GOP Pushes New Budget Resolution Meant for Medicare, Social Security

A new budget resolution is being pushed by the Republicans on the House Budget Committee meant mostly to rein in spending on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, according to the panel’s chairman.  

“President Donald Trump has delivered his 2019 budget”, Republican Representative for Arkansas Steve Womack said Wednesday, “and it’s now the Congress’s time to act.”

According to The Hill, Womack, who captured the Budget gavel just last month, acknowledged that the sweeping fiscal agreement enacted last week — which solidifies discretionary spending levels over the next two years — essentially precludes the need for Congress to enact a new budget governing domestic programs for 2019. He also conceded that the Senate, for that very reason, is likely to skip the budget process this year altogether.

Citing skyrocketing deficit spending, Womack said he wants his committee to step in with a new budget blueprint “to put America on a different glide path, from a fiscal perspective.”

“We’ve got to have an opportunity to look at these from top to bottom, and then come up with what we believe are solutions that can be politically doable,” Womack said to Bloomberg Television. “That’s what the Budget Committee process will begin to do.”

Womack suggested that the effort will be heavily focused on the entitlement side of the ledger, which is largely disregarded in the newly passed budget deal that Trump signed into law on Friday.  

“I think it’s fundamental,” Womack said of entitlement reform. “Seventy-eight percent of what we spend in your tax dollars goes out on autopilot.”

The Hill also reported that Womack emphasized that it’s early in the process — “I’m not going to try to prescribe an outcome for my committee,” he said — but floated the notion of tapping reconciliation as a device for fast-tracking entitlement changes.

“You can hear the chatter from the other end of the Capitol, the Senate wing, that says that they may or may not do a budget this year because we’ve set the top line numbers on discretionary and they won’t change anything on the mandatory side,” Womack said.