The House GOP’s newest hurdle to its debt ceiling bill: Math

In its eagerness to cut government funding, the Chamber republicans they have proposed capping spending for the next decade, which would be necessary for the math to work on their new debt ceiling plan. But those limits could also make it difficult for the House to maintain.

The reason? The caps would prevent Republicans from increasing military spending, as many say is necessary, or protect the Pentagon and veteran programs by forcing deep cuts elsewhere.

“If you start making some categories or programs harmless, that necessarily means that everything else on average is getting an even deeper cut,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the liberal Center for American Progress. .

The proposed annual caps would apply for the next 10 years to appropriations, the money that lawmakers distribute annually to agencies like the Department of Defense or the Department of Health and Human Services. While most federal spending is on autopilot with Social Security and Medicare, lawmakers struggle each year to decide whether to increase defense or no defense spending, or often both.

In it text of the bill published on Wednesdayannual discretionary spending beginning October 1 would return to established levels in 2022. Each year thereafter, that total would increase by 1%, which is below historical inflation rates and well below the annual rate of 5% of recent price increases.

The upside for Republicans is that sticking to that cap for the next nine years would result in a sharp drop in spending that would make substantial progress in reducing the budget deficit. The bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that the limits save about $3.2 billion compared to the Congressional Budget Office baseline.

But because the bill doesn’t specify where the cuts would be made, appropriators would have to make those decisions as bills funding individual departments grow. And that’s where the math gets tricky.

Simply applying the reductions equally to defense and non-defense programs would result in a 28% cut in both by 2033 after adjusting for inflation and population growth, according to Kogan.

The White House Office of Management and Budget put forward a slightly different figure of a cut of 22%but that’s only in the first year and it also assumes that Pentagon funding would at least match this year’s level, while non-defense spending would reverse.

“The speaker’s plan raises crucial questions for dozens of House Republicans,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Thursday. “Will they vote to end manufacturing jobs in their own home districts and reverse the relocation of manufacturing to China? And will they vote to cut benefits for veterans in their own districts?”

Jean-Pierre even went so far as to call individual members of Congress, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Mike Carey (R-Ohio), on whether they would support such cuts.

In his speech introducing the plan, McCarthy dismissed concerns about the depth of the spending cuts.

“These spending limits are not draconian. They are responsible, ”he said. “Federal spending has skyrocketed in the last two years by 17%. And that doesn’t include trillions in COVID-era spending.”

Kogan said the math gets even worse for non-defense programs if other assumptions are made. If, for example, Republicans wanted to protect themselves from cuts to both military spending and veterans programs, two politically popular items in many red districts, the percentage cut for all other programs would increase from 28% to 58% by 2033. .

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have 60% less staff or could do 60% less research,” he said. “(The National Institutes of Health) does a lot of research on cancer. So does that mean 60% fewer projects are funded?”

That would simply be allowing defense and veteran spending to grow with inflation and population growth over the next decade. But with defense hawks worried about the prospect of a conflict with China over Taiwan and a track record of annual defense increases averaging more than 5% a year since 2018, the Pentagon budget would likely grow above the baseline. if the House Republicans had their way.

Allowing a 5% increase in defense spending each year would bring non-defense cuts to a whopping 91%, Kogan said.

“This is not a serious proposal,” he said.

The chair of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Maya MacGuineas, disagreed. In a statement after the plan was released Wednesday, she said: “This is a reasonable proposal, one that would generate significant savings at a time when the nation desperately needs them.”

But with 18 House Republicans hailing from congressional districts won by President Joe Biden in 2020 and McCarthy was only able to lose four and still push a package through the House, it’s unclear whether Republican leaders will be able to corral the necessary votes. , especially if the party moderates hurdle. Democrats have signaled that the plan would be dead by the time it reaches the Senate, giving vulnerable members of the House little incentive to vote for something that could easily be used against them in 2024.

On the opposite side of the party, some hardline Republicans have already began to push for changes in the plan, saying that his language about work requirements for some federal benefits is not enough. If they can reopen that issue, it could encourage moderate Republicans to seek change as well.

“I think they would be unpopular,” Kogan said of the possible cuts, “because the costs are so extreme and the things they ask for are so severe.”