House Budget Committee Votes to Break Budget Deal

The House Budget Committee approved legislation yesterday that would alter last summer’s bipartisan budget deal and enable Congress to set defense funding above the agreed-upon cap, while cutting deeply into various non-defense programs, particularly those for lower-income families, as we explain in two new reports.

Our first report gives the big picture:

The House Budget Committee approved on May 7 a package of two bills that would alter the bipartisan deal between President Obama and congressional leaders that was reflected in last summer’s Budget Control Act (BCA).  It would eliminate the “sequestration” (automatic cuts) in discretionary programs scheduled for 2013 as a result of the failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the “supercommittee”) to achieve $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, and replace it with a package that is strikingly unbalanced in how it affects different parts of the budget and, in particular, programs for low- and moderate-income people.

Our second report takes a closer look at the proposal to cancel the discretionary sequestration scheduled for 2013 while merging and reducing the existing discretionary funding caps.  As the graph shows, the bill would accommodate the Ryan budget plan to cut non-defense discretionary funding for 2013 nearly as deeply as if sequestration remained in place, while boosting defense funding above the level that the Budget Control Act sets.

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