CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
March 20, 2012 – 11:04 p.m.

GOP Budget Sets Up Appropriations Fight

By Paul M. Krawzak and Kerry Young, CQ Staff

As House and Senate budget writers put together long-term plans that stake out sharply divergent goals, appropriators at both ends of the Capitol said they are prepared to begin work using different spending levels for the coming fiscal year, all but guaranteeing a new round of fights between the chambers later this year.

The House Budget Committee is scheduled to begin the process Wednesday with its markup of the fiscal 2013 budget resolution released by Chairman Paul D. Ryan. Action on the House floor is expected next week.

Click here to view chart: House GOP Fiscal 2013 Budget

The House is likely to write its spending legislation to the $1.028 trillion limit in the House budget resolution, challenging Democrats by coming in lower than the $1.047 trillion discretionary limit specified in the August debt limit law (PL 112-25). Senate Democrats said after Ryan, R-Wis., unveiled his plan that they will stick to the limit set in the law.

The Ryan tax and spending blueprint proposes spending $5 trillion less over a decade than the budget offered by President Obama last month, and it would reduce the deficit by $3 trillion more than the president’s plan, the GOP said. Ryan’s plan also calls for simplifying the tax system, restructuring federal health care programs and replacing automatic spending cuts with a mix of reductions in discretionary and mandatory programs.

Republicans said they expected strong support for the plan from GOP lawmakers in committee and on the House floor.

“If we don’t pass a budget we deserve criticism, because we’ve been criticizing the Senate for not passing a budget,” said Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., a freshman on the committee.

Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, a senior appropriator and Budget Committee member, said he would be surprised if there is much opposition among committee Republicans. “They pretty much got everybody on board,” he said.

But one conservative freshman on the committee, Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., said Tuesday he planned to vote against the budget. Karen Steward, a spokeswoman for Huelskamp, said it was unclear whether he would oppose the plan both in the committee and on the House floor.

Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., also plans to mark up a budget resolution later in the year, although Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said there is no reason for the Senate to consider one because the discretionary spending limit for next year is set in the debt limit law.

Conrad on Tuesday filed a resolution for committee allocations, setting in motion the process for the Senate to proceed with the spending bills.

A Realistic Number

House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers of Kentucky said that although he prefers the $1.047 trillion spending limit, he is ready to write his bills to meet the lower figure of $1.028 trillion.

GOP Budget Sets Up Appropriations Fight

“I think it’s a realistic number,” Rogers said. “It’s a number we will be able to work with, I think, and pass the appropriations bills.”

Senate Democrats are determined to stick with the higher discretionary cap in the debt limit law.

In a written statement, Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, said “differing top line numbers lead to needless delay and in the end, no one should doubt that the Senate will not move forward from the agreed upon level of $1.047 trillion for discretionary spending.”

David E. Price of North Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security, said the GOP leaders’ decision to lower the fiscal 2013 spending cap will make it harder to complete the next set of spending laws.

“It’s a formula for a great deal of confusion and chaos and yet another crisis, which the Republicans have specialized in,” Price said.

The difference goes beyond the relatively small $19 billion gap between the limits in discretionary spending the House and Senate will use as starting points because they will be working with widely different caps for defense and domestic discretionary spending.

The Senate will write its Defense appropriations bill to stay under a $546 billion ceiling and all domestic spending bills to meet a $501 billion limit, the caps in the debt limit law. But the House, following the budget resolution, will use $554 billion as the Defense limit and $474 billion as the domestic cap.

Rogers said “it’s getting tougher” to cut domestic spending, but he said, “We’ll make it work.”

Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the different discretionary limits will make it “a bigger challenge” to get House and Senate agreement. “We’ll have to negotiate the difference, as we always do,” he said.

The House and Senate have disagreed on discretionary spending limits in the past. But the difficulties are magnified this year by automatic spending cuts provided for in the debt limit law.

Unless Congress takes action to repeal the spending “sequester,” $109 billion in automatic cuts will take effect in January, pruning about $55 billion out of defense, about $43 billion out of domestic discretionary programs and the balance out of mandatory programs.

The GOP budget calls for replacing the sequester for fiscal 2013 with a combination of alternative savings. About $19 billion in savings would come from reducing the discretionary appropriations cap, and an additional $261 billion would be achieved through a handful of changes to entitlement and other mandatory spending programs.

Most Democrats also oppose the automatic spending cuts, but have yet to advance a plan to replace them. In general, however, they favor using a combination of tax increases and spending reductions.

GOP Budget Sets Up Appropriations Fight

A bigger plan that addresses the sequester “is what remains to be done,” Conrad said. “That has to be done in some bipartisan way, and so I am hopeful that as we go through this year, we will find a way to do that.”

Support in the Senate

It is unclear how much support for the House GOP budget there will be among Senate Republicans.

Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, spoke in support of the House plan when it was introduced Tuesday. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Senate Republican, expressed interest in additional cuts in discretionary spending.

“If we can actually do better than that, we ought to look at doing better than that,” said Thune, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, at an afternoon news conference. “I suspect that there will be amendments offered on the floor by Republicans to get closer to where the House numbers are. I think there is a real belief that if we can do better, we ought to try and do that to get spending down to the lowest level possible.”

Frances Symes contributed to this story.