House may consider Trump’s $15 billion spending rescission package today

Republicans like to complain that, while they’d love to cut spending, the complicated machinations of the congressional budgeting process simply don’t allow them to do so unilaterally. There are filibuster threats. There are are limits to the reconciliation process. Hey, if only we could! Too bad the way Washington works!

Well, they don’t have that excuse today. Thanks to the Budget Impoundment Act of 1974, Congress is now in a position to rescind $15 billion in completely unnecessary spending, much of which involves money that hasn’t even been spent when it’s been allocated in the past. And all it takes is a simple majority of each chamber to get it done. Today, it appears the House will vote on the rescission package offered by President Trump, and Tom Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste laid out the case in The Hill for why this is an absolute no-brainer:

President Trump’s rescissions proposal cuts wasteful programs, including more than a dozen that Citizens Against Government Waste has identified in its annual database and congressional pig book. The package includes $523 million in energy loans from the 2009 stimulus package, $86 million in unspent transportation earmarks, $30 million for economic development assistance grants, and $13 million for high energy cost grants, all of which exemplify Washington’s profligate spending. Support for the rescissions package should be bipartisan, and there are signs it actually is. In April, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) expressed his support for rescinding funds that have been sitting unspent, saying, “I wouldn’t irrationally oppose a rescission which said we’ve had money laying in an account that has not been spent for one, two, three years, we shouldn’t just have it sitting in that account.” All the rescissions being proposed by President Trump meet Hoyer’s standards. As the rescissions submission states, the funds are “unobligated balances from prior year appropriations” that are “no longer needed for the purpose for which it was appropriated by the Congress” and which have “been left unspent by agencies for years.” Some of the programs are low priority and nonessential. The outcries over the rescission of funds for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) are a red herring. The authorization for $5.1 billion in CHIP funds expired last September. In January, Congress passed a six-year extension of CHIP as part of the continuing resolution for fiscal 2018. The renewal of the program will end up saving taxpayers $6 billion over 10 years.

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Now Steny Hoyer has been having a cow over the fact that there are no defense cuts in the rescission package, but there’s a simple answer to that complaint: The increases in defense spending are desperately needed, and long overdue after years of neglecting the Armed Forces during the Obama Administration. This is called making choices and setting priorities. Democrats knew the defense increases were needed, and used that fact to squeeze more domestic spending out of Republicans who realized they couldn’t get the whole thing past a filibuster unless they gave Democrats what they were demanding. The ultimate result was a spending blowout Republicans had to swallow hard and accept because that was the Democrats’ price for taking care of the military. Rescinding $15 billion of that waste is just the beginning of any return to fiscal responsibility, but at least it’s something. Hopefully the House will not be where the drama takes place. The rescission package will have a harder time in the Senate, where usual suspects like Susan Collins may be unwilling to pare back on the federal government’s credit card privileges. Remember, there are only 51 Republican senators to begin with, and John McCain isn’t going to be there (not that you could necessarily count on his vote if he was). That means the GOP needs all 50 present Republican senators go pass the rescission package. This is the one that will be a nail-biter. But it has to get through the House first, and today could be the day. The GOP House has a loud record over the past several decades of talking about cutting spending and never really doing it. Today would be a great time to actually accomplish what they always say they want to do. They will rarely have a better opportunity.