Inside the spending cuts House Republicans are fighting for

In today’s edition … What we’re watching: Biden heads to Michigan amid UAW strike … What is affected by a government shutdown and how it could affect you … Ralph Nader, wary of Trump, offers to help Biden win … but first …

On the Hill

Inside the spending cuts House Republicans are fighting for

Today is a big test for House Republicans. 

They will vote on a procedural motion — a rule — to advance four of the 11 remaining individual spending bills the House hasn’t passed. If the vote fails, the chamber’s Republicans will seem even more unable to govern. 

The vote is a last-minute play to appease a small group of hard-line Republicans and demonstrate that the party is working to enact deep, year-long spending cuts — but it will do nothing to prevent a government shutdown on Sunday.

The only viable way to prevent a shutdown — which now seems likely —  is to pass a continuing resolution, or CR.

Senate leaders close in on clean CR

Senate leadership is nearing an agreement on a CR. They’ll vote tonight to move on to a shell bill that would house a CR. 

Negotiations have revolved around how “clean” to make the CR — limiting the amount of other priorities such as disaster and Ukraine aid.

But the administration is pushing back against not including at least some Ukraine funding — perhaps proportional to how long it funds the government. The White House’s request for Ukraine aid was meant to cover the next three months, but any CR is expected to be shorter.

“The Biden-Harris Administration continues to work with members of both parties in the Senate and the House to secure supplemental funding as part of any continuing resolution — which would ensure our efforts to support Ukraine continue alongside other key priorities like disaster relief and regular government activities,” Timothy White, an Office of Management and Budget spokesman, said in a statement Monday evening.

Limiting Ukraine aid in a CR could give Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) a lifeline in the House.

But it’s unclear whether McCarthy would put even a clean CR on the House floor if it’s unable to pass with only Republican votes because that could lead a group of hard-right Republicans who’ve been making his life hell to try to oust him. He could also try again to convince House Republicans to pass their own CR — although a bill that could pass the House along party lines would probably never clear the Senate.

Spending bill strategy

Because House Republicans are focusing on year-long spending bills, we thought it’s worth taking a closer look at what’s in those bills.

The 12 bills would cut nondefense discretionary spending — which doesn’t include Pentagon funding or mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — by $58 billion more than the amount to which President Biden and McCarthy agreed in May when they struck a deal to raise the debt limit, according to an analysis by Bobby Kogan and Jean Ross of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. (The analysis also excludes Department of Veterans Affairs medical care spending.)

But the cuts would hit some government programs much harder than others — and several bills that House Republicans have made the most progress passing would raise spending rather than slash it.

The only spending bill House Republicans have passed to date — the military construction and veterans affairs bill — would raise spending by 4.8 percent compared with the previous fiscal year, according to the analysis by Kogan and Ross.

The four spending bills the House will take up today include the homeland security bill (which would raise spending by 3.9 percent, according to the CAP analysis), the defense bill (which would raise spending by 2.2 percent, per the analysis), the agriculture bill (which would cut spending by 2 percent, according to the analysis) and the State Department and foreign operations bill (which would cut spending by 15 percent, according to the analysis). 

Deep cuts

One quarter of all the savings House Republicans’ bills would achieve comes from cutting a single program that provides funding for low-income schools, known as Title I education grants.

House Republicans want to cut Title I by nearly 80 percent, saving $14.7 billion.

The cuts are even steeper than education funding reductions proposed by the Center for Renewing America, a think tank led by Russ Vought, former president Donald Trump’s White House budget director.

The think tank put out a budget proposal in December that called for cutting $8.2 billion from the Department of Education’s elementary and secondary education programs, which include Title I grants. (House Republicans would cut $14.7 billion from Title I in the 2024 fiscal year compared with the previous year, while the Center for Renewing America proposed cutting $8.2 billion from almost 30 elementary and secondary education programs in the 2023 fiscal year compared with the 2021 fiscal year.)

The Title I cuts are included in one of two appropriations bills that haven’t made it out of committee yet. The House Appropriations Committee is expected to meet today to discuss how to move forward, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Democrats have warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts could cost up to 224,000 teachers their jobs, and teachers unions have mobilized to lobby against them.

“Title I funding helps fill in the gaps that have existed in all our systems for generations, especially in our public schools,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement to The Early. “It is unconscionable that House Republicans would try to strip away desperately needed funds from our most vulnerable, most marginalized students.”

The Republican view

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee behind the proposed Title I cuts, said Republicans want to cut the program so deeply for two reasons.

First, that’s where the money is. It’s a relatively big program, and Republicans could achieve a lot of savings by cutting it deeply.

Second, Washington sent more than $100 billion in relief funds to public schools during the pandemic, and some of the money remains unspent.

• “There was $27 billion that was provided from pandemic legislation that is still in the pipeline, so to speak,” Aderholt said in an interview this month. “Therefore, you would expect that that money be spent before you would be going and asking for more money.”

Democrats say any unspent relief funds are needed to help schools and students recover from the pandemic. The legislation was designed so that schools don’t need to spend the money until next year.

• “We need the money to fight learning loss,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee and the subcommittee that Aderholt leads.

What’s more, House Republicans’ cuts don’t take into account how much schools have left in pandemic relief funds.

• “Title I is a formula grant based on how poor the school district is,” Kogan, who previously worked in the Biden White House as an OMB adviser, wrote in an email to The Early. “House Republicans didn’t modify it to be based on how much money is left over. So, if your school district is very poor and so is most likely to have used up all its [American Rescue Project] money, this 80 percent cut will simply leave you without money for this coming year.”

Aderholt, who represents a poor district himself, said he understood DeLauro’s argument. But as Republicans looked to make deep spending cuts, he said, he tried to prioritize what he believed schools truly needed as opposed to “what would really be nice to have.”

“When you’re forced to make cuts and you’re given a budget and you see [pandemic relief] money that’s already in there, it’s just hard to give more money into an area where you see there’s money that’s already available,” he said.

What we're watching

On the picket line

Biden is heading to Michigan this morning, where he’ll appear with the striking United Auto Workers and become the first president to walk a picket line — a day before “former president Donald Trump will arrive in the next county over, trying to tap into the same angst among industrial workers,” as our colleagues Matt Viser and Isaac Arnsdorf write.

We’ll be watching what Biden — who is known for going off script — says and does when he shows up on the picket line.

“White House officials on Monday did not specify what would occur during Biden’s visit, including whether he planned to address the crowd, hoist a sign or meet with auto company representatives,” Matt and Isaac write.

On the Hill

We’re watching how many more Democratic senators urge Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to resign after he was indicted on Friday on bribery charges. Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.) have done so already — and we expect every other Democrat to face a barrage of Menendez questions in the hallway as senators return to Washington today.

One Democrat who’s certain to be swarmed by reporters: Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), who hasn’t weighed in so far.

On the Hill

What is affected by a government shutdown and how it could affect you

The United States is barreling toward a government shutdown, and “basic federal services hang in the balance,” our colleague Jacob Bogage reports. Here’s some of what to expect if the government shuts down on Oct. 1: 

• Funding for food assistance could run out: “Programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) or WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) have contingency funds that can carry over past the government funding deadline,” Jacob writes. “But that funding only lasts so long, meaning a protracted shutdown of a month or more could make some aid disbursements difficult.”
• Military service members would work without pay: “The roughly 1.3 million active-duty U.S. military service members would remain on the job without pay during a government shutdown. They would receive backpay after the shutdown ends, as would all the other federal workers forced to keep working during the period.”
• Veteran benefits, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will continue: Ninety-six percent of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ “nearly 414,000 employees would continue working, either because their pay doesn’t depend to annual appropriations or because they are exempt from furloughs,” Jacob writes. “Medicare and Medicaid, like Social Security, are funded separately from annual appropriations, so those benefits will continue uninterrupted.”

Read the rest here.

At the White House

Ralph Nader, wary of Trump, offers to help Biden win

Our colleague Michael Scherer sat down with political firebrand Ralph Nader, who, despite being exiled from the U.S. Senate by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) in 2000, wants everyone to know that defeating Trump “has become his overriding political mission.” 

• “I know the difference between fascism and autocracy, and I’ll take autocracy any time,” Nader told Michael in a recent telephone interview. “Fascism is what the GOP is the architecture of, and autocracy is what the Democrats are practitioners of. But autocracy leaves an opening. They don’t suppress votes. They don’t suppress free speech.”

Here’s an excerpt:

• “Nader is dismissive of the chances of the Green Party in 2024, despite personal praise for Cornel West, the party’s likely candidate,” Michael writes. “He speaks of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democratic challenger to Biden who campaigns on some of Nader’s issues, as a wayward talent unable to get out of his own way.”
• “Nader says no formal Biden endorsement will be forthcoming, and he still supports the idea of third parties in principle. ‘Biden is better than he has ever been but he is still terrible on empire and Wall Street,’ is about as close as he will come to complimenting the president.”
• “But the cover boy for Newsweek in 1968 and Time in 1969 has devoted himself as he approaches his tenth decade of life to, in his view, making Democrats better at being Democrats.”

The Media

Must reads

From The Post: 

• Why Biden’s allies are scrambling to elevate his landmark climate law. By Timothy Puko.
• ‘There is life after the Senate. And it’s good.’ By Jesús Rodríguez.
• In Texas, guns are everywhere, whether concealed or in the open. By Molly Hennessy-Fiske.
• Seven GOP presidential candidates are set to debate Wednesday night. By Maeve Reston.

From across the web: 

• Court-ordered Alabama congressional maps add 2nd opportunity district for Black voters. By AL.com’s Mike Cason.

Viral

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