House Budget Committee members laid out a case Monday for creating a fiscal commission to tackle the nation’s soaring debt at the panel’s first field hearing in three decades.

Retiring Chairman Jodey C. Arrington, R-Texas, brought the committee to his home turf in Dallas while the House is in recess for a three-hour discussion about the key drivers of federal debt and a strategy for curbing deficits.

“Just for perspective, it took our nation nearly 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of debt, and today we add a trillion dollars to the national debt every five months,” Arrington said in his opening comments. “It’s going to require both parties to take this on. We have to work together, Democrats and Republicans.”

He won support from the panel’s ranking Democrat, Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan F. Boyle, who could become chairman next year if Democrats win the House majority in the November elections. Boyle suggested more field hearings around the country could help build public support for a fiscal strategy.

“I think that this should be the first of a number of budget committee hearings that we take on the road to show the American public the substantive work that we do in this committee,” he said.

The committee heard from several witnesses as part of the hearing: former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a Democrat; former Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat-turned-independent; and former Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a Republican.

Panetta, a former White House budget director and former House Budget chairman, raised concern about the size of the country’s debt, which currently stands at more than $40 trillion, and its impact on national security.

“To think about engaging in conflict at a time when our fiscal situation is so dire raises a lot of concerns,” he said. “As secretary, you have to surge quickly if you’re going to face problems. You’ve got to have the resources to do that.”

But legislation to create a fiscal commission has gone nowhere in this Congress. A bipartisan House bill was introduced over a year ago and sits in limbo. A bipartisan Senate bill was introduced in March of this year and awaits committee action.

And past attempts to solve the debt problem through a fiscal commission have proved inadequate. A “super committee” formed in 2011, called the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, ended in stalemate. The panel’s co-chairs, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., now the Appropriations ranking member, and former Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, at the time released a wistful statement throwing in the towel: “After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.”

In a notable dissent Monday, Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., suggested that a fiscal commission may be a waste of time. He said lawmakers “really don’t need a commission to tell us to do our job.”

“We just need to do it,” said Smith, who is not on the Budget panel but attended the field hearing. “We could do it right now if we just came together.”

Lawmakers and witnesses discussed some of the lessons gleaned from similar previous efforts that failed to turn around the nation’s fiscal trajectory.

In discussing landmines to navigate when forming a commission, Portman pushed for “making it statutory” and “not allowing it to be amended to death in the Senate.”

“There should be some amendments probably and some discussion, of course, but you got to protect the entirety of it,” he said, while also calling lawmakers to get sufficient “buy-in” from members to move on a fiscal commission.