Republicans last year promised voters they would chop federal spending to shrink the nation’s staggering deficit and on Thursday the ax fell. House GOP lawmakers announced significant cuts to both domestic and defense spending for the final seven months of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. They announced $74 billion in reductions from President Obama’s original spending request for the fiscal year, though they have yet to work out specifically which programs would lose money. The cuts are spread across the entire government and even include the Pentagon’s budget, which Republicans propose reducing by $16 billion below what Obama had requested for this year.
But the cuts fall far short of the $100 billion in spending the GOP pledged to eliminate this year. Overall, federal spending under the GOP plan would shrink to $1.055 trillion, about $35 billion below current levels if they were maintained until the end of the year.
Domestic and international spending would shrink by 9 percent under the plan and security spending would increase by about 1 percent, which is still 2 percent less than what Obama requested.
The spending cuts were announced by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Last week, House Republicans pushed through a measure instructing Ryan to cut non-defense spending to 2008 levels for the remainder of the fiscal year, which his plan achieves.
“Washington’s spending spree is over,” Ryan said Thursday. “As House Republicans pledged and voted to affirm on the House floor last week, the spending limits will restore sanity to a broken budget process and return spending for domestic government agencies to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels.”
With a 24-seat majority, it won’t be hard for House Republicans to pass spending bills with cuts as deep as 17 percent in some agencies, including transportation, housing and urban development.
But the cuts will stall in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Ryan’s proposal “an unworkable plan,” and accused Republicans of playing “Russian roulette” with the nation’s economy.
Democrats staged a press briefing in response to Ryan’s budget proposal, parading out Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, a former top adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to warn that cutting the budget this year could harm a still-fragile economy. Reductions, he said, “would be working at cross purposes,” with efforts to spur recovery, including the recent extension of tax cuts signed by Obama.
The two parties have only a few weeks to work out their differences on funding the remainder of the fiscal year because a resolution to keep the government running will expire on March 4. Senate Democrats said Thursday that they believe Republicans are willing to shut down the government if they do not get the cuts they want, although no GOP leader has endorsed a shutdown.
Ryan’s budget plan calls for cutting Commerce and Justice departments spending by 16 percent and reducing the budget of the federal government agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Election Commission, by 13 percent.
