Yellen urges Congress to increase Treasury Department funding Amounts

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged Congress to increase the Treasury Department's budget as it struggles to establish new programs designed to disperse trillions of dollars in national coronavirus relief.

She said the Treasury Department wants more expansive fiscal policy in order to execute the expansive plans approved with the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue program and other stimulus measures.

"Our team has completed valiant work implementing these applications with the tools at our disposal," she said in prepared remarks. "But we cannot continue to be good stewards of the recovery -- and handle the new bodies of work that Congress assigns to people in the years beyond -- with a budget that was designed for 2010.

More competitive spending is required, Yellen said, especially to track financial offenses, boost community development projects and crack down on tax cheats. She asked $13.2 billion to boost IRS discretionary spending $417 million to help apply the American Rescue Plan.

"The rate and potency of our retrieval -- our economy, long-term -- depend on a fully funded Treasury," she explained.

Yellen's remarks come one day prior to the White House will launch its multitrillion-dollar fiscal year 2022 budget. Biden is expected to propose $6 trillion in new spending for the next fiscal year, according to The New York Times, driven by his own sweeping -- and expensive -- intends to substantially expand the government-funded safety net and update the country's crumbling infrastructure.

Over the course of the past year, Congress approved almost $6 trillion, or approximately 27.1percent of the nation's GDP, in coronavirus relief spending, including $4 billion trillion handed under former President Donald Trump.

To put that into perspective, the U.S. has invested roughly the exact same amount of money in the past year to face the duel health and economic crises than it did on every war across the planet in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks (about $6.4 trillion), according to one analysis conducted by Brown University's Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs.

The government conducted a record-shattering $3.1 trillion budget deficit in fiscal year 2020, and has already racked up $1.9 trillion in red ink for the first six months of the fiscal year.

And even though the national debt is on track to reach $30 trillion by the end of 2021, Biden and congressional Democrats are plowing forward with attempting to pass the president nearly $4 trillion Build Back Better schedule, which is comprised of the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and $1.8 trillion American Partners Plan.

Although Yellen has advocated for paying down the country's debt,'' she said in March the U.S. still has more space to borrow.

"I'd say we have shifted somewhat since 2017 once I stated ," she said at the moment. "And it is partially because the rate of interest environment was so incredibly low."