Congressman Tim Walberg is expecting plenty of spending discussions in Washington in the coming weeks.
With a new Congress and a new president coming in, Walberg says job number one will be spending cuts. He believes much of it needs to be done to prepare for President Donald Trump.
“And that’s what we’re talking about, that we need to get a number of things hopefully done even before President Trump takes office or very shortly after,” Walberg said. “We have to have a top line for our budget reconciliation we’ve been working on to reduce unnecessary spending to start putting ourselves back in line and on track.”
Walberg says the debt ceiling is another thing to be discussed. President-elect Trump has called for it to be eliminated, at least for a while.
“Take that off the table, raise the debt ceiling for four years so we don’t have to worry about that. Constitutionally, we’re supposed to pay our debt anyway, so the only reason this debt ceiling vote has come in is because of politics.”
Walberg says if Republicans in Congress handle things right, through a reconciliation process, then 60 votes won’t be needed in the Senate to carry out some major spending cuts.
In his own role as chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Walberg says he’s already talking with House leaders about programs that could be cut in the Department of Education and the Department of Labor.
Walberg is also now a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources. In that role, he says he’ll be looking into the causes of the California wildfires. He says bad decisions with forest and water management contributed to the crisis.
