Congress Trying to Avoid Automatic Spending Cuts

Congressional legislators are struggling to find a way to avoid a 1% automatic cut to defense and non-defense budgets, which will occur if they don’t reach an agreement to lower spending before the end of the year.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act placed a $1.59 trillion cap on base discretionary spending, with a cap of $886 billion for defense spending and about $704 billion for non-defense expenditure. The law also set a deadline of January 1, as well as a penalty for failing to meet that date. According to Biden administration officials, in the absence of an agreement, this would mean a 1% cut to both defense and non-defense programs to take effect after April 30, 2024.

However, the Congressional Budget Office’s new scoring states that non-defense spending is actually about $30 billion higher than the levels legislators first established for fiscal 2023, which could mean that non-defense spending sees even higher cuts than the automatic 1%.

“The world is our oyster in terms of possibilities here,” Marc Goldwein, the senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told The Hill. “I don’t have any expectations, and I don’t think anyone really knows what is going to happen.”

“If you are trying to figure out how to cut government, you would never do a blanket across-the-board cut because it removes your ability to do marginal prioritization,” added Bobby Kogan, the Center for American Progress’s senior director of federal budget policy.