President Obama’s budget won’t be released until Tuesday, but budget-week trash-talking got off to an early start Monday when Democrats knocked the decision by the Republican Budget Committee chairmen not to hold hearings with the president’s budget director.
In a letter sent Monday morning to House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., the Democratic members of the committee said that Price was “disrespectful” to forgo the traditional post-budget hearing with Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan.
The squabble began last week, when Price and his Senate counterpart, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, told Donovan not to bother showing up for hearings, saying that Obama’s budget won’t be serious about reducing the federal debt and that their time would be better spent elsewhere.
All the Democratic members of the House Budget Committee, led by Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, responded Monday with a pointed letter to Price.
“We are appalled at your decision refusing to hold a hearing,” the 14 lawmakers wrote. “This choice is more than just a rejection of the House Budget Committee’s longstanding, bipartisan tradition; it is disrespectful to the committee members, the public and the president.”
The letter noted that the budget director has testified before the committee each year since 1975, and that it’s the only set of hearings on the budget as a whole.
The Democrats accused the Republicans of refusing to hold the hearings because Obama has rejected the “Tea Party agenda.” They also wrote that the GOP favors policies that “disinvest in America, privatize Medicare, hurt the middle class, slash social safety net programs like Medicaid, threaten retirement security, protect special interest tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy, and use gimmicky accounting tricks to falsely claim balance.”
While the Budget Committee hearings won’t be held this year, other committees already have announced hearings later on in the week with high-ranking Obama officials on the budget requests for their agencies.
