House GOP Budget chair aims to release plan before late September

House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) on Wednesday said the committee is working to release its long-awaited budget plan before late September.

“I will not let a fiscal year go by without having our budget that our committee has worked hard on, and that we have worked with every member, every faction, every caucus of our conference, to get to a good place,” Arrington said Wednesday morning.

“That’s all reflected in our resolution, our draft resolution, and my plan is to make sure that that resolution is marked up and passed out of committee by the end of the fiscal year,” he said. 

The current fiscal year is set to end on Sept. 30.

Arrington said more details about the scope of the plan would come “when we’re ready to put it on the committee table for discussion and debate and markup.”

“But I think it’s a responsible budget. It’s a path to balance,” he said, “and our country desperately needs a fiscally responsible plan to and a path to balance because the current fiscal path is unsustainable, and our debt is going to implode on this country.”

His comments as efforts to release the committee’s budget blueprint seemed to be put on the backburner months ago as the bipartisan negotiations over the nation’s debt limit dominated focus on Capitol Hill.

But Arrington said on Wednesday that the budget panel has consensus on not getting through “this fiscal year without at least marking up a budget in committee and passing it.”

“We’ve been working with the broader conference to get close to 218,” he added.