News: House Republican committee chairs pitched in a private meeting what could add up to between $2.5 trillion and $3 trillion of spending cuts and budget savings to fund Republicans’ reconciliation package — which would include massive tax cuts.
We got our hands on the presentations that House committee chairs made during a closed-door Republican conference meeting this week.
They lay out a road map of where the GOP’s hunt for spending cuts is heading right now. The options range from more than a dozen possibilities from curtailing student loan programs to large-scale Medicaid cuts to new immigration-related fees.
The universe of options is wide, but the GOP may need this scale of cuts to satisfy the Republican conference’s deficit hawks. Plus, reconciliation rules don’t allow for bills that increase deficits after 10 years, so anything that goes beyond that budget window would have to be offset.
Cuts, cuts, and more cuts.
– The Energy and Commerce Committee is eyeing up to $2 trillion of cuts, including per capita caps for Medicaid — which would put a limit on federal dollars sent to states — along with Medicaid work requirements and pharmacy benefit manager reforms.
Medicaid work requirements are controversial and could adversely impact hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans who get their health care through the program. President Donald Trump tried to impose them during his first term but former President Joe Biden reversed the policy. Now that Trump is back, work requirements are on the table again.
Energy-related cuts, such as rolling back tailpipe rules and fuel efficiency benchmarks for cars and light trucks, known as CAFE standards, were also part of the committee’s pitch.
– The Education and Workforce panel believes it has up to $500 billion in cuts, largely through targeting student loans. Options include lowering the amount that can be obtained in student loans, or the “aggregate borrowing limit,” along with restrictions on loan eligibility for non-citizens. Caps on the public service loan forgiveness program are another option, as is repealing the SAVE repayment plan. Colleges paying fees for unpaid loans came up too. Taken together, this is all part of a broad GOP offensive against a Biden-era initiative designed to help younger Americans faced with huge student loan debt, especially minority students.
– The House Agriculture Committee is targeting between $100 billion and $250 billion in cuts. Some would impact SNAP, aka food stamps. Mandating states pay more for SNAP benefits with a cost-share requirement, changing the Thrifty Food Plan process and expanding work requirements were among the options. Democrats are already panning proposals to cut spending on social safety net programs to pay for tax cuts.
– House Oversight and Government Reform floated up to $66 billion in potential savings. The panel is targeting federal workers’ retirement and benefit programs: the Federal Employees Retirement System and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Options include an FEHB audit and raising the FERS employee contribution rate to 4.4%, which is currently the rate for recent hires but not workers brought on before 2014.
– The Judiciary Committee is eyeing up to $27 billion in options, including a variety of different immigration fees such as charges for asylum application and annual renewal, detention, parole and visa overstays.
– The Transportation and Infrastructure panel’s up to $26 billion in savings would include raising tonnage duties for ships, and electric vehicles fees that would go into the Highway Trust Fund.
– The Natural Resources Committee has a smaller target of up to $5 billion, but the panel’s options cover some energy priorities for Republicans. The panel’s ideas include oil and gas lease sales, mining and energy-related measures, and forestry and timber sales. These will be strongly opposed by environmental and conservation groups.
There are other ideas that came up too, including work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and reforming how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded, as we reported Wednesday.
And it’s no surprise that scattered through the presentations were multiple mentions of rolling back Democrats’ signature policy package from 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act.
The road ahead. All of this is preparation for the House Budget Committee and GOP leadership to put together reconciliation instructions. Setting revenue targets for each committee that will be involved in the Republicans’ bill is the first big step toward concrete decision-making about how the package shapes up.
Amid the hunt for cuts, Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) has stepped out to float a lot of cost savings options of his own. Some of these overlap with committees’ ideas laid out in Wednesday’s presentations, although a good amount don’t.
Arrington’s committee went into lots of detail on ideas for reconciliation in a 51-page menu of policies and cost estimates they compiled. We scooped that document for you on Jan. 17.
Ultimately, each and every cut will have to get approved by every Republican member in the House. Facing a 217-215 margin soon, any GOP member could kill the bill, at least until early April.
Politically, finding a universe of cuts and savings that everyone in the House Republican Conference can live with won’t be that easy. As we noted above, Democrats are going on offense and slamming some of the GOP’s options.
Today in the Capitol: Senate Democrats will have a caucus meeting at 11 a.m. as they look to strategize on nominations and upcoming legislation, including ICC sanctions.
