As the national debt hit a record $38 trillion this week – rising by $1 trillion faster than ever outside the pandemic – many Republican lawmakers who once decried spending stayed silent, something the progressive news outlet The Tennessee Holler promptly mocked them over.

“At least the rich got their tax cuts, right Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)? With Inequality at gilded age levels,” the outlet wrote Saturday in a social media post on X.

“Remember when Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) used to pretend to care about the debt? That was adorable.”

Both Blackburn and Burchett have spoken endlessly about their desire to cut back on the federal government’s spending. In 2023, Blackburn released a plan to cut non-defense spending by 5% across the board, decrying the debt increases seen “under President Biden’s watch.” Similarly, Burchett warned that “we will literally lose our country” should the debt continue to grow.

Now, as the debt reaches a new record high, growing at the fastest rate seen in history outside the COVID-19 pandemic, both lawmakers’ concern over the national debt seems to have subsided, the Holler argued.

“PSA: They don’t care about the debt and never did,” the outlet wrote. “...Inequality is the real killer. We should be spending on health care, housing, helping regular folks… not tax cuts for the rich and wars.”

A significant contributor to the United States’ new record-high debt is President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which among other things extended the tax cuts introduced during Trump’s first term, and is projected to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over ten years.

Both Blackburn and Burchett supported the OBBBA, and Republican lawmakers have struggled to reconcile their fiscal-hawk rhetoric with support for Trump’s flagship legislation. Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), for instance, who once called the national debt an “existential threat,”

struggled to answer

for supporting the OBBBA.