Representative Harriet Hageman, (R-WY), says she voted down a “minibus” spending bill because it would only add to the country’s “obscene national debt.”
House Resolution 1061, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, if passed, the vote funds six of the twelve FY2024 spending bills.
A Constitutionalist and fiscal conservative, Hageman is emphatic on her stance against the bill. In a release, the Congresswoman says, “Washington’s addiction to spending must be stopped. With a national debt of over $34 trillion – a debt that is growing by $1 trillion every 100 days, we must be bold in our efforts to fix this very real problem. Some issues are too important not to fight for, and our obscene national debt is one of those issues. This minibus provides over $60 billion more in discretionary spending than the same six appropriations bills drafted by House Republicans earlier this year.”
Hageman goes on to say that the piece of legislation is “bloated” and “full of spending gimmicks used to circumvent the already absurdly high spending caps touted within the minibus. By converting regular, government as usual operations into hundreds of millions in ‘emergency spending’ the true amounts of spending are not included in the top line numbers of this appropriations package and it deceptively circumvents spending limits put in place, which are already too high.”
She goes on to stress that issues important to Wyoming that were included in earlier bills passed by the House, were left out of this piece of legislation. “Delisting the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Grizzly and stopping the implementation of the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan were stripped from the final spending package, and money to implement a program that isn’t even law – EID Ear Tags for cattle and bison, was increased – making our fight against mandatory EID even more difficult.”
“This package of spending bills is not the change we need to restore fiscal responsibility in our federal government, and trying to sell it to the American people as such is dishonest.”
The Wyoming Representative goes on to list other issues she has with the minibus, like “claims to cut the EPA by 10 percent or $977 million,” but in reality, “this cut is largely backfilled by superfund taxes. Democrats claim that EPA is only reduced by three percent from last year’s levels.”
Also, according to the release, the bill would not defund Critical Race Theory agendas across Federal agencies, as well as not prohibiting funding the DOJ censoring lawful speech as misinformation.
