| 3.23.22

The First Senate Republican Budget Since 2006 (S. Con. Res. 11)

Do you support or oppose this bill?

What is S. Con. Res. 11?

(Updated October 21, 2019)

This bill lays out the Federal budget for 2016, and puts forth a spending plan for the subsequent years from 2017 to 2025. The goal is to balance the country's budget in 10 years, and in that time, cut spending by $5.1 trillion. Spoiler: this budget cuts many programs and changes many existing services, all while employing some creative accounting.

Perhaps most notably, this budget aims to support military programs while staying true the budget caps. Unlike the House budget, that increases defense spending by $94 billion with the help of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund, a stash of money that can be used for defense purposes, but that is separate from Department of Defense or State Department funding — the Senate budget sticks to the $58 billion cap, imposes a 60-vote point of order against any legislation requesting more than $58 billion for the war fund. As The Hill notes:

"That would set a high hurdle for legislation requesting a total above that threshold and could provide the Senate with leverage in negotiations with the House."

Otherwise, the budget follows pretty similarly to the budget proposed by the House.

This budget too would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and all the health care-related pieces of the Health Care and Reconciliation Act of 2010, a bill that amended the ACA. The budget authorizes the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to repeal these acts, without the option of a filibuster.

This process, for whatever reason, is called “reconciliation” — or a tool that "makes it easier for Congress to change current law in order to bring revenue, spending, and debt-limit levels into conformity with the policies of the annual budget resolution." This budget also grants reconciliation rights on programs that deal with children’s nutrition or safety from sexual predators, a number of issues related to the entrenched Department of Veterans’ Affairs, infrastructure and transportation.

In addition to repealing the ACA, the bill would restructure Medicaid, by turning it into state by state grants. Cuts it seeks to make would come from Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps, totalling a whopping $4.3 trillion. As the New York Times notes, these cuts are mostly ideas that don't have solid plans for implementation:

"Unlike the House budget, [the Senate] does not make specific policy prescriptions, such as converting Medicare into a voucher-like program that would allow recipients to buy subsidized insurance on the private health care market."

For all you students, this budget proposal also puts Pell Grants on the chopping block —a program that gives low-income students money for college that they don’t have to pay back. This budget would cut them by $90 billion, and another $60 billion from other higher education spending.

If this bill passed and all of its provisions were put into place, the the budget would be balanced by 2025.

Argument in favor

This bill reduces the deficit by making cuts to a number of programs, including Medicare, and by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It’s not easy, but it has to be done— the current state of U.S. spending is unsustainable.

Argument opposed

This bill suggests reducing the deficit by either cutting or scaling back some of the most important government programs: the Affordable Care Act, Pell Grants, Medicare, the military. A balanced budget in ten years is not worth this.

Impact

Every person in the U.S., and every future government function.

Cost of S. Con. Res. 11

The CBO has not yet analyzed the specific policies that compose this budget, but has analyzed this proposal and its projected impact on deficits. It also has analyzed the federal debt held by the public compared to the CBO’s Extended Baseline (basically current law), its Extended Alternative Baseline (which incorporates tax provisions that are due to expire), and scenarios where deficits are cut by $2 trillion and $4 trillion over a 10-year period. It also found the amount of federal debt held by the public would be 55 percent in 2025, compared to 79 percent under the Extended Baseline and 88 percent under the Extended Alternative Baseline.

Additional Info

In Depth:

This budget comes with a whopping 28 amendments. That’s because the bill was open to amendments. If you had gotten down to the Capitol, you could have gotten them to declare that your cat was cute. Okay, not really, but you get the idea.

Of Note:

Everybody’s got a budget plan. President Obama plan released in February, would have increased both military spending and spending on social programs. It also would have increased taxes. The Senate rejected it on Tuesday, March 24, 98-1. Ouch. Either way, he's the man with the pen, and he's said that any bill with sequestration will get a big fat veto stamp on it.