We write about the national debt a lot on this blog, because it is the slow-moving emergency that touches almost everything else. It passed $40 trillion this year. Net interest on that debt now costs the country more than the entire defense budget. And the two things that would most help fix it—a constitutional requirement to balance the budget, and a presidential power to strike individual wasteful items from a spending bill—are things Washington has talked about for decades and never delivered.
So we decided to stop just talking about them. We drafted both. Today we're publishing two proposed constitutional amendments, in full, along with a plain-language explainer and everything you need to ask your own member of Congress to introduce them. You can read all of it on our new amendments action page.
Here's what they do—and, just as important, what we built into them so neither one can be turned into a weapon.
Amendment One: Balance the Budget — With Teeth, and With Protections
The first amendment requires that the federal government not spend more than it takes in, measured against nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates at the time Congress passes the budget. Congress can only run a deficit by voting for a specific amount with a three-fifths supermajority, on the record. No hiding behind procedural tricks.
The piece most previous attempts have lacked is enforcement. This version has it: if Congress simply fails to pass a compliant budget, an automatic 3% across-the-board cut kicks in until it does. But note the trigger carefully—that cut only happens if Congress fails to do its job. Pass a balanced budget, and nothing is cut automatically.
And here is the safeguard we think matters most. Social Security and Medicare are both shielded from that automatic cut. Social Security is carved out of the balance math entirely and handled through separate legislation; Medicare still counts toward the balance requirement, but it can't be hit by the automatic reduction. Seniors' earned benefits should never be the price of Congress failing to pass a budget. That isn't just good policy—it's good history. The last balanced budget amendment to come close died in the Senate in 1995 by a single vote, and the sticking point was precisely the fear that Social Security would get swept into the cuts. We answered that objection directly, because we actually want this one to pass.
Amendment Two: A Line-Item Veto That Can't Be Weaponized
The second amendment gives the President the power to strike individual wasteful items from a spending bill—a tool 44 of the 50 governors already have. Congress tried to grant it by ordinary law back in 1996, and the Supreme Court struck that law down in 1998, ruling that it takes a constitutional amendment, not a statute, to do this properly. So that's what we wrote.
But a line-item veto in the wrong hands could become exactly the kind of partisan weapon we exist to oppose—a president slashing the other party's priorities while shielding his own. So we built in a fairness guarantee that is the heart of the whole proposal: if the President cuts an item that primarily benefits one party, they must cut a roughly equal amount—within 10%—from the other party's items in the same bill, at the same time. No one-sided targeting, by either party, ever. Genuinely bipartisan items that were co-sponsored across the aisle are exempt, and disputes over who sponsored what go to an equal-representation committee with a neutral tiebreaker.
The result is a tool that can only be used the way it's supposed to be used: to cut genuine pork, evenly, out in the open—not to punish the other team.
The Safeguards Are the Whole Point
If there's a theme here, it's that we spent as much effort on the guardrails as on the powers themselves. A balanced budget requirement that could gut Social Security wouldn't deserve to pass. A line-item veto that let one party knife the other wouldn't either. The reason earlier versions of these ideas failed—in the Senate, and in the courts—is instructive, and we tried to learn from every one of those failures rather than repeat them. These are discussion drafts, and the wording will keep tightening as they move through legislative counsel. But the design is deliberate, and it's built to survive both a Senate vote and a courtroom.
A Personal Pledge
Amendments don't ratify themselves. After Congress proposes one, three-fourths of the states—38 of them—have to ratify it. That's a long road, and the founder of this movement has made a personal commitment to walk it in person:
If we can get real traction on these amendments in the House—and get them past that bar—I will personally travel, at my own expense, to each and every one of the 44 state legislatures that already have a line-item veto, to encourage them to ratify the federal version. And for the Balanced Budget Amendment, I will go to all 50 states if that's what it takes. It seems only fair not to ask the six holdout states to adopt a federal line-item veto they don't even have at their own level—so the balanced budget fight belongs to every state, and I intend to show up for it everywhere.
That's not a line we take lightly, and it's not one we intend to walk back.
What You Can Do
This is the part that actually matters. Amendments start in Congress, and that first step is the one your Representative and your two Senators control directly—which is exactly where public pressure works best. On our amendments action page you'll find:
• The full text of both amendments, plus a one-page summary and a plain-language explainer, all as downloadable Word documents you can print or attach to an email.
• Links to look up who your U.S. Representative and Senators are.
• A ready-to-send letter you can make your own and paste into their contact form.
The 1995 balanced budget amendment came within one vote of passing the Senate. The margin that matters is small enough that ordinary people, contacting their own representatives, can close it. Read the amendments, download them, send them to your member of Congress, and ask where they stand. That's how something that's been stuck for decades finally starts to move.