Congressional negotiators began narrowing differences Monday on competing budget resolutions, and although Republicans now control both chambers, experts see little likelihood of starting the next fiscal year with a funded federal government.
The budget resolution being negotiated by members of the Senate and the House of Representatives authorizes appropriations committees to spend an allotted amount in fiscal 2016. This will be a victory for the GOP, which now controls both chambers of Congress, marking the first time in years that a spending blueprint will be agreed upon.
It’s likely to be a victory short lived.
Budget resolutions are blueprints. As such they aren’t subject to presidential vetoes. Spending bills are, and they must pass Congress and be signed by the president. Since both Republican budget plans are wildly different than President Barack Obama’s own proposed spending priorities, gridlock is all but certain in the months ahead.
Here’s the starting point for budget talks: The two GOP budget resolutions envision deep spending cuts above $5 trillion over 10 years to get to a balanced budget. The president’s budget proposal doesn’t balance, boosts spending on education and infrastructure and is paid for with a $320 billion tax hike on the rich that will never get past a Republican Congress.
Similarly, GOP plans envision repealing the Affordable Care Act, something the president is sure to veto.
“How disappointing it is to see the budget resolution and process itself has become almost like a presidential budget – it’s just a messaging document?” lamented Steve Bell, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.
There’s another wrinkle. Republicans have deep divisions. Deficit hawks want to slash spending, while defense hawks want more military spending. And there’s a bevy of Republicans lining up to run for president next year, adding political calculations into the mix.
Republicans also must negotiate with Democrats, who are eager to give them a taste of their own medicine doled out when the GOP was in the minority and stifled the budget process.
It’s why some budget veterans such as Bell, now director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, are downbeat about the prospects for actual government funding being in place when the next fiscal year begins on Oct. 1
“Sure they have a balanced budget on a piece of paper . . . everyone who understands how budgets work knows that this is nothing but a pious hope,” said Bell, stressing that proposed deep spending cuts can’t hold. “There is no way the Republican Congress will implement a budget that . . . balances in 10 years.”
Between now and Sept. 30, expect a lot of politics over funding of the government, warned Robert Bixby, head of the bipartisan watchdog group Concord Coalition.
“They’ll pass a budget resolution – which would be an accomplishment in and of itself – but with an acknowledgment that it might not be feasible to pass the appropriations bills at those levels, that they might be too low,” he said. “You might find the president vetoing appropriations bills and we wind up with another continuing resolution” to fund the federal government after Oct. 1.
Others are more optimistic.
“The budget process seems more on track than we’ve seen in quite some time,” said Maya MacGuineas, who heads the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates balanced budgets. “Outside the budget process, there will be some things that will have to be addressed.”
And those aren’t small things. They include whether lawmakers will use gimmicks to shift some defense spending into a broad overseas contingency fund, effectively using smoke and mirrors in order to boost spending above agreed-upon budget constraints. A large number of tax provisions – so-called extenders – have expired and need to be restored and presumably paid for through cuts elsewhere or be allowed to add to the deficit.
There’s also the the problem of the Highway Trust Fund, the source of about 80 percent of highway spending. It is scheduled to run out of money in less than two months. The fund continues to spend more than it takes in through federal gasoline taxes, and lawmakers are struggling to figure out how to fund this in light of budget talks and promised deficit reduction.
If the recently passed bipartisan “doc fix” is any indication, lawmakers might just punt on how to pay for it.
Since the late 1990s, the “doc fix” restores annually Medicare reimbursement payments to doctors who, absent congressional relief, stand to loose them. Medicare is the government health system for the elderly, and lawmakers of all stripes hailed the April 15 deal that put this funding on a permanent footing.
At a cost of $200 billion, lawmakers offered no plan to actually fully pay for it. Obama signed it into law the following day.
“I think it sets an unfortunate precedent, because you have all sorts of people heralding it as a big bipartisan success,” said MacGuineas.
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