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Congressional Daily Record
This section captures a floor statement or debate entry. It mentions members such as David Schweikert.
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June 25, 2026
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Download official House Record PDFReturn to issue contextUnder the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.)
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is sort of our weekly attempt to see if we can use math to annoy people, so let's actually have some fun here. I am going to try three different things in this presentation.
cycle of fraud in so many of these government programs. Yesterday, in my Joint Economic Committee, we did a high-level fraud in government- sponsored healthcare, Medicaid, and other programs—some wonderful data.
of politics, and we are going to tell the truth about demographics and the financing of Medicare and some of the things we are going to have to do to actually keep it stable.
Let's actually start to tell the truth. How many of you have seen this chart? It has been one of my opening charts for year after year after year, trying to help everyone—staff, Members of Congress, anyone who is crazy enough to watch this—with the reality.
You see the blue area here? That is functionally the only thing a Member of Congress gets to vote on. You get to vote on defense and nondefense discretionary. Everything else is substantially on formula.
to understand that Social Security is the number one spend. It is going to come in about $1.65 trillion. Interest is the second biggest spend in our government at $1.2 trillion. Medicare is $1.1 trillion. Medicaid and ObamaCare, ACA subsidies, are about a trillion. Defense is actually number 5.
stack, and we have a problem. If anyone was paying attention in the math there, if we are going to take in $5, $5.5, $5.25 trillion in tax receipts, did you notice that by the time I got to the Medicaid ACA subsidies, we were out of money?
That means this year, my math is we are going to borrow about $2 to $2.3 trillion. Once again—think about this, Mr. Speaker—last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.43.
Remember, Congress just passed the housing bill. I voted no on it because there are a number of things in there—being a guy who actually has a background and actually even a degree in finance and housing, I don't believe it built another house. It created some programs, expanded this and that, but it didn't produce another house. It didn't do the things necessary.
here—I am going to show you. We have actually done some academic literature. Your 30-year mortgage today is going to be at 6.5 percent. Mr. Speaker, how would you like to be 5.5 percent? Do you know why it is a full point higher? U.S. government borrowing. When almost
every single day we are borrowing about $7 billion, about $98,000 a second, you are competing with your own government.
Here, we put together a couple of helpful charts. Housing affordability sensitivity to interest rates—think about this. If we were at 5.5 percent—and this is sort of using what would be a mean mortgage size in my community, Tempe, Scottsdale, your house payment would be $2,828. Add in that extra 1 percent of higher interest rates because we borrowed so damn much money, it is not $2,800. It is $3,100 a month. That premium that you are paying is an object of our borrowing.
are going to talk about housing affordability, maybe we could actually convince the debt markets we are going to stabilize our borrowing.
the next 10 years, and it is the thing we are not allowed to tell the truth about, Mr. Speaker.
We have a problem. Some of the math says, next year, we will have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, but we will have double the number of 65 and up. I will be one of them. If you look around somewhere here, I think my 4-year-old is running around—yes, my little boy turns 4 today. I am 64 years old, and I have a 4-year-old and a 10- year-old and a wife my age because we are really optimistic about the future, or we did really bad retirement planning.
Look, this is just math. I have tried presenting this, and Members of Congress get mad at me because the hallways here are full of people showing up at our offices right now demanding more money.
{time} 1430
So let's actually have a little fun here. “Household Cost Impact of Legislative Fiscal Policy. Cumulative Legislative Contribution Since 2015”—what the hell does that mean? It basically is saying if you and I go back to 2015 and had 30-year mortgages, just the amount of borrowing the Federal Government does has made that 30-year mortgage $76,000 more over that 30-year time. That is what a single point of interest on an average loan is in my part of the country.
townhall or meetings, and this and that, and the public will turn to us and say: It is all waste and fraud.
I am going to show you the slides. Waste and fraud are a big deal, but it is a sliver. Our problem is our government functionally is an insurance company with an army, and we are terrified to tell the truth about it.
So let's actually have some fun here. Let's actually try to understand where the real mismanagement of spending is.
We have more spending and leakage. What is leakage? I would argue leakage is what we in the Joint Economic Committee have identified over and over when we have written a piece of legislation poorly or the lawyers, or CMS, or the Treasury have actually designed it, where the smart lawyers out there find ways to exploit it.
part C, Medicare Advantage. Mr. Speaker, 55 percent of our brothers and sisters on Medicare use this managed care model. There is something in there called risk scoring. There's something called a MedPAC report. It is about that thick. We write it. We get it every year. No one bothers to read it.
It basically says: Hey, Member of Congress, there is $100 billion, $150 billion a year in what we would define as leakage, where these insurance companies are able to come in and score grandma as being sicker and, therefore, they get risk scoring, additional cash.
Well, that extra spending means we have to raise our borrowing. Do you understand the problem? I just showed you our borrowing is raising your interest rates.
because we make everything less affordable, and now interest is the second biggest expense in our government. Some of the models actually say that in a decade, interest will be our number one expenditure.
Look, when you have an almost $40 trillion debt, CBO's own report said in 9 budget years—and this is without the recent higher interest rates, without some of the additional supplementals and other borrowing and spending we are about to do—in 9 years, the deficit is going to be $3.1 trillion, and $2.1 trillion of that was just interest. $1 trillion was actually the structural deficit. Hey, we are spending too much money. Over here was $2.1 trillion that was just interest, and there becomes the fragility.
I love that fancy word. Fragility means small movements of interest going up, and it is a technical economic term, Mr. Speaker. It means we are screwed.
presentation after presentation after presentation about it—that is called interest rate fragility. The bond market is about to run this country. We aren't. What are we going to do to convince that bond market—because, remember, we borrow money. The entire industrialized world is borrowing money. China is borrowing money. Japan is borrowing money. Now Germany is borrowing money. We are competing with everyone for what is left in the world's savings.
older, and they are moving into their retirement years, and they are not saving in the same numbers? You start to have this stress. Ray Dalio talks about this all the time, and that is the world's savings compared to the borrowing appetite. We have got a mismatch, and that means interest rates go up.
identified in our Joint Economic Committee hearing yesterday, when we were talking about where some of the leakage is in programs we have designed. This isn't a—well, some of it is. This isn't something where foreign nationals sneak into the country and set up a scam. Some of this is we wrote a law, and we just did a really crappy job writing it.
States can set up a program where it is visiting. So you can have your child, your cousin, your sister visit you on your Medicaid. We actually have States like New York where the caregivers' salaries, just these people who are coming and visiting you, are 50 grand.
this program in New York City was the number one job creator? You start to actually look at what is happening by categories, so Federal outlays by major categories. We are going to bounce back and forth to try to make the point that it is how we have designed the policy.
In 2011, you actually start to see where the leakage was. Here we are in 2026, and we are spending $7.449 billion. Do you understand the problem? Our tax receipts are only going to be about 5\1/2\ if we are lucky. The rest of this ends up being borrowed.
when we get behind these microphones and say: It is waste and fraud. We can balance the budget if we just got rid of that.
is almost 7 percent of the spending. Think of that. We calculated it at 6.9 percent of our spending.
took in, we spent $1.43? This is a hell of a lot of money, but it is 7 percent. Are you going to help me find the other almost 35 percent we need? That is actually structural. That is how we have designed programs. We have created incentives to basically exploit the system, not help people get healthier, not do the most efficient things, but the most profitable things. Then armies of lobbyists are all up and down these hallways to stop us from fixing this.
Once again, Mr. Speaker, our best estimates, fraud in the Federal Government, if you do everything, is under 7 percent.
Here are some of the numbers that get really uncomfortable: a large share of Medicare spending on age 65. So this
is the distribution, just so you understand. We calculate that over the next 6 years, Medicare spending will double. We will basically go from $1 trillion last year to $2 trillion per year. It is not a conspiracy. It is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is just we got older, and baby boomers are moving into the higher utilization year of their healthcare benefits.
that aren't 65? Well, look, you have some of this population over here, renal failure, other certain categories, where you are able to enroll in Medicare, but it is still a very small population. The majority, 82 percent of the population, on Medicare is 65 and up. It is an earned benefit.
{time} 1440
Here is one of the punch lines.
Mr. Speaker, anyone who is willing to listen—and this is just math. It is not personal; it is just math—what do you think we spend as a Federal Government?
Medicare spending. The majority of Medicare spending actually comes out of the general fund and your copays.
So let's take a look here. Here we are in 2026. Your Federal Government spends about $20,000 per enrollee in Medicare. In 9 budget years, it is $34,000 a year.
Now, what, there are 67 million baby boomers. Does anyone start to see a math problem?
acceleration is just demographics. As the baby boomer population gets older, they are moving into higher utilization years.
Okay. So we can actually take a look at this. Think of this. In 2035, $2.13 trillion. So in 9 budget years, over $2 trillion will just be the Medicare budget. Now you start to see what I mean when I talk about that the debt is substantially demographics.
Let's see how many more of these we want to torture you with.
Medicare spending will continue to expand. Look, this year, it is a little over 4 percent of GDP. In 9 budget years, it is over 5.6 percent of GDP. Do you remember how we in the House, the Budget Committee, the Treasury, we all talked about how we want to get down to 3 percent of borrowing—3 percent of the entire economy. Okay. That is great.
funds, this year, we are right now getting close to 7 percent of the entire economy is being borrowed.
Does anyone see the irony? In a few years, just Medicare is taking 5.6 percent of the entire economy, just for that one program.
All right. Let's see what else we can do here that actually drives people a little bit insane.
understanding. Now, understand, since 2011, think of the things that have happened. We had the financing of the mortgage bubble from 2008. We had COVID. We have actually had these things hit. But debt held by the public per capita—and remember when we were in 2011, we were basically $33,000 per capita. Today, we are over $92,000, and that is a 176 percent increase since 2011.
This breaks my heart. When I got elected, I was part of the Tea Party wave. We basically were pledging fiscal sanity and fidelity to the U.S. Constitution. I am not sure we are doing either of those these days.
projections. Remember, they were saying this year we were going to borrow about $1.7 trillion. My math is saying we are up to $2.3 trillion. Maybe I am a bit pessimistic, but CBO's own calculation is, in 2035, we are over $2.5 trillion in borrowing. If you actually look at their February numbers, they had $3.1 trillion.
Okay. Let's see if we can make some of this make sense.
we, as policymakers—what can we adopt? What can we do? I have done entire presentations here week after week after week of here are ways we can get rid of duplicative MRIs, X-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans, and put those scans on your device so that when you go to your next doctor, it is there and we get rid of the duplicates. We think that could be as much as $35 billion in 1 year, $350 billion over 10 years. The lobbyists hate that idea because of the excess spending.
My reason for my rambling is there are solutions. You are not magically tomorrow going to say that 40 years of falling fertility rates, 65 years of knowing we had baby boomers—the demographics aren't magically going to change.
up for a country that is now at zero population growth and that Census had a prediction that sometime in the next 5 years, we will actually have 1 or 2 years with negative population growth.
this. Seniors per 100 working age adults, and I go back to 2011. I had 21 seniors for every 100.
In 2025, the last year where we had the data, it went from 21.9 to 32.2. Just trying to make the argument, Medicare, Social Security, today's worker pays for todays' retiree. The total FICA tax and the total payroll tax don't cover the benefits going out the door.
their special Treasury bills. That trust fund in the Social Security actuary report that came out a week ago basically says that in a little over 6 years, it is gone. The trust fund is gone.
borrowing that money internally because Treasury has already spent it, but Social Security holds those T bills so they cash them in. Treasury has to go out and borrow the money to send them the money so they can send their checks out.
months, everyone over 65 getting a Social Security check under current law gets a 22 to 24 percent cut. We will double the poverty of seniors at that time.
The U.S. population age 65 and up in 2011, 41 million; 2026, so the year we are in right now, 63 million.
It is just math. What drives me insane around here, just makes me angry, it is math. Didn't we sort of know how old we were getting? Didn't we know about baby boomers?
and the professor at that time was talking about this, and that is 40 years ago.
had on this floor of legalizing technology that could disrupt the price of healthcare, of moving to a talent-based immigration system instead of the migration of large populations of poverty into the country, of designing systems, of cures—see if I can make this make sense.
So much of our spending around here is to maintain misery. I would argue that the most moral thing we can do, particularly in healthcare, is the elimination of a disease, moving toward a cure. I will give you the classic example of 15 years ago, Hepatitis C, we had hospitals all around the country getting ready to put up liver transplant centers.
and then a competitor right after that crashed the price. Now those liver transplant centers are not needed.
Would you believe, Mr. Speaker, we had lobbyists here trying to slow down access to the drug so those folks who had built the liver transplant centers could actually amortize their costs?
{time} 1450
about disrupting bureaucracies; we are talking about disrupting business models, particularly in healthcare. Cures are moral, and they are really amazing economics.
healthcare was somehow related to obesity.
Think about what I just said: 47 percent of U.S. healthcare was related to obesity. Maybe it would be moral and really good economics and just compassionate saying: What are we doing in nutrition support? What are we doing in gamification of helping people eat healthier, deal with multichronic conditions? What are we doing in access to new drug categories and other things that could help our brothers and sisters get healthier and the economic value of that?
U.S. borrowing. It turns out, Mr. Speaker, those folks who talk about MAHA and these things, they are actually partially exactly correct.
Health. If the biggest growth of our spending is within those healthcare categories, what can we do to lower the price of healthcare? Is it rationing or working for it using technology and other things to help our brothers and sisters get healthier?
All right. I am going to see if I have one last board here.
All right. Apparently, we didn't print it.
Mr. Speaker, we basically just ran through sort of three categories.
U.S. debt is raising the cost for all of you. You are paying higher interest rates on your credit card, your mortgage, and your car loan because of the insatiable appetite of the Federal Government. And, let's be honest, the insatiable appetite of borrowing from the Federal Government is because our public actually demands it. They want things. They don't want to be told no.
it is structural in so many of our programs. It is a profit model for many of those who use these programs, but even then it is still under 7 percent.
The third thing is the reality of what we are as a country. It is demographics. We have a lack of young people. We are getting older. We have a whole bunch of benefits that we are obligated to because we made promises. We made a societal contract.
I can give you a path that we keep our promises, Mr. Speaker, but every day we refuse to deal with the reality of the math it makes it that much harder to protect the future.
today. The math says if you use the 6 percent generational discount rate, which is reasonable in today's world, we need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government. Is this really what we decided we are going to do to our kids and our grandkids? It is what we have done.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.