trajectory here, really since March of 2020 with some of the COVID spending, it totally reset the budget and they’re sticking with that,” DeSantis continued. “I think that that’s just going to be totally inadequate to get us in a better spot.”
WATCH: @RonDeSantis slams the “massive amount of spending” in the debt ceiling “deal.”
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) May 29, 2023
“Prior to this deal our country was careening towards bankruptcy. And after this deal, our country will still be careening towards bankruptcy.” pic.twitter.com/331Q0AcRab
”In Florida, we run big budget surpluses,” DeSantis said of his own governance. “We have a $1.2 trillion economy but our debt is only $17 billion — second lowest per capita in the country,” he noted.
“We make tough choices,” DeSantis said of Florida’s budget decisions, “and we make sure that we look forward to the long haul.”
Contrasting Florida with D.C., DeSantis pointed out that Congress does “these cycles to just get them through the next election, and that’s ultimately one of the reasons why they continue to fail.”
Evidently joining DeSantis is his concern about the debt deal are the House’s Chip Roy (R-TX) and Senate’s Mike Lee (R-UT):
Thank you, @RonDeSantis, for speaking up about this. https://t.co/MeTTbw6P9F
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) May 29, 2023