“It’s easy to write budget caps,” said Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress and a former Senate and White House budget staffer, who analyzed the bill and provided data for some of our charts.
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But the actual decisions about how to apply reductions would fall to lawmakers on the appropriations committees, who could parcel out the cuts in any way they can agree on. The charts spread the remaining cuts out evenly across the rest of the government, to show one simple way they could be applied. Those are initiatives that many Republican lawmakers and voters value. The programs that would be subject to such deeper cuts include nutrition assistance for poor mothers and infants, air traffic control, the State Department, cancer research and Social Security Administration employees. Veterans’ health care is the second largest.
But with defense, veterans’ care and homeland security exempted, the caps would result in cutting the rest of the discretionary budget by more than half.ĭefense is the largest category of discretionary spending in the budget. Universal discretionary caps would cut spending by an average of 18 percent over a decade, compared with what’s expected if current levels grew according to inflation. The charts above show how exempting big categories of spending would make the budget caps more draconian. Source: Analysis of Congressional Budget Office data by Bobby Kogan, Center for American Progress Note: Figure shows base discretionary budget authority totals for 2024-2033. President Biden wants Congress to raise the debt limit without any conditions, saying he’s willing to talk about the budget, but not under a threat of default. If Congress doesn’t raise the limit on how much the country can borrow to pay its existing bills by June 1, the Treasury Department may be forced to default on its bonds, an underpinning of the global economy. McCarthy’s first big move in negotiations over the debt ceiling, which he has argued should be tied to reductions in federal spending to lower future debt, though there is no legal reason it must be. And Kay Granger, the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, has said border security remains a top priority. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised he will protect the military from reductions, though the bill as written does not exclude them. Republicans in House leadership have responded that no cuts are intended. The White House has been attacking Republicans for proposing cuts to veterans’ care. “It goes from being an achievable goal to one that would be very difficult to achieve,” he said. If the entire discretionary budget were subject to cuts, the reductions would be “aggressive” but “achievable,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which backs deficit reduction.īut if favored programs are protected, the cuts everywhere else will get much deeper and harder to implement.
Source: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget Note: Figure shows base discretionary budget authority, which does not include emergency spending.
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