Quigley Chairs Hearing on Trump Budget’s Proposed Cuts to Vital Programs

Today, Rep. Mike Quigley (IL-05), who serves as Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services & General Government (FSGG), held a hearing with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on its role in preparing President Donald Trump's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2020. The President's budget calls for devastating cuts to programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP, to pay for the GOP's disastrous tax cuts for the wealthy. Quigley delivered an opening statement raising these concerns and questioned OMB Acting Director Russell Vought about government-wide policies set by OMB.

Quigley's opening statement as prepared for delivery is below and video of his opening statement is available here. Video of the full hearing is available here.

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today.

I would like to welcome the Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vote.

This is a fitting topic for this subcommittee's first budget hearing of the year.

OMB oversees implementation of the President's agenda and prepares the President's budget. That Budget offers a chance for this Administration to lay out, in detail, its vision and priorities for America.

Unfortunately, I couldn't be more frustrated by what OMB has delivered this year.

This Budget deeply slashes programs that support the most vulnerable among us – the sick, the elderly, the poor – while doubling-down on discredited trickle-down economic policies that widen the inequalities in our society.

Overall, the budget cuts non-defense discretionary spending by 9 percent in 2020.

To get there, it slashes programs that working and middle-class Americans rely on for basic necessities like food, transportation, medical care, and housing.

As justification for these cuts, the Budget cites the pressing need to cut deficits and stabilize the national debt, conveniently forgetting that deficits are ballooning right now because of the Republican tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

As a reminder, this Administration has claimed – and continues to claim – that its 2017 tax cuts will pay for itself and more.

Yet, Goldman Sachs, hardly a liberal bastion, concluded that it would add as little as 0.3 percent to GDP in 2018 and 2019, and could be slightly negative in 2020 and beyond.

And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax cut bill will increase the total deficit by almost $2 trillion over the next ten years.

To pay for this, the President breaks his promise to the American people and cuts as much as $1.5 trillion out of Medicaid and $500 billion from Medicare, while once again calling for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

In short, this Budget puts the price of these tax cuts for the rich squarely on the backs of hard-working regular Americans.

And it gets worse. The Budget relies on gimmicks, false savings, and unsustainable assumptions to cover up the full impact of its disastrous policies.

For example, the Budget makes extremely unrealistic economic growth assumptions to mitigate the true impacts of its policies on the deficit.

It estimates that GDP will grow by roughly 3% each and every year over the next decade.

That's a full percentage point higher than most serious economic experts believes is possible.

And according to the President's own Economic Report, that growth is contingent on even more tax cuts and non-existent increases in infrastructure spending.

The Budget also relies on a so-called two-penny plan to further reduce non-defense discretionary spending to 27% below the 2019 level.

It hardly can be called a plan – the Budget doesn't spell out any of the hundreds of hard choices that would be necessary to cut spending that drastically – and it's completely unrealistic.

Meanwhile, OMB asks other agencies to make drastic cuts, but is hardly willing to do so itself.

It proposes a cut of less than 1 percent, after accounting for funding it shifts elsewhere or that aren't part of OMB's core responsibilities.

On defense, the Budget rejects the longstanding principle of parity and once again avoids making hard choices.

Rather than making a workable proposal to increase budget caps for defense and nondefense spending in tandem, the Budget uses sleight-of-hand to sidestep the issue entirely.

The Administration makes no adjustments to the budget caps.

Instead, it proposes – quite unapologetically, by the way – to get around them and bump up defense funding by 5% by 2020 by increasing the overseas war fund to the tune of $100 billion.

That's the same war fund that your predecessor derided as a slush fund and gimmick.

The Budget also proposes $5 billion of additional funding for a border wall that Congress – and the majority of the American people – have already rejected.

Despite all of this – fantastical growth numbers, unrealistic cuts, and numerous gimmicks – the Administration still fails to balance the budget by the end of the decade—a standard set by Republicans—when deficits will still exceed $200 billion.

This budget strays so far from reality, in fact, that we really have little choice but to disregard it entirely.

We'll continue to exercise the power of the purse to benefit all Americans, even if this Administration doesn't seem interested in that.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention frustrations with the way OMB has conducted its management and oversight work.

OMB doesn't just prepare the President's budget. It also clears regulations and testimony and oversees many government-wide policies and initiatives.

Yet under this Administration, officials at multiple agencies have committed repeated and egregious violations of ethics rules and other government regulations, costing taxpayers potentially millions of dollars.

We don't have enough time to mention all the questionable spending decisions appointees have made on travel boondoggles, office renovations, and furniture.

We also continue to be concerned about the general lack of transparency and responsiveness from this Administration on ethical and budgetary issues.

Agencies also continue to complain to us that their reports, testimony, and questions get routinely stuck in the OMB clearance process.

This subcommittee provides significant budgetary resources to OMB to help address and improve these and other government-wide policies, and it's aggravating to only see the problems get worse.

I look forward to discussing these issues in more detail.

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