Panel budget cuts expected to be small

Democratic panel chairmen are racing to meet a leadership demand to submit lists of budget cuts.

House leaders are struggling to showcase even modest efforts to reduce the deficit.

{mosads}Earlier this week House leaders said they need their chairmen to kick their budget oversight into high gear in order to offset some of the fiscal angst that is gripping the caucus.

But leaders may be disappointed in what they receive by Friday’s deadline.

According to Democratic aides, a number of committees had not made this task a priority before Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Wednesday reaffirmed it as such.

Aides said many committees will likely offer updates in name only and that contain few meaningful recommendations. Other chairmen have embraced the cost-cutting plan on paper, but have been unable to turn out a stellar product for a variety of reasons.

“We just had a markup of four or five important bills, so we’ve been working on a lot of different things,” Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said Thursday. “And we’re doing the best we can.

“We’ll continue to monitor the agencies under our jurisdiction as well as the programs that are under our jurisdiction, and we are also working on giving [the Speaker] other ideas, but I can’t give you a status of it at the moment,” he continued.

Asked if meeting a Friday deadline was doable, Waxman replied; “We’ll do our best.”

The chairmen were hardly alone in bearing the responsibility for Wednesday and Thursday’s scramble to prove the party’s cost-cutting credentials.

While an earlier request for lists of expendable programs resulted in uneven participation from their chairmen, the leadership’s implementation of those recommendations they did receive has been just as spotty.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in June received detailed lists of removable programs from at least four committees, including the Natural Resources Committee, led by Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.).

On Thursday, Rahall said he did not know the fate of those programs he recommended for elimination.

“I think the Speaker and the leadership will incorporate them into the appropriations process, and incorporate them into future bills,” Rahall said. “But I don’t know. I’m just surmising.”

Despite the urgency to prove the chairmen’s initiative’s effectiveness, neither Pelosi’s nor Hoyer’s office could spell out the plan for acting on the program lists sent in by House committees.

“We’re looking forward to seeing the effort of all the chairmen to conduct oversight over programs under their jurisdiction,” Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said. “Oversight is a necessary first step to identifying potential cuts.”

Hoyer re-opened the issue during a Wednesday meeting with the House’s committee chairmen. He implored panel leaders to find areas of the budget that can be scrubbed, so that current spending can be turned into savings.

“You all need to find some programs to cut,” Hoyer told the chairmen.

The leadership’s last-minute push comes at a time when concerns about the deficit and spending have spread through the caucus and have hamstrung Democrats’ ability to enact what’s left of its jobs agenda.

On Thursday afternoon, Democrats had to scrap an already scaled-back tax extenders and emergency economic spending bill, again at the behest of dozens of conservative Democrats who continued to object to the legislation’s impact on the deficit.

Hoyer told the chairmen on Wednesday that House leaders intended to hold them to a Friday deadline to submit updates on a 15-month-old effort to root out “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal budget by requiring each committee to better scrutinize programs within their jurisdiction.

“You need to produce something on this,” Hoyer said, according to a person in attendance.