New GOP Majority Is Trying to Cut Spending, But Not By Enough
Demian Brady

June 20, 2011

Overall, GOP lawmakers are trying to deal with the deficit, but they need to move faster

The tumultuous 2010 election, in which Republicans won a stunning 64 seats to take control of the House of Representatives, was billed as a referendum on many fiscal policies of the previous Congress and the Obama administration. GOP candidates promised a change of course, hyping an agenda of spending cuts in their "Pledge to America."

Now that the new House majority has had several months to live up to that hype, how can we effectively measure whether rhetoric has indeed become reality? The National Taxpayers Union Foundation's BillTally system provides some answers.

Since 1991, BillTally has analyzed the fiscal impact of every proposed piece of legislation -- not just those bills that reach the floor of the House and Senate for votes. The system then matches up legislation with sponsorship records for every lawmaker, showing what would happen to the federal budget if each and every bill supported by a given member of Congress became law.

The BillTally results for the first 100 session days of the 112th Congress reveal that the new House majority is indeed offering a different legislative path than members of the previous Congress on spending, but there are many surprising wrinkles to this story.

Members introduced 204 bills to increase spending, and just 58 to cut spending. The bills cosponsored by the average Republican would reduce the budget by $63 billion (net figures: spending reductions adjusted for spending increases). Their counterparts on the Democratic side would increase expenditures by $6.3 billion. This may come as news to many citizens who believe everyone in Congress has acknowledged the need for some degree of budget cuts. Even House Members in the Democratic Blue Dog coalition, who profess to be more "fiscally responsible," had a net agenda to raise outlays by $3.3 billion.

The new batch of GOP freshmen, brought in on a wave of anti-establishment support, are proposing nearly the exact same amount of spending reductions as veteran Republican congressmen (roughly $63 billion each). Furthermore, there is a distinct lack of initiative on the part of individual Republican members: The typical Republican supported, on average, just five of the 58 savings bills introduced.

Living up to its reputation, the Tea Party stood apart from those trends. No single caucus proposed more net spending reductions than the Tea Party Caucus's $99.1 billion savings agenda. Not even the conservative Republican Study Committee (whose members backed $74.5 billion in net reductions) could match this feat.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans offered several different bills to repeal all or parts of President Obama's healthcare reform law (an annualized savings of $40.3 billion). Yet, national defense -- long a sacred cow with many Republicans -- has occupied a large part of the Democrats' spending cut agenda, though not enough to offset their new spending.

What does the big picture look like, without the partisan personalities? Here again, BillTally provides a useful look "under the hood."

Excluding overlapping proposals, the net effect of all legislation from the 112th Congress's first 100 days would be to cut annual spending by $152.9 billion, the net result of $144.8 billion in increases, and $297.6 billion in cuts. This is a dramatic turnaround from the 111th Congress's price tag of $363.3 billion.

A further historical comparison provides some context to the size cuts being offered this year. There are several parallels between this Congress and the 104th Congress in 1995, both were swept into power amid similar themes of a "revolution" to limit government.

Members in the 104th Congress, in fact, proposed a total savings of $123.9 billion -- 61 percent fewer than the current Congress (even after adjustments for inflation). This may seem encouraging, but, in fact, this only makes the next statistic more disturbing.

The cuts proposed in the 104th Congress represented 75.5 percent of the federal government's deficit in 1995. Today's proposals would only take 18.1 percent out of our record 2011 deficit.

All told, the House has proposed or passed many of the "Pledge to America" promises: cancelling unspent stimulus funds, cutting government spending to 2008 levels, saving at least $100 billion this year, a hard cap on new discretionary spending, weekly votes on spending cuts, freeze on federal hires, repealing duplicative programs, and reducing Congress's own budget. However, many of these proposals face a grim outlook in the Senate.

Even though the current crop of lawmakers has brought bigger axes to Washington than their predecessors did 15 years ago, the size of the job has grown far faster than their blades. Clearly, if the deficit is to be addressed without punitive, counterproductive tax increases, the days when a scalpel would suffice for budget-cutting have long since passed.

Demian Brady is a senior policy analyst at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation

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