One of the House GOP’s staunchest fiscal conservatives is slamming the just-passed Republican spending blueprint.
Rep. Mick Mulvaney long opposed to busting the spending caps put in place under the 2011 Budget Control Act, said the GOP is using a costly gimmick to pay for an increase in fiscal 2016 defense spending.
“With fiscal concerns no longer in vogue, House Republicans broke the statutory caps of the Budget Control Act and did so in a way that wasn’t honest,” the South Carolina Republican wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Instead of making the arguments for changing the law, the House budget used an off-budget fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, to increase military spending.”
Mulvaney was among 17 Republicans who voted against the House spending blueprint.
The House passed the $3.8 trillion proposal last week without any Democratic support. The plan now must be reconciled with a similar, but not identical Senate Republican budget.
Both the House and Senate plans boost defense spending by $38 billion by increasing the contingency operations fund, which does not require cuts to offset it and thus adds to the deficit.
Republicans devised the plan to increase the wartime fund so that they would not be forced to make painful cuts in non-military spending, which otherwise would have been required to comply with the spending caps.
The budget caps were signed into law to save $1 trillion over 10 years, but lawmakers are struggling to pass spending measures with the cuts intact and are seeking a way to lift the caps or otherwise skirt their limits over the objection of conservatives.
“Because of the hard decisions that defense hawks and deficit hawks had made together,” Mulvaney wrote, “Republicans were gaining the moral high ground on spending. Last week we lost it, and it will be harder to regain the next time.”
Mulvaney also hinted that House budget plan may make it harder to get the GOP to pass legislation to raise the nation’s borrowing limit this year.
Conservative watchdog groups also condemned the House budget proposal, but GOP leaders defended the plan as one that will maintain military readiness amid increasing terrorist threats at home and abroad.
