This week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden cut a deal to raise the debt limit. The breakthrough came after three months of Biden pledging not to even negotiate over the debt limit. Instead, Biden was forced to concede to a 1% cap on increases for non-military spending, a cutback on IRS funding, a clawback of some unspent COVID-19 allocations, and addition of work requirements for some federal aid.

The compromise deal was indeed far less than House Republicans had demanded, as Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., tweeted:

After factoring in a small cut to discretionary spending over the next 2 yrs, we are still talking about ~$6T more or less in spending bc of large increases in spending elsewhere. … Govt grew massively over the past 3 years. This growth was supposed to be emergency funding only during COVID. During this time, govt grew 40% or by $2 trillion from 2019 to 2023. We went from spending just over $4T to spending just over $6T.