House budget chair blasts Senate resolution as 'unserious and disappointing'
House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) on Saturday blasted the Senate's budget resolution, passed by the upper chamber only hours before, as “unserious and disappointing.”
Arrington criticized the budget plan for “creating $5.8 trillion in new costs and a mere $4 billion in enforceable cuts” or “less than one day’s worth of borrowing by the federal government.”
The Texas lawmaker also took a shot at Senate Budget Committee Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) plan to score the cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts as not adding future federal deficits, something Graham would achieve by judging an extension of those cuts on a “current policy” baseline.
He said the blueprint “sets a dangerous precedent by direct scoring tax policy without including enforceable offsets.”
“We are at a fiscal inflection point and failure to rein in our runaway deficit spending and unsustainable debt could prove catastrophic for our economy, security and global leadership,” Arrington added in his statement.
The House GOP chair’s shot-across-the-bow response to the passage of the Senate budget marks the start of a difficult negotiation on a budget reconciliation package that would enact President Trump’s legislative agenda.
Senate Republicans passed their budget resolution shortly after 2:30 a.m. Saturday by a 51-48 vote.
Moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who stated her concerns about potential cuts to Medicaid benefits, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who balked at a provision raising the federal debt limit, both voted against it.
Graham has defended his plan to use a current-policy baseline to score an extension of tax cuts as not adding to the deficit by arguing that would allow Senate Republicans to make those tax rates “permanent.”
The Senate’s Byrd Rule prohibits legislation passed under the budget reconciliation process from adding to the deficit in the years beyond the 10-year budget window.
The budget resolution has drawn sharp criticism from other House conservatives.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said he would oppose passage of the Senate budget resolution in the House.
“If the Senate can deliver real deficit reduction in line with or greater than the House goals, I can support the Senate budget resolution," Harris said in a post on social platform X. "However, by the Senate setting committee instructions so low at $4 billion compared to the House’s $1.5-2 trillion, I am unconvinced that will happen."
“The Senate is free to put pen to paper to draft its reconciliation bill, but I can’t support House passage of the Senate changes to our budget resolution until I see the actual spending and deficit reduction plans to enact President Trump’s America First agenda,” he added.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), another prominent fiscal hawk and member of the Freedom Caucus, also vowed to oppose the bill.
“If the Senate’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ budget is put on the House floor, I will vote no,” he wrote on X.
He added that the “Senate’s budget presents a fantastic top-line message — that we should return spending back to the pre-COVID trajectory” it proposes “ZERO enforcement to achieve it, and plenty of signals that it is designed purposefully NOT to achieve it.”
Roy also argued that while the House budget meanwhile lays out a floor of $200 billion in spending reductions.
“That ‘floor’ establishes important guardrails to force Congress to pump the brakes on runaway spending and to achieve critical reforms to badly broken Medicaid, food stamp and welfare programs currently being abused to subsidize illegals, the able-bodied and blue states.”
Roy declared the Senate’s budget is a “path to failure.”