The Republican Study Committee released a proposed 2019 budget Wednesday that would balance the budget in eight years and cut billions of dollars worth of discretionary spending from the omnibus package, giving conservatives a plan to rally around in the wake of a budget deal with Democrats that added $300 billion in new spending over the next two years.
The proposal released Wednesday includes many pet issues for conservatives, including making permanent the tax cuts enacted by the GOP tax law passed in December, the full repeal of Obamacare, and the elimination of many spending priorities from the bipartisan omnibus package.
“It’s the only credible and comprehensive plan that’s been put forward this session to turn us back toward fiscal solvency before it’s too late,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. “We’re going to hear howls of protests from the partisans of the status quo, but we need to be mindful that we are running out of time and we are running out of options.”
The plan would maintain the president’s request for defense funding for the next ten years, starting with $716 billion in the 2019 fiscal year, but issue severe cuts to discretionary spending, a proposal that most Democrats would oppose. It would also reverse the planned spending cap increases agreed to in February and reduce spending by $12.4 trillion over ten years. Nevertheless, Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., maintained that the proposal is not a “slash job.”
[Related: White House rolls out Trump’s fiscal year 2019 budget: Here’s what’s in it]
“We need to earn back the title as the adults in the room, the fiscal people. We are responsible not just for where we are today, but for decades to come,” Walker said.
The proposal was released about a month after the omnibus spending bill passed despite reservations by President Trump, who made known his disgust with the bill and process when he signed it into law.
It also comes in the wake of new projections by the Congressional Budget Office, which projected $1 trillion budget deficits by 2020 due in large part to the tax reform law and the omnibus package, and $33 trillion in national debt by 2028. The budget proposal takes into account the CBO’s estimates, and lawmakers said they were not using “pie in the sky” numbers to justify their proposal.
In response to the omnibus’ passage and the CBO’s report, House leadership held a balanced budget amendment vote and has openly discussed a rescissions package to curb some of the recently passed spending. The proposal’s path to balance the budget in eight years reflects a longer timeline than the RSC’s 2018 budget, which would have balanced it in six years.
The proposal, however, is unlikely to reach the House floor and there remains pessimism that the House Budget Committee will end up marking up it’s own budget resolution.
“Without the [House] Budget Committee engaging, it’s hard to kind of get a launch pad to be able to see this happen,” Walker said of a possible vote. “I would like to tell you that I’m hopeful. I’m just not at this point.”
“I think that it would be an inexcusable dereliction of duty for the House Budget Committee to fail to produce a budget,” said McClintock on the idea of a markup. “I am disappointed and embarrassed that it hasn’t even begun that work now a full week after the deadline for the House to adopt a budget.”
