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Last week, Rep. Jack Bergman spoke in a House Budget Committee markup on the dire financial crisis that our country is facing.

Our great experiment of a country, one which was built on self-governance, has been in-flight for nearly 250 years, Rep. Bergman explained. As a career pilot, he warned that our Nation – similar to any plane – appears to be in a fiscal descent and Bergman questioned, “Is it a landing or is it a crash?”

Rep. Bergman continued, “What is more challenging for us: fear of change, or fear of status quo…We have both a spending and a revenue problem in our country and until we can come to a realistic understanding about both sides of the ledger, we as a country will continue to edge closer to the fiscal abyss.”

The markup session came after the committee held two legislative hearings in 2023 to examine the need for a bipartisan, bicameral commission to address our Nation’s fiscal challenges – including our growing annual budget deficits, a skyrocketing national debt (which recently hit $34 trillion), and the path to insolvency currently faced by Medicare and Social Security.

Following his remarks, Rep. Bergman joined with his colleagues on the House Budget Committee to pass three bills through the committee – the Fiscal Commission Act of 2023 (H.R. 5779), the Debt-to-GDP Transparency and Stabilization Act (H.R. 6957), and the Fiscal State of the Nation Act (H.R. 6952).

Watch Rep. Bergman’s remarks here and read more about these bills below:

Fiscal Commission Act of 2023 (H.R. 5779)

• Establishes a bipartisan, bicameral fiscal commission tasked with identifying and recommending policies to improve the solvency of federal trust fund programs, balancing the budget as soon as possible, stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio, and improving the US’s long-term fiscal outlook.

Read the full text of the bill here.

Debt-to-GDP Transparency and Stabilization Act (H.R. 6957)

• Requires the President’s annual budget submission (and any concurrent resolution on the budget) to include a ratio of the public debt to the estimate GDP.

Read the full text of the bill here.

Fiscal State of the Nation Act (H.R. 6952)

• Requires the Comptroller General to present to Congress an overview of the US’s financial health. Each concurrent resolution on the budget must also include a statement on the fiscal state of the US.

Read the full text of the bill here.