Some members of the House Freedom Caucus said that a proposed deal announced by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to raise the debt ceiling for two years ahead of a possible federal government default doesn’t go far enough.
Negotiators are now racing to finalize the bill’s text. McCarthy said Saturday that House will vote on the legislation on Wednesday, giving the Senate time to consider it before June 5, the date when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the United States could default on its debt obligations if lawmakers did not act in time.
But Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), one of the House Freedom members, wrote that he would pass on the proposed deal. “A $4 trillion debt ceiling increase? With virtually none of the key fiscally responsible policies passed in the Limit, Save, Grow Act kept intact? Hard pass. Hold the line,” he wrote on Twitter Saturday.
“I listened to Speaker McCarthy earlier tonight outline the deal with President Biden and I am appalled by the debt ceiling surrender. The bottom line is that the U.S. will have $35 trillion of debt in January, 2025. That is completely unacceptable,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Texas) wrote on Twitter, echoing statements made by other caucus members.
“A $4T debt ceiling increase with virtually no cuts is not what we agreed to. Not gonna vote to bankrupt our country. The American people deserve better,” wrote Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) on the social media platform, while Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) wrote Sunday that the proposal includes “ZERO claw back of the $1.2 Trillion ‘inflation reduction act’ crony giveaways to elite leftists for grid-destroying unreliable energy.”
The agreement would keep non-defense spending roughly flat in the 2024 fiscal year and increase it by 1 percent the following year, as well as provide for a two-year debt-limit increase—past the next presidential election in 2024, an anonymous source told The Associated Press over the weekend. The final details of the proposal have not yet been released to the public.
Some conservatives expressed early concerns that the compromise does not cut future deficits enough, while Democrats have been worried about proposed changes to work requirements in programs such as food stamps.
But McCarthy defended his “agreement on principle” debt ceiling deal with President Joe Biden on Sunday amid the criticism. The speaker acknowledged that some Republicans may not have got everything they wanted in the legislation but said that Democrats received little in concessions.
“Maybe it doesn’t do everything for everyone, but this is a step in the right direction that no one thought that we would be able to today,” McCarthy told Fox News in an interview on Sunday. “I’ll debate this bill with anybody,” he continued. “Is it everything I wanted? No, because we don’t control all of it. But it is the biggest recession in history. It is the biggest cut Congress has ever voted for in that process.”
Meanwhile, McCarthy suggested that the majority of his Republican conference would back the tentative deal with the Biden administration, which would raise the debt ceiling for another two years at the least. He also touted the bill, which he said would be about 150 pages, as a win for the GOP after the Biden administration held out on negotiations for several months.
“I think you are going to get a majority of Republicans voting for this bill,” McCarthy said in the interview. “We were able to do this when the president said he wasn’t even going to talk to us,” he added. “Right now, the Democrats are very upset.”
Before Saturday’s announcement, some members of the House Freedom Caucus said that McCarthy should stand firm in debt negotiations.
“First, President Biden delayed engagement with Congress for months on the debt ceiling and, now that he is engaging, press reports indicate he is pushing to water down the provisions of the House-passed Limit, Save, Grow Act while simultaneously demanding a debt ceiling increase of $4 trillion or more (well beyond the $1.5 trillion provided in the House bill),” 35 Republican lawmakers wrote last week.
And they added: “In response to the President’s preposterous position, we encourage you to add additional provisions to the Limit, Save, Grow Act such as the inclusion of the recently passed Secure the Border Act and the end to funding for the FBI’s massive (larger than the Pentagon) new headquarters.”
Republicans had also sought to repeal Biden’s efforts to waive $10,000 to $20,000 in debt for nearly all borrowers who took out student loans. But the provision was a nonstarter for Democrats. The budget agreement would keep Biden’s student loan relief in place, though the Supreme Court will have the ultimate say on the matter.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
If this capitulation is approved you can guess what will be said in 2024 as the economy crashes and debt skyrockets. The democrats will spend recklessly but still will blame the Republicans for the deal and it will be correct. The people will blame Republicans not the Democrats. McCarthy is a fool or a traitor