Republican leadership should work toward a deal with the White House on government spending before another unwinnable showdown over government funding and the debt ceiling, a top Obama economic adviser said Friday.
“They know where this play ends,” said Brian Deese, senior adviser to President Obama.
Addressing the GOP’s difficulties in agreeing on defense spending in the House and Senate budgets, Deese suggested at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in D.C. that the White House’s role was to let the process play out while highlighting the path to a deal.
The difficulty facing Republicans is that many national security hawks in the party want to raise the statutory spending caps on defense spending for 2016, a spending limit set in past high-stakes negotiations with Obama.
Obama’s budget includes raising defense spending $38 billion above the cap for fiscal year 2016, to $561 billion.
The budgets proposed by House and Senate Republicans this week would leave funding at the cap: $523 billion. The House version, however, includes additional funding through a war account that does not count against the cap. Disagreements between fiscal conservatives and defense hawks on that maneuver will have to be resolved on the House floor.
Obama proposes lifting the caps on defense and non-defense spending by equal amounts, and making up for the added spending by cutting spending or raising revenues in later years of the 10-year budget window.
That was the structure of the deal reached between Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in late 2013 to keep the government open.
Deese said Friday that the Murray-Ryan deal was one that worked economically and politically, and would be the inevitable path forward when the threat of the government running out of money or risking a default comes up later in the year.
Republicans should work toward it now rather than later, he suggested. “There’s a question out there that Republican leadership has to grapple with, around, do they look to find areas where there are areas of bipartisan agreement and move to those in the first place rather than getting backed into them?”
“The thing that we can do to most helpfully encourage the kind of deal that would be good for the economy and good for national security is be very clear both about where the president stands and about how we would get from here to there,” Deese added.
In particular, Deese said, Obama will not allow the across-the-board spending cuts to be locked in, and will not allow the cap to be raised for defense spending unless it’s also raised for non-defense spending. The caps apply to all non-defense spending appropriated by Congress, on everything from job training programs to law enforcement and basic research.
Obama held firm on his demands during the government shutdown in fall 2013, when the government also came within days of being unable to guarantee making payments on obligations because the debt ceiling hadn’t been raised.
Since House Speaker John Boehner ended that standoff by passing a bill to re-open the government with Democratic help, there have been fewer high-profile conflicts between Obama and congressional Republicans over funding the government or raising the debt ceiling.
That dynamic could change now that Republicans also have the majority in the Senate.
But Obama economic adviser Jeffrey Zients, speaking at the same event Friday, said that economic growth in recent years has “been helped by the absence of brinksmanship.”
