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“Congressional leaders have reached an agreement on overall spending levels for the current fiscal year… House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday the agreement would secure $16 billion in additional spending cuts from the previous agreement brokered by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden and is about $30 billion less than what the Senate was considering…
“Overall, the agreement calls for $886 billion in defense funding. It would provide $772 billion in domestic, non-defense spending, when including $69 billion called for in a side deal to the debt ceiling bill that McCarthy had reached with the White House, Democrats said.” AP News
Here’s our previous coverage of the deal approved by McCarthy and his subsequent ouster. The Flip Side
The right argues that more cuts are needed, but is skeptical that Johnson has the leverage to do better given his narrow majority.
“Republicans are celebrating clawing back $20 billion in IRS funding and $6.1 billion in unspent Covid-relief funds. We celebrate with them for what it’s worth, though we wish each of those numbers were higher. It’s just hard to get too excited about such small dollar amounts relative to the size of the budget…
“Keeping discretionary spending roughly equal to last year’s is a perfect demonstration of Washington’s unseriousness on fiscal policy. Last year, the deficit was $2 trillion. It was a year of low unemployment, no major new domestic programs, no U.S. forces involved in major wars, and tax revenue comfortably above the historical average as a share of the economy. Coming up $2 trillion short in those conditions is an embarrassing failure of leadership.”
The Editors, National Review
“The House Freedom Caucus condemned the deal: ‘Republicans promised millions of voters that we would fight to change the status quo and it is long past time to deliver.’ The deal, they declared, is a ‘fiscal calamity.’ And they’re right. But all of that is beside the point. I’m a big believer in the power of arguments in a democracy, but the simple fact is that arguments within Congress matter less than the raw numbers behind who is making the arguments…
“Not only does the GOP not control the Senate or the White House, it barely controls the House. When Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) leaves Congress this month, the Republicans will have only a two-seat majority… And contrary to what House Freedom Caucus members shout on cable TV, you can’t dictate policy outcomes just because you’re angry — or right. Arguments still matter, but the argument Republicans need to win is at the ballot box.”
Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times
“Overall, domestic discretionary spending remains essentially flat, while defense dollars increase by roughly 3%. That breaks the Democrats’ longtime demand for parity between defense and social-welfare spending. Mr. Johnson’s team also managed to kill several gimmicks that threatened to make emergency spending and changes to entitlement accounting part of the permanent budget baseline…
“Meeting the budget deadlines lets Republicans focus on Mr. Biden’s border mess, where a united GOP might extract real concession on security in return for weapons for Ukraine and Israel. The alternative is for the GOP to fracture over this spending deal, threaten a shutdown, and produce more headlines about GOP dysfunction.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left is mildly disappointed by the cuts, but argues that the deal is far better than a government shutdown.
The left is mildly disappointed by the cuts, but argues that the deal is far better than a government shutdown.
“The $1.66 trillion agreement leaves most of the Biden White House’s spending priorities intact, apart from cuts to Covid recovery programs and the IRS. By any objective measure, these spending reductions—aimed at two pet targets of anti-government zealots on the right—are inopportune and self-defeating…
“Covid transmission is again spiking across the country, and paring back key IRS functions actually reduces federal revenues, once more exposing the right’s pose of fiscal responsibility as the empty posturing it’s always been…“But these cuts are clearly measures the Biden administration and congressional Democrats can live with, particularly if the alternative is putting the government on indefinite furlough at a time when the state of the economy, at least by conventional macro measurements, is more robust than ever.”
Chris Lehmann, The Nation
“‘We have secured hard-fought concessions,’ Johnson begins, and then proceeds to exaggerate the conservative slant of the bill almost beyond recognition. In reality, what was agreed to on Sunday looks almost exactly like the handshake deal between Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy that increased the debt ceiling last June, in exchange for modest restraints on federal spending. The ‘concessions’ achieved amount to about 0.36 percent of the discretionary budget…
“What this sad escapade does show is that Kevin McCarthy is sitting at home in Bakersfield right now for no good reason. The deal Johnson announced is roughly identical to what McCarthy would have reached… There is no conservative hypnotist who can lull Democrats who control the Senate and the White House into agreeing to all of their hyper-partisan demands.”
David Dayen, American Prospect
“As flawed and fragile as the weekend deal is, it at least gives some hope that compromise over budget matters is possible. What’s scary is that nothing that’s going on in Washington even begins to deal with the main problem, which is a chronic imbalance between revenue and spending that is causing the government debt to rise inexorably…
“If today’s fights over fairly small spending adjustments can bring the government to the brink of shutdown, what hope is there of achieving the far bigger changes in taxes and spending that will be required to shrink deficits meaningfully?… I’m near-term slightly more optimistic but long-term pessimistic about the ability of the United States to deal with its budget problems.”
Peter Coy, New York Times
