With Congress gone on spring break, the White House made sure everyone knew that House Republicans had yet to introduce a budget resolution and would not do so before the April 15 deadline to pass it.
Days before leaving, President Joe Biden said in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) “I hope House Republicans can present their budget plan to the American public before Congress goes into Easter recess so we can have a deep conversation when it returns ”.
McCarthy, instead of offering such a resolution, has been demanding that the White House sit down to negotiate the budget. When McCarthy asked again Monday, a White House spokesman issued a statement highlighting a report that House Republicans missed the deadline, which is found in the 1974 law establishing the federal budget process, but There are no penalties for lateness.
“President Biden remains eager to negotiate with President McCarthy on the budgets. But weeks after the president released his deficit-cutting budget, House Republicans left Washington during a two-week recess without submitting their own,” the spokesperson said.
In the view of one critic, the White House is taking advantage of the ambiguity around the word “budget” in Washington. What the White House is asking of House Republicans is to provide something much less detailed and useful for negotiations than what the White House presented, and much more difficult politically.
Kent Nishimura via Getty Images
The White House budget is a massive multi-volume affair so detailed that he has proposed language for lawmakers to use when writing funding bills. A budget resolution contains barebones tables, lacks policy language and is mostly non-binding in nature.
This benefits the White House, according to Doug Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and chairman of the conservative think tank American Action Forum.
“A budget presupposes much more than a budget resolution and they should never really be compared,” he said. In his view, the White House is goading McCarthy into producing something politically difficult that isn’t all that useful for negotiating anyway.
“It is deliberately false,” he said. “(The White House) could easily sit down with their budget, which are proposals that don’t have the force of law, and whatever list the Republicans have, and they would be in a comparable situation.”
“A budget presupposes much more than a budget resolution and they should never really be compared.”
– Doug Holtz-Eakin, President of the American Action Forum
But a key problem is that the Republicans don’t have that list, so it’s hard to have that meeting. And, as White House officials are quick to point out, it was McCarthy himself who promised a budget resolution.
“It’s not complicated: President McCarthy, who said passing a budget was his ‘first responsibility,’ needs to spell out exactly what programs working families are relying on to cut to give tax handouts to the super-rich and special interests.” White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa told HuffPost.
“Will you cut health care, education, border security, manufacturing, defense spending, Medicare, or support for families with children? We cannot have unilateral budget negotiations: the president presented his priorities, the president must do the same ”.
To further complicate matters, these are no ordinary budget negotiations: the threat of default due to a debt ceiling violation lingers in the background.
On the one hand, Republicans have said they will not raise the debt ceiling this summer or early fall without as-yet-unspecified spending cuts. The White House has said raising the debt ceiling is non-negotiable, but a separate budget discussion can take place. However, that discussion can only take place once the Republicans present their tax plan.
And that’s where the problem is. The positions have led to a rhetorical “no, you go first” showdown, with the GOP complaining that the White House will not negotiate and the White House asking Republicans to say what their plan is before they negotiate. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department’s ability to avoid default with accounting movements is diminishing by the day.
So far, the White House has led the way in the public debate, as Republicans have barely released specific budget demands, let alone offered or passed a budget resolution. Brian Deese, then the White House director of the National Economic Council, said on February 6 that the logical counteroffer to the White House budget would be a budget resolution.
“We continue to wait and wait for House Republicans to come up with a budget plan, come up with a budget resolution. That is the way the process works most effectively,” he said.
So far, though, the closest House Republicans have come to specifying what they want is a letter McCarthy sent to the White Housesaying the GOP wants to reduce annual spending to “pre-inflationary” levels, strengthen work requirements for some federal benefits, recoup unspent COVID money, and enact unspecified proposals on border security and energy production.
The House GOP’s difficulties in uniting even around a budget resolution were highlighted by a report in The New York Times of infighting between McCarthy and some of his aides over the debt limit strategy.
An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the White House budget and a budget resolution differ greatly on the details. Still, the official said, it would be an improvement over what the House GOP has released so far. And, the official said, it’s a low bar.
“I don’t think anyone here is expecting them to come up with a 1,600-page budget with legislative language and details about each account,” the official said. “It is not unreasonable for us to say: ‘We have told them what we are for. What are you for? And it can’t just be four bullet points in a one and a half page letter. It has to have some meat.”
“It is not unreasonable for us to say: ‘We have told them what we are for. What are you for? And it can’t just be four bullet points in a one and a half page letter. It has to have some meat.”
– Biden administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity
Whatever Republican leaders propose, they also need to show they can pass it, the official said, “to show they have 218 votes for whatever they demand or whatever their position is.”
An expert at the liberal Center for American Progress said the White House is right that even a budget resolution would provide some details, such as annual spending targets or cumulative totals over the 10-year budget window, that the GOP has yet to disclose.
“It’s very popular to say, in general terms, that we should cut spending, and then it’s very unpopular when you try to figure out what spending should be cut. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all,” said Bobby Kogan, the Center’s senior director of federal budget policy and a veteran of Biden’s Office of Management and Budget.
However, Kogan said anyone hoping for a budget resolution to be crafted quickly will be disappointed. He can often take weeks to muster the support of various party factions before a vote, a daunting prospect for a Republican majority with just four votes to spare and a speaker seen as beholden to the right of his conference.
“The speaker probably doesn’t want to introduce a budget resolution yet because he knows the details behind the proposal will be too unpopular to gain support,” Kogan said.
“Right now, it’s been kind of a black box. We don’t know how much progress has been made. We don’t know what the difficulty is. We don’t know where the robbery is. And so we don’t really know how close they are.”