Money lacking despite support

GOP lawmakers struggle to fund ideas they say they back

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., delivered a stern warning recently as he urged support for legislation to combat skyrocketing drug abuse. “There is an epidemic sweeping across our nation,” he intoned.

Other Republican lawmakers followed. And in March, the Senate voted 94-1 for the bill.

When it came to paying for the effort, however, there was no similar outpouring. The Senate rejected calls for $600 million in emergency federal aid.

It wasn’t the first time that resources didn’t match the rhetoric.

Congressional Republicans in recent months have trumpeted their work on crumbling roads, inadequate care for patients with mental illnesses and other pressing issues. Yet time and again, lawmakers declined to put up the money.

They refused emergency funding to control an expected outbreak of the Zika virus, saying the Obama administration should use existing money. (Republican leaders are now reconsidering.) A push to modernize the nation’s fractured mental health system is stalling, in part over GOP resistance to new investments. And at the end of last year, Congress turned aside pleas to modernize funding for roads and bridges, which hasn’t been updated in more than

“It seems like lawmakers are great at passing bills. They’re not so good at providing money to pay for things.”

two decades.

“It seems like lawmakers are great at passing bills. They’re not so good at providing money to pay for things,” said Richard Nance, who directs alcohol and drug treatment programs in Utah County, south of Salt Lake City.

Nance says he’s been overwhelmed by the surge in heroin and prescription drug abuse in recent years. He’d like to build a second residential treatment center because the current facility is always full. But the county hasn’t had the funds, partly because Utah rejected new federal funding in 2014 to expand its Medicaid program through the Affordable Care Act.

Congressional Republicans say they’re protecting taxpayer money at a time when government spending is out of control.

“Every day, Americans make tough, responsible decisions. … They know that they have a limited amount of dollars to spend,” House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., said in his 2017 budget blueprint. “Washington has either forgotten these simple rules of the road or, worse, decided it does not have to abide by them.”

Price has proposed to slash some $6 trillion from the federal budget over the next decade, and many Republicans are demanding even more cuts.

Federal spending, driven largely by health care and retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, is indeed increasing as a share of the economy.

Less noted has been the erosion of federal spending that is not earmarked for the military or for Medicare, Social Security or other entitlement programs.

This part of the budget — which supports other government services such as transportation, scientific research and education — has been steadily declining since 2010.

So- called nondefense discretionary spending is now projected to reach its lowest level relative to the economy since 1962, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a leftleaning Washington think tank.

The appetite for raising additional reve- nue has also dwindled, though federal taxes are roughly on par with the historic average (and remain low by international standards).

When Congress approved a five-year transportation bill in December to fund road and transit projects, lawmakers refused to raise the gas tax to pay for it. Instead, they tapped a series of reserves not intended for transportation. The 18.4 centper-gallon tax, designed to fund roads and bridges, hasn’t been raised since 1993.

Altogether, federal investment in highways buys less now than at any time in the last quarter-century, according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Public health officials nationwide are confronting similar shortfalls, even as they confront the opioid epidemic and plan for an anticipated outbreak of Zika this summer.

Richard Nance, who directs alcohol and drug treatment programs in Utah