US House Working To Fulfill Budget Pledges

More than a month into the new Congress and it remains an open question whether the new House leadership will be able to live up to the many promises that were made during the speaker battle, including a couple of promises related to spending.

Among the agreements Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made to get the votes he needed were these: pledging to cap discretionary spending for fiscal year 2024 at fiscal year 2022’s levels and producing a budget through regular order.

"We can get it done," Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK4) said, "it'll take a lot of hard work."

Bice will be sharing the workload, as a new member of the House Appropriations Committee.

Rep. Tom Cole is the committee's vice chair. There are 12 subcommittees and he said all are now fully constituted.

"So, you’re going to want to start seeing those appropriations committees come to work," Cole (R-OK4) said in a recent interview, "you want to see them pass individual bills out of committee, which we will."

That may be easier said than done. It's been decades since all 12 appropriations subcommittees in the House and Senate got their bills out and then across the floor by the Oct. 1 deadline, which is essentially what constitutes regular order. And already there's a slight hold-up

"We can’t write our budget until we see what the president, as the leader of the executive branch, wants run," Cole pointed out. "But at the end of the day, Congress sets the limit on spending and decides what are the national priorities."

And therein lies the other challenge -- capping discretionary spending at FY '22 levels would require cutting approximately $130 billion from the budget, about half of that from the Pentagon's budget if the cuts were made proportionately..

"We’ve gotta change the direction," Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said, who isn't necessarily pushing for defense cuts, but said spending must gradually be reined in: "There is no plan here in Washington, D.C. that gets us back to balance in a year, there’s not one."

House Democrats worry the GOP majority will disproportionately target domestic programs for reductions, especially with some Republicans saying defense spending is off limits

Bice believes, if they work hard enough, they can find places to cut across the board--even in the military.

"You can’t tell me that there’s nowhere that there’s not waste, fraud, or abuse within our military," Bice said in an interview. "There are places -- we just have to do our homework, and we have to do our due diligence to find out where those things are, and what’s palatable."

 President Biden is expected to release his budget March 9.