Lawmakers dig into White House budget

“On the one hand, they wanted to change the Obama numbers but keep the transparency of the Obama budget – and ended up sacrificing one for the other,” says Stan Collender, a longtime congressional budget analyst and partner at Qorvis Communications in Washington.

In a bid to show lower deficits, Democrats controlling the budget panels have resorted to budget gimmicks that they denounced during the Bush years.

These include omitting the cost of a “fix” for the alternative minimum tax – a perennial off-budget item for lawmakers wary of allowing the tax to hit millions of middle-class taxpayers.

The White House budget also provides contingency funding for natural disasters – another event typically funded off budget. The House panel cut that funding in half; the Senate zeroed it out altogether.

Moreover, rather than setting aside funding for big-ticket priorities, such as the $633.7 billion “down payment” for healthcare reform in the Obama budget, House and Senate budget resolutions leave the issue to authorizing committees to propose funding levels and find offsets.

In the past, lawmakers have used budget resolutions to set markers for authorizing and spending committees and for providing a procedure for enforcing those limits.

But House and Senate panels this year opted to punt to other committees the big-ticket decisions on issues such as healthcare reform and energy.

“Be it the [Environment and Public Works] Committee or the Energy Committee, they would have maximum flexibility to draft legislation, but it would all have to be paid for,” said Senator Conrad at the opening of his panel’s markup on Wednesday.

In response, Republicans are turning the charts that Democrats used against Bush budgets to attack Mr. Obama’s budget plan. Exhibit A for Democrats in the Bush years was a chart showing the massive expansion of debt during the Bush years. This week, Republicans simply added on the Obama deficit projections.

“To try to put it in a different context, if you take all the presidents since George Washington through George Bush and add up all the debt that they’ve put on the books for the American people, President Obama’s proposal actually equals and exceeds that amount of debt in his first term – staggering numbers when you think about it, just plain staggering numbers,” said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the top Republican on the Senate Budget panel, at a press briefing on Wednesday.

“Your budget hides the second five years. It ignores what is going to happen,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) of Alabama at the Senate markup on Thursday.

“We are on an unsustainable course.”

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