Even as the Republican-led Congress worked to finalize a mostly symbolic balanced-budget resolution, it added roughly $180 billion of real spending to long-term deficits.
The Republican budget agreement would balance in nine years, meaning that spending would be less than taxes in 2024. It would do so by reducing planned spending on health care and other government programs, without raising taxes.
The agreement will not, however, go to the president’s desk for signing and will not become law. It’s merely an agreement between the two chambers and a blueprint for setting the government on a sustainable fiscal path.
The budget process includes a process meant to allow the fiscal goals set in the budget to be put into effect by congressional committees on an expedited basis. That tool, known as reconciliation, allows legislation to move with only 51 votes in the Senate, rather than a filibuster-proof supermajority.
Republicans chose to mostly limit the use of the reconciliation process to send legislation repealing Obamacare to President Obama’s desk, an effort that would surely be vetoed. In doing so, they enabled themselves to meet their campaign promises of voting to repeal the law, but also precluded the possibility of reconciliation to actually balance the budget.
“This is more of a campaign-oriented messaging document than it is a budget that will actually come to fruition as envisioned in this blueprint,” said William Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who was a long-time Republican Budget Committee staffer.
The “irony of ironies,” said Hoagland, was when House Republicans voted on March 25 for their budget blueprint and then in the next vote passed legislation changing the way doctors are paid by Medicare that will add $141 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
That legislation is the biggest component of the $180 billion that the current Congress has added to future deficits, as computed by the nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The rest was from a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, a few smaller bills, and interest costs resulting from those laws.
The GOP budget agreement includes the assumption that the added spending from the doctor payment reform would be offset with unspecified cuts elsewhere in the budget.
But the budget does not provide a path to actually implementing its provisions.
In the past, budgets have paved a path to balance. Most recently, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act was a law hammered out between Democratic president Bill Clinton and a Republican House using reconciliation, meant to cut spending by more than $200 billion. With the help of the dotcom boom, it led to a balanced budget.
This year, however, congressional Republicans and the Obama administration and Democrats are far apart on most spending and tax issues, and the budget was never going to be considered as a vehicle toward a fiscal agreement. In fact, the budget’s passage does nothing to preclude a bruising showdown later this year over actually funding the government. The two sides remain far apart on a number of important considerations, starting with whether and under what conditions to raise statutory caps on spending. Obama has threatened to veto any spending bill that doesn’t lift the caps.
Nevertheless, Republicans touted passage of the agreement as evidence that they are able to manage the basics of governing, noting Senate Democrats’ failure to pass budgets between 2010 and 2013, and then again in 2014.
“It shouldn’t be a big deal. It should be something we do routinely, because it is really the most basic demonstration of our ability to govern,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Tuesday.
Democrats also take the budget seriously, as a sign of Republicans’ future plans for legislation.
“Remember those drastic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Pell Grant funding, child care, housing support, infrastructure investment, etc. are all real markers for the future,” a Senate Democratic aide warned before the Senate moved to final passage of the budget.
