While President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) is must-pass legislation, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., believes the Senate can still make the spending cuts deeper to restore much-needed "fiscal sanity" to government.
"I'm committed to getting this bill done – I believe every Republican I know wants to get this bill done – but we also will want to create some fiscal sanity," Scott, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, told Sunday's "The Cats Roundtable" on WABC Radio.
"The House worked their tail off; unfortunately, the House bill cuts the spending over the next 10 years by something like 1.7%; there's a lot more we have to do.
"But we have to bring more fiscal sanity to the table.
"In the next few months, we'll probably hit $37 trillion in debt. And we're running over $1 trillion a year on interest expense."
And, according to Scott, the House OBBB structure does not curb spending, even if it cuts taxes and promises to juice the American revenues through increased Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
"If we leave it just the way it is, we're going to be close to $60 trillion worth of debt in 10 years: We'll never be able to pay for anything else we care about," Scott told host John Catsimatidis.
The OBBB does renew the 2017 Trump tax cuts, while boosting spending on border security and defense, but it comes woefully short in codifying the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts of waste, fraud, and abuse from former Democrat President Joe Biden's government spending levels, according to Scott.
"We've got to go line by line through the budget and do everything we can to save money," Scott told Catsimatidis.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., fired back at OBBB critics on debt-level projections from it, saying it is a "dramatic shift in the right direction."
"No other government has ever cut this much in a single piece of legislation," Johnson told "The Cats Roundtable." "You're talking about more than $1.5 trillion. It's by a factor of two the largest cut that Congress will have ever made.
"Is it enough? No, it's not. We have $36 trillion in federal debt. But it's important to remember that we did not get into that financial situation overnight. It took many decades. It's going to take more than a flip of a switch to turn it around.
"It's like a large vessel on the sea. It doesn't turn on a dime. You need like a mile of open ocean to do it."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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