Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney says his staff will soon be sending a package to Congress to rescind some of the planned spending in the $1.3 trillion omnibus bill signed last month by President Donald Trump.
“[We] hope to have something here in the next couple weeks,” Mulvaney said Wednesday during a House appropriations subcommittee meeting, reports The Washington Times.
Conservative lawmakers, such as Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., want Trump to send a rescission request to Congress to cancel nondefense spending that the legislators previously approved in the 2,000-plus-page omnibus bill.
“We need a plan right now, where the White House and then the House leadership both say, ‘Look Mitch, there’s plenty of money just sitting around in pots, where we can buy significant savings for the American people after that omni[bus], and we want to show them we are serious about fiscal responsibility,’ and so that’s what it is going to take,” Brat told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Thursday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday that he does not favor such an effort.
“You can’t make an agreement one month and say, ‘OK, we really didn’t mean it,’” McConnell said on Fox News. “[Trump] agreed to it. He was involved in the negotiation and signed the bill … We had a deal with the Democrats.”
But Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., chairman of the Republican Study Committee, disagrees.
“Once again, Mitch McConnell is making excuses for why Republicans cannot do what we all promised in the past,” Walker said Tuesday in a statement. “His latest rejection of President Trump’s spending cuts shows that McConnell prioritizes his backroom deal with Democrats over Republicans’ promise to rein in government excess.”
To start the rescission process, the president must send a request or requests to Congress. Once he does so, Congress has 45 in-session days to act.
Rescissions are introduced as legislation in both the House and Senate and referred to a committee; they may be thrown out if the committee does not act in 25 days.
Rescissions used to be commonplace, as presidents in between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton “sent up tons of the rescission requests,” according to Paul Winfree, director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
In an op-ed published April 12 by The Washington Times, Brat wrote the first item on the chopping block should be an item from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
“Let’s start with cutting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Gateway Project, a pork project that would build a new tunnel to connect New Jersey and New York,” Brat wrote. “The estimated cost of the project has doubled in the last decade and a single shovel hasn’t even pierced the ground. Why should taxpayers from my state have to pay for this?”
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., appeared to signal initial support for the resissions push on Tuesday.
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