“With days left before the government shuts down, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has embraced steep reductions to the U.S. safety net in an attempt to appease far-right Republican demands for lower spending.”
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
MADISON, Wis. – In case you missed it, the Washington Post reports that House Republicans are increasingly embracing drastic spending cuts that will hurt Wisconsin families, seniors, and children.
In addition to targeting the Social Security and Medicare administration, the latest proposals would also make dramatic cuts to nutrition assistance programs for women and young children and slash heating assistance for lower-income families as we approach the winter. Wisconsin’s Republican congressional delegation, including Congressmen Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, and Tom Tiffany have refused to speak out against these devastating proposals.
“House Republicans would rather jeopardize nutrition assistance for Wisconsin children than ask corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share,” said Opportunity Wisconsin Program Director Meghan Roh. “It’s time for Congressmen Steil, Van Orden, and Tiffany to stand up to Speaker McCarthy and members of their party who are willing to shut down the government if these extreme demands aren’t met.”
Washington Post: Bending to right, McCarthy pushes safety net cuts in shutdown battle
Cutting housing subsidies for the poor by 33 percent as soaring rents drive a national affordability crisis. Forcing more than 1 million women and children onto the waitlist of a nutritional assistance program for poor mothers with young children. Reducing federal spending on home heating assistance for low-income families by more than 70 percent with energy prices high heading into the winter months.
With days left before the government shuts down, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has embraced steep reductions to the U.S. safety net in an attempt to appease far-right Republican demands for lower spending. If McCarthy can win over conservatives and pass legislation funding the government, Republicans hope to have greater leverage in negotiations with the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House.
But far-right votes have remained elusive, leading McCarthy to propose ever larger and still evolving spending cuts. “The level of reductions in the existing House resolution set us back significantly on issues that government should be funding for the benefit of this country,” said G. William Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington.
“Their proposals were already almost an impossibility before. But if they go even further, as they are now discussing, I don’t see how we can address many of the major issues the nation is trying to address,” Hoagland added. The estimated cuts to housing, nutrition assistance and home heating aid come from the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank.
[. . .]
In June, President Biden and McCarthy agreed to avert a debt limit crisis with a deal that kept government funding at nearly flat levels for the next fiscal year. That amounted to a spending cut when accounting for inflation. Lawmakers also agreed to pull back tens of billions of dollars that Democrats had approved for expanding the Internal Revenue Service.
However, conservatives have regarded the spending agreement as a starting point for negotiations, and they spent the summer pushing for much lower funding levels. The hard-right lawmakers angry about the debt ceiling deal froze the House for a week in June by blocking procedural votes on noncontroversial legislation.
McCarthy eventually conceded to their demands and directed the House Appropriations Committee to prepare the 12 spending bills that fund the government for the 2024 fiscal year at the 2022 spending levels, well below what Biden and McCarthy had agreed on. And despite protests from the White House, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee advanced legislation in July that would cut spending by roughly 9.5 percent on average, according to Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.
Many federal programs would have seen much more dramatic reductions. The spending proposals would bring spending on these domestic programs to their lowest point as a share of the domestic economy in at least 60 years, according to Kogan. (Democrats have characterized these plans as a 23 percent cut, when taking into account proposed spending reductions to the Inflation Reduction Act and other programs.)
[. . .]
Six Republican members from two different factions, three from the pragmatic Main Street Caucus and three from the hard-right Freedom Caucus, met for several days before announcing a deal on a stopgap measure last week. That would have funded the government for 30 days, cutting every department except the military and veterans programs by 8 percent. It included most of a Republican-approved border security bill.
The White House said that plan would mean 300,000 households, including 20,000 veterans, would lose housing support, 6.6 million students would see their Pell Grants cut, 60,000 seniors would lose help from services like Meals on Wheels and 2.1 million women would be waitlisted due to the cuts to the program for poor women who are pregnant or mothers. And yet again even these cuts, despite being blessed by several Freedom Caucus leaders, were also rejected by the smaller faction of hard-right House conservatives, who panned the measure and argued it still spent too much money.
The impasse has forced McCarthy into a legislative bind with only days to spare before a shutdown that many Republicans believe will bring a political backlash to their party. House Republican officials have discussed another $60 billion in spending cuts, but it is unclear if such a measure would prove sufficient to appease the remaining conservative holdouts.
“Speaker McCarthy is proposing increasingly deep cuts to some parts of the social safety net and many other critical government functions in an attempt to appease extreme members of his caucus,” Kogan said. “This would increase suffering among some of the most vulnerable Americans.”
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