Frustrated GOP freshmen target gimmicks making it hard to cut budget
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WASHINGTON -- Before winning a spot in the House Republican freshman class, Rep. Tim Griffin was a high-ranking GOP political operative and a top aide to strategist Karl Rove.
But despite his extensive Washington experience, Mr. Griffin, R-Ark., said he was blindsided last year by budget "gimmicks" that blocked a clear victory for his top priority: cutting federal spending.
This year, congressional Republicans expect few opportunities to stage another spending showdown.
So Mr. Griffin and other frustrated GOP freshmen are focusing on a new goal: rewriting congressional budget rules to prevent spending from rising in the first place.
The freshmen want to end a host of arcane budget gimmicks involving "chimps" (changes in mandatory spending), budgetary timing shifts and spending cancellations known as "rescissions." But their most passionate rhetoric is focused on a more mundane target: the troubling effect of inflation on the nation's budget.
By law, congressional budget analysts are required to produce baseline projections on how agency spending rises with inflation and population growth. The theory is that providing the same level of services costs more each year. But that means spending is assumed to always rise.
It also means that slowing a program's rate of growth is invariably condemned as a "cut," Mr. Griffin and other freshmen complained, even if the program in question is getting more money than it did in the past.
"I compare Washington cuts to an Arkansas normal-person cut," Mr. Griffin said. "A normal-person cut is when you get less money this year than you got last year. In Washington, you can get more money this year than you did last year, but if it's not as much as you thought you were going to get, then that's a cut."
Ending adjustments for inflation in agency budget projections is unlikely to have much immediate impact. Budget caps were adopted amid last year's fight over the federal debt limit, and agency spending is actually projected to fall over the next decade, from $1.34 trillion in 2011 to $1.2 trillion in 2015. Agency spending would not return to last year's levels until 2021. But spending on giant federal health and retirement programs would keep rising, as would interest payments on the growing national debt.
First Published February 12, 2012 12:00 am
