As a first-term senator from Delaware, Joe Biden introduced a bill that would sunset all federal programs — including Social Security — every four years, a policy goal that he attacked “some Republicans” for during his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
The legislation Biden put forward in the Senate back in July 1975, when, like now, the U.S. economy was in a nosedive, would have terminated “all provisions of law” which allow “new budget authority for a period of more than four fiscal years,” the congressional record shows.
The Biden sunset provisions would have applied to the defense budget, and entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“It requires every program to be looked at freshly at least once every four years. The examination is not just of the increased cost of the program, but of the worthiness of the entire program,” Biden, then 32, said of his fiscal crunch bill in 1975.
Ironically, in his speech introducing the legislation back then, Biden — who last year pushed through the $739 billion government spending package he called the Inflation Reduction Act — went on to lament the “staggering” size of the federal budget and the “rate that it is increasing.”
The following decade, on at least three separate occasions, then-Sen. Biden would advocate freezing all federal spending.
In 1984, citing the “upward march of interest rates and inflation,” Biden supported a spending freeze. He argued that the American people “are not stupid,” and would support a freeze as well.
Also in 1984, Biden supported an amendment offered by Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) linking an increase in the debt limit to a freeze on all federal spending.
“My mother says there is nothing like looking over the precipice to focus one’s attention,” Biden said at the time of the nation’s rising debt obligations.
When the amendment was withdrawn by Tsongas, Biden voted against raising the debt ceiling.
The following year, Biden proposed freezing all federal spending for two years, arguing during a floor speech that “If the President again submits an outrageous budget, Congress should give serious consideration to an immediate across-the-board freeze for the next two years in federal spending and a two-year suspension of tax indexing.”
The historical info was compiled and provided to The Post by former GOP Capitol HIll aide Chris Jacobs, founder of Juniper Research Group.
Biden stood by his support of freezing federal well into the 1990s.
In 1995, Biden complained on the Senate floor that his 1975 efforts to sunset all federal programs never made it out of Congress.
“When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well, I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government,” he said.
“And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice. I tried it the third time, and I tried it the fourth time,” Biden bragged.
The resurfacing of the 80-year-old president’s decades-long support for curbing bloated federal programs on Wednesday was mocked by many in the GOP who claim that Biden lied during his State of the Union speech when he said, “Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority … anybody who doubts it, contact my office.”
“I don’t have a bill to sunset Medicare and Social Security, but [Joe Biden] did,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in a tweet Wednesday, sharing the text of Biden’s 1975 proposal.
“I always wondered why [Joe Biden] was so insistent on lying to attack me. Now we know: he has a guilty conscience. He actually did what he is falsely accusing me of doing,” Scott added in a separate tweet.
The Florida Republican supports sunsetting all federal legislation sunsets in 5 years.
“If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” he said in a tweet.
The Republican National Committee also took aim at Biden’s anti-spending past.
“Biden’s spent the last year falsely claiming that Republicans are threatening Social Security and Medicare (they aren’t). Biden claims Republicans back a plan to sunset all federal legislation after 5 years (they don’t). Guess who did support such a plan? Joe Biden,” Zach Parkinson, the RNC’s deputy communications director, said in a tweet.
