Congress not likely to pass Trump budget plan
Congress probably will start with its own bipartisan draft
After taking a break next week for Memorial Day, the Republicancontrolled Congress will start to craft federal spending plans for next year — but they will not start with the budget blueprint President Trump will send over Tuesday.
Trump’s budget plan sets out dramatic spending cuts and a method to squeeze savings out of entitlement programs such as Medicaid, but it is a long way from being enacted.
“The president’s budget has never been the starting point for anything as long as I’ve been here,” said Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
“I don’t think there’s much chance of this budget going anywhere, based on how Republicans talked about the skinny budget,” he said, referring to a slimmed-down outline of the plan that Trump released in March.
Congress usually starts its drafting process each year with the budget and makes additions or subtractions from that. If it keeps to that practice, it will start with a plan that passed with bipartisan support this month.
The dynamics of the Republican majority — the staunchest conservatives often unite to insist on shrinking the government — probably will lead to some of Trump’s proposals “bleeding into the budget we’re going to deal with in a few weeks,” Yarmuth said. He said he does not expect the House to draft a plan with a $200 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or food stamps, but he does expect there to be some money cut from SNAP.
Roy Loewenstein, a spokesman for Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, said Lowey, the top
Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, would work with committee Republicans to improve after-school education programs, invest in medical research and maintain national security.
“But Democrats won’t accept any spending proposals or appropriations bills with poison pill policy riders or that slash critical programs that support working American families,” Loewenstein said.
It is not just Democrats who are skeptical of Trump’s broad strokes.
Interest groups began organizing after the preliminary version of Tuesday’s budget was released in March. It proposed eliminating dozens of programs. Members of Congress in both parties — who jealously guard their constitutional power to allocate funding — quickly said the president was free to propose what he wanted, but they would decide what gets funded and what does not.
“Some of the large cuts, I don’t think will be sustained by the majorities in the House,” House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., told a telephone town hall with constituents
“Democrats won’t accept any spending proposals or appropriations bills with poison pill policy riders or that slash critical programs that support working American families.”
Roy Loewenstein, a spokesman for Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.
March 20.
The Library of Congress is filled with budget proposals that presidents sent to Capitol Hill and never saw again in the form of legislation. Even in a House and Senate controlled by Republicans, Trump’s plans could face the same fate.
“It’s true of any president’s budget that somebody on the Hill is going to say, ‘It’s dead on arrival,’ ” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “And with the cuts envisioned and changes to entitlement programs, this one may be deader than most.”
Budget Director Mick Mulvaney will go before the House and Senate Budget committees this week, and members of Trump’s Cabinet will testify before other committees that set policies for their departments. All will probably be pressed to defend the cuts under questioning from lawmakers who wrote the laws creating programs slated for elimination.
Ellis said his group has supported for years some of the cuts Trump proposes, such as the elimination of the Appalachian Regional Commission and similar regional economic development organizations that survive because of their popularity with members of Congress.
“It all depends how hard the president and his allies going to push,” Ellis said. “It’s easy to make cuts on paper, what really is the measure of the administration is what they will fight for on the Hill.”
Trump was rebuffed in his first budget battle, when Congress largely ignored his call to cut $18 billion from domestic spending in the budget for the remainder of this fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30. That battle pushed up against the deadline to pass a spending bill this month to avoid a partial shutdown of the government, and Trump lashed out on Twitter after seeing news coverage saying Democrats had won. “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September,” he said.
The budget process is supposed to work this way: The president sends a budget to the Hill, the Budget committees draft a resolution setting top spending levels for various departments, then the 12 appropriations subcommittees write detailed spending bills on how much each department and agency gets for programs. That process calls for the budget committees to pass their resolution by April 15, so the appropriators can write and pass their bills before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
Yarmuth said he could not see the House passing a budget resolution before the end of June, meaning appropriators would get started only in July, and Congress is due to be in recess for August.
Stan Collender, a former staffer on both the House and Senate Budget committees who is a vice president at the communication firm MLSGroup Qorvis, said he does not expect spending bills to be passed until December at the earliest.