The Unseriousness of the House Republicans’ Debt Limit Bill
The core of their proposal, however, is a cap on annual appropriations dramatically below the levels required to maintain current levels of activity. These cuts would be 13% in the fiscal year beginning this October and would rise rapidly to 24% by 2033. Cutting most programs 13%, much less 24%, would require radical reductions in the role of government in our society. Those figures, however, dramatically understates the proposal’s effect.
House Republicans insist that they do not want to cut defense spending. Many also insist that they would protect veterans’ health care – the single largest non-defense discretionary appropriations account. If Congress protected the Defense Department, but not veterans’ health care, from cuts, the reductions in everything else would be 27% in the first year and 49% after a decade. If Congress protected both defense and veterans’ health care, everything else in the annually appropriated budget would have to be cut by one-third immediately, with a 59% reduction required in ten years.
Of course, those are only average reductions. Many functions we obviously are not going to cut (e.g., congressional salaries, the President’s Secret Service detail, air traffic controllers, TSA inspectors). Each time an essential program is taken off the table, or is allowed to absorb a cut smaller than 59%, the cut to everything else must become even deeper.
House Republicans, of course, offer no suggestions – not even bad ones – for how they would meet these targets. They have not, and most assuredly will not, introduce a single appropriations bill that would mark to these limits or anything remotely close. They could not come close to passing such a bill even in the House. President Biden has quite appropriately been pointing out that his budget includes the complete text of the appropriations bills he would like to see enacted and asking House Republicans to offer comparable clarity.
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