Republican lawmakers plan to attack President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2022 from at least three specific angles, despite not yet having a chance to review the requested funding levels fully.
The Washington Examiner spoke with 10 senior GOP aides and Republican strategists ahead of the Friday unveiling, and they pointed to inflation fears, disproportional increases in non-security-related spending, and a potential violation of one of Biden’s largest campaign tax promises as rallying points for the opposition.
Some further criticized the administration for waiting longer than “any other administration in the modern budget era” to release a first-year budget request.
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The New York Times reported Thursday that the budget request will clock in at more than $6 trillion for FY22, a level of federal spending unseen since World War II that would drive yearly deficits above $1 trillion over the next decade.
Four of the individuals who spoke with the Washington Examiner directly cited comments made by former Obama administration National Economic Council Director Larry Summers about how Biden’s spending proposals are “overheating” the economy.
Summers told CNN earlier this month that the White House must “recognize that the risk of a Vietnam inflation scenario is now greater than the deflation risks on which they were originally focused.”
“Whatever was the case a few months ago, it should now be clear that overheating, not excess slack, is the dominant economic risk facing the U.S. over the next year or two,” he continued. “Wherever possible, they should be trying to defer spending rather get it out the door as soon as possible.”
“They haven’t even released the budget yet, and inflation is already ticking up,” one Capitol Hill aide told the Washington Examiner. “What’s going to happen once we pour on $6 trillion more? If you think gas and lumber prices are outrageous now, just wait until lagging wages become a factor.”
A number of the senior GOP aides who spoke to the Washington Examiner said that the expected non-defense spending increases far outpace those of defense spending. The skinny budget released by the White House in April saw non-defense discretionary requests jump by $106 billion from the FY21 levels, compared to just $16 billion for defense.
Two of those aides specifically questioned why the administration would not ramp up the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, given the massive surge in migrant border crossings Republicans say was sparked by the president’s immigration overhaul.
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The White House is already addressing the inflation and discretionary spending concerns by claiming that historic investments are necessary to modernize the country’s infrastructure, protect workers, and regain the upper hand against China and other economic adversaries.
Speaking in Cleveland Thursday, Biden himself made the argument that rising wages are a “feature not a bug” of his economic plan, claiming that employers should be competing with each other to land workers and not the other way around.
“The starting gun has already gone off. We can’t afford to fall any further behind,” he added of competing with China on the global stage. “Now is the time to build the foundation that we’ve laid — to make bold investments in our families, in our communities, in our nation. We know from history that these kinds of investments raise both the floor and the ceiling of the economy for everybody.”
Still, a third tactic, touting Biden’s own past tax promises, could be the GOP’s best chance for a rhetorical win, especially as Republican lawmakers seek to negotiate an infrastructure compromise that doesn’t wipe out former President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Nearly every individual interviewed by the Washington Examiner pointed to a specific claim made by the New York Times: Biden will not renew Trump’s tax breaks for low and middle-income families after they expire in 2025.
According to the New York Times’s report, the Biden administration is framing the increased tax revenue that would follow the expired cuts as a tool to help reset the deficit over the next decade, but Republican critics will argue that it instead violates the president’s often-repeated promise not to raise taxes on households making less than $400,000 a year.
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“This is clearly [Biden] going back on arguably his most important campaign promise,” one senior GOP aide told the Washington Examiner. “But it makes sense. There’s no way he could’ve won in 2020 if they were honest about this stuff.”
It’s worth noting that Congress “practically” never approves presidential budget requests without adjusting the spending levels, another GOP aide explained, but a proposal that lets the tax cuts expire “just makes our job that much easier.”
