House passes second GOP budget-reform bill

The bill would end the practice of setting budget baselines for discretionary spending that are equal to the prior year’s budget plus inflation. Democrats argued during Thursday debate that with this bill, Republicans are ignoring the fact that inflation exists, and that the bill would erode the purchasing power of these programs.

{mosads}”The concern is that this creates actually a very misleading picture of what we can purchase in terms of goods and services with our dollars, and it gets more misleading over time,” House Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Thursday.

“And what this bill does is, it tries to kind of wish away inflation,” he said.

But Republicans argued that the bill would not prevent Congress from boosting budget items when needed, and would force Congress to look more critically at requests for increased funding.

“Let’s not err on the side of assuming every government agency automatically needs a spending increase one year to the next,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday. “If we think they need more money, then we should measure it on an honest basis and then legislate more money for those agencies.”

On Thursday, the House approved the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act, which would require the Congressional Budget Office to provide macroeconomic analyses of bills with major budget impacts. This bill also passed on a party-line vote, and Democrats argued that Republicans were trying to introduce dynamic scoring into the budget process as a way to justify tax cuts.

The House is expected to take up other budget reform bills next week.