Another Spending Standoff Between the White House and Congress?
As spring turns to summer, the House and Senate will work on the 12 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. The backdrop to this work? The president who signed the Budget Control Act into law four years ago wants to exceed the spending levels the legislation prescribed.
In a recent blog post, Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan made clear that the administration opposes the spending levels. Mr. Donovan wrote that “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.” However, because the congressional “supercommittee” formed in 2011 did not reach agreement on entitlement and/or tax changes to reduce the deficit, automatic reductions were triggered on discretionary spending, with separate caps on defense and non-defense appropriations.
But in separate letters regarding the House’s first two spending bills, Mr. Donovan wrote that “the President has been clear that he is not willing to lock in sequestration going forward, nor will he accept fixes to defense without also fixing non-defense.” Largely because of these broad disagreements over spending levels, the administration issued veto threats on the first two appropriations measures.
Ironically, President Barack Obama now opposes a policy outcome—the “sequester” spending levels—that he introduced: Multiple fact checkers have confirmed that it was administration officials who proposed the sequester mechanism during debt-ceiling negotiations in the summer of 2011. These histories directly contradict the president’s statement in an October 2012 debate with Mitt Romney that “the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.”
The administration can say that it did not propose the sequester mechanism. It can also say—with more accuracy—that sequestration was an action-forcing mechanism that was never intended to take effect. But neither argument changes the fact that the Budget Control Act remains the law of the land. The specter of Mr. Obama vetoing spending bills—potentially setting up another government shutdown this fall—because they fail to nullify an act that he signed into law could present an optics problem for his administration.
This post was originally published at the Wall Street Journal Think Tank blog.