House Republicans Show Their Hand: Committee Spending Levels Shortchange Key Priorities

Today, House Republicans marked-up their first two funding bills for fiscal year (FY) 2016 in full committee. They also released planned funding levels, known as 302(b) allocations, for the 10 remaining appropriations bills that fund the rest of the government.  In doing so, House Republicans have started to show how they plan to budget at discretionary funding levels that are the lowest in a decade, adjusted for inflation. The bills released so far, along with the targets for the remaining bills, show that the Republican budget funding levels will force cuts compared to the President’s Budget in areas important to the economy and the middle-class, ranging from research to education to environmental protection, as well as in national security priorities, ranging from peacekeeping and foreign assistance to the base defense budget.

These funding levels are the result of Congressional Republicans’ decision to lock in the funding cuts imposed by sequestration. Sequestration was never intended to take effect: rather, it was supposed to threaten such drastic cuts to both defense and non-defense funding that policymakers would be motivated to come to the table and reduce the deficit through smart, balanced reforms. The President's Budget would reverse these cuts going forward, replacing the savings with commonsense spending and tax reforms in order to make investments important to families, the economy, and our national security. Unfortunately, the bills and appropriations targets released today double down on a very different approach.

Table 1. Proposed Republican Budget Cuts Relative to the President’s 2016 Budget Request*

• Title I.  The House Republican budget would result in $1.3 billion less in funding for Title I, equivalent to funding for nearly 5,000 schools, 18,500 teachers and aides, and 2.1 million students.
• IDEA.  The House Republican budget would result in over $450 million less in funding for students with disabilities, an amount equivalent to what is necessary to support nearly 7,800 special education teachers, paraprofessionals and other related staff. 
• Job training.  The House Republican budget would serve 2.4 million fewer people with job training and employment services, including help finding jobs and skills training.

Research and Development

• National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Labor-Health and Human Services-Education).  The House Republican budget would lead to more than $1.7 billion less in funding for NIH, translating into 1,400 fewer new grants and adversely impacting research across all disease areas. The House Republican budget also risks squeezing out new initiatives proposed in the President’s Budget, such as a major investment in Precision Medicine, an innovative approach to disease prevention which takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles to give clinicians the tools to better understand the complex mechanisms underlying a patient’s condition and the ability to better predict which treatments will be effective. 
• National Science Foundation (NSF) (Commerce-Justice-Science). The House Republican budget would lead to about 350 fewer research grants at the National Science Foundation (NSF), affecting about 4,900 researchers, technicians, and students. This reduction would slow the pace of discovery across fields of science and engineering – including areas like advanced manufacturing, clean energy, cybersecurity, and neuroscience – inhibiting research essential to U.S. innovation and economic competitiveness.
• Clean energy investments (Energy and Water Development). Most clean energy research and development (R&D) is funded in the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill, one of the two bills House Republicans have already marked up in committee. As described above, the bill cuts key R&D and other clean energy investments by 40 percent or more relative to the President’s budget, including reductions of 55 percent to solar energy investments and 49 percent to manufacturing, sharply reducing the number of innovative projects the Federal government will support.

Housing Assistance, Homelessness, and Supportive Services

• Permanent supportive housing (Transportation-Housing and Urban Development).   The House Republican budget would support at least 15,000 fewer families with rapid rehousing, at least 23,000 fewer units of permanent supportive housing targeted to the chronically homeless, and 60,000 fewer special-purpose vouchers, which would provide needed housing assistance to families, veterans, and tribal families experiencing homelessness, victims of domestic or dating violence, youth aging out of foster care, and families with children in the foster care system for whom assistance could facilitate reunification.
• Housing choice vouchers (Transportation-Housing and Urban Development). The House Republican budget would provide housing assistance to about 34,000 fewer very low-income families because Public Housing Authorities would not be able to reissue vouchers or would have to terminate assistance.
• Rural housing (Agriculture).  The House Republican budget would provide affordable rental housing for 19,000 fewer rural families and households headed by older Americans or individuals with disabilities that depend on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service Rental Assistance program to be able to remain in their homes.
• Home and community-based supportive services (Labor-Health and Human Services-Education). The House Republican budget would underfund programs that provide services to older Americans and individuals with disabilities potentially resulting in more than 500,000 fewer rides to doctors and grocery stores, 200,000 fewer hours of assistance to seniors unable to perform activities of daily living, and 100,000 fewer hours of care for dependent adults in supervised, protective group settings.

Public Health, Safety, and Other Core Functions of Government

• Tax enforcement and taxpayer services (Financial Services and General Government).  The House Republican allocations target their deepest cuts on the bill that funds Wall Street Reform and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS budget has already been cut by roughly 17 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 2010. If the Financial Services and General Government cuts are distributed across the board, IRS funding would be cut by roughly 23 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 2010. Funding cuts made to date have already had severe consequences; the additional cuts are so extreme that the IRS would likely have to take even more drastic measures to absorb them.

o   IRS customer service levels have dropped to unacceptable levels with taxpayers lining up outside Taxpayer Assistance Centers for hours to get service and more than 8 million taxpayer calls being disconnected due to overloaded IRS phone systems.  With the additional cuts that would result from the Republican budget, assistance to taxpayers would continue to deteriorate and critical information technology investments to improve customer service and efficiency would not be made, introducing a risk of major system failures.

o   The IRS has lost 5,000 key enforcement personnel since 2010, hamstringing its enforcement capacity. As a result of these reductions to enforcement personnel, the Federal government loses billions of dollars of tax revenue each year from corporations and individuals who get away with not paying the taxes they owe.  Additional cuts would exacerbate reductions to tax enforcement activities, further increasing the deficit by approximately $2 billion.

• Law enforcement agents (Commerce-Justice-Science).  The House Republican budget would result in 300 fewer Federal agents to combat violent crime, pursue financial crimes, and ensure national security; nearly 70 fewer Assistant U.S. Attorneys; and 250 fewer prison guards to maintain the safe and secure confinement of inmates in federal prisons.
• Ryan White HIV/AIDs program (Labor-Health and Human Services-Education).  The House Republican budget would lead to 5,000 fewer patients receiving critical antiretroviral treatments through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, and 125,000 fewer medical visits at Ryan White clinics.
• Indian Health Service (IHS) (Interior and Environment). The House Republican budget would require IHS to reduce health services purchased for emergency care, specialty care, and capacity to address primary care shortages for a population that suffers disproportionately from acute and chronic health issues, resulting in approximately 3,300 fewer inpatient and 95,000 fewer outpatient visits, despite the fact that the need for these services only continues to grow.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Interior and Environment).  The House Republican budget would reduce the number of inspections the EPA would be able to conduct for non-compliance with environmental laws to protect the water we drink and the air we breathe, delay criminal enforcement actions for polluters, postpone efforts to save taxpayer dollars by consolidating EPA facilities, and decrease support for state and tribal partners in their implementation of the Nation's environmental laws to protect the public’s health.

Infrastructure

• National Parks (Interior and Environment).  The House Republican budget would delay roughly three-quarters of the 35 major construction projects and close to half of the 464 rehabilitation projects planned for 2016 at our national parks.
• Weatherization Assistance Program (Energy and Water Development). The Republican Budget would reduce funding for Weatherization Assistance Program grants by nearly 10 percent from the President’s Budget level, which would result in about 3,000 fewer low-income households receiving residential energy retrofits that would lower their bills and make their homes more energy efficient.

National Security

• Peacekeeping (State and Foreign Operations).  The House Republican budget would severely reduce international assistance compared to the President’s Budget. That would translate into nearly 4,700 fewer peacekeepers in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world if the cut were applied directly to ongoing UN missions, reducing the number of personnel available to protect civilians, maintain peace and security, assist in disarmament, demobilize and reintegrate former combatants, support the organization of elections, protect and promote human rights, and assist in restoring rule of law.
• Other foreign assistance (State and Foreign Operations). Compared to the President’s Budget, the Republican Budget would impose double-digit percentage cuts to funding for U.S. diplomacy and a broad range of programs critical to the President’s National Security Strategy, at a cost to American global leadership.  The lower funding levels would hamper our efforts to promote economic and security engagement in Central America and help stem illegal immigration, scale back our commitments to address the urgent and growing threat posed by climate change, and harm critical programs that enhance the ability of our partners and allies to counter terrorism, control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and build both civilian and military security capacity, ultimately causing risks to accrue to our national security.

Finally, the Republican budget holds defense funding to sequestration levels and skirts the budget caps by using a funding mechanism intended for wars to pay for non-war costs, despite the widely acknowledged and cynical “gimmick” nature of the approach.  Governing responsibly means clearly articulating policy priorities and providing a strategic, credible, and responsible investment plan to fund them, which enables the military to fully execute a long-term strategy. In contrast to the Republican budgets, the President’s Budget is clear, realistic, and strategic. It makes long-term investments above the sequestration levels to restore military readiness over the next several years, and responsibly funds recapitalization and modernization programs needed to ensure our continued technological edge. 

Shaun Donovan is the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.