The freshmen want to end a host of arcane budget gimmicks involving “chimps” (changes in mandatory spending), budgetary timing shifts and spending cancellations known as “rescissions.” But their most passionate rhetoric is focused on a more mundane target: the troubling effect of inflation on the nation’s budget.
By law, congressional budget analysts are required to produce baseline projections on how agency spending rises with inflation and population growth. The theory is that providing the same level of services costs more each year.
But that means spending is assumed to always be going up. It also means that slowing a program’s rate of growth is invariably condemned as a “cut,” Griffin and other freshmen complained, even if the program in question is getting more money than it did in the past.
“I compare Washington cuts to an Arkansas normal person cut,” Griffin said. “A normal person cut is when you get less money this year than you got last year. In Washington, you can get more money this year than you did last year, but if it’s not as much as you thought you were going to get, then that’s a cut.”
Ending adjustments for inflation in agency budget projections is unlikely to have much immediate impact. Budget caps were adopted during last year’s fight over the federal debt limit, and agency spending is actually projected to fall over the next decade, from $1.34 trillion in 2011 to $1.2 trillion in 2015. Agency spending would not return to last year’s levels until 2021. Spending on giant federal health and retirement programs, however, would keep rising, as would interest payments on the growing national debt.
Democrats argue that the Republican approach is nonetheless ill-advised. It “tries to kind of wish away inflation,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, creating “a very misleading picture of what we can purchase in terms of goods and services with our dollars” that “gets more misleading over time.”
House Republicans voted unanimously to support the inflation-busting Baseline Reform Act on Friday and sent it on to the Democrat-controlled Senate. This week, House leaders plan to hold votes on a raft of additional rule-changing measures, few of which have much chance of survival. One measure, which would create a process for the White House to nix specific spending proposals with congressional approval, does have the backing of the White House. But many congressional Democrats oppose the modified line-item veto plan, and aides say it is unlikely to pass the Senate.
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