Jose Luis Magana
Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) talks to reporters at the Capitol, December 12, 2023, in Washington.
Republicans could have made Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson or a picket sign with the words “No New Taxes” on it House Speaker, and any of them would have ended up putting out the same statement that Mike Johnson did about a budget deal reached over the weekend. There is no conservative hypnotist who can lull Democrats who control the Senate and the White House into agreeing to all of their hyper-partisan demands. Johnson’s tenure was always going to result in the latest in a series of sad Dear Colleague letters.
“We have secured hard-fought concessions,” Johnson begins, and then proceeds to exaggerate the conservative slant of the bill almost beyond recognition. In reality, what was agreed to on Sunday looks almost exactly like the handshake deal between Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy that increased the debt ceiling last June, in exchange for modest restraints on federal spending. The “concessions” achieved amount to about 0.36 percent of the discretionary budget.
Conservative rage over this is likely to manifest in at least a partial government shutdown. What most of the reporting on this budget deal has missed is that Republicans had moved on a week ago from a showdown over federal spending targets to a showdown over immigration. Unless there’s been a change of heart, the House GOP caucus is united on demanding far-right border policies in exchange for passing a government funding bill. As that remains unacceptable to Democrats, we’re likely to see funding run out beginning on January 19, regardless of this agreement.
Nevertheless, what this sad escapade does show is that Kevin McCarthy is sitting at home in Bakersfield right now for no good reason. The deal Johnson announced is roughly identical to what McCarthy would have reached. And if the Freedom Caucus gets angry enough to kick Johnson to the curb for such heresy, the next guy (and it will be a guy) coming in will reach the same deal the next time.
The agreement on Sunday is about topline appropriations numbers for discretionary spending. Both parties had already come together on the defense side, with $886 billion appropriated. (Remember the number EIGHT HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SIX BILLION DOLLARS when we hear later about how the military is impoverished and we can’t help our allies around the world without supplemental funding.) The fight Johnson picked was over the nondefense side.
The debt ceiling deal set aside $704 billion for nondefense discretionary spending, but then had $69 billion in “side deals” attached, which moved spending from other priorities to offset the additions. That included two major buckets: unspent COVID aid and $20 billion out of the $80 billion appropriated to the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act.
In his letter, Johnson cites a topline appropriation without the side deal. But it’s clear that he’s going to honor that deal, because he cites “$16 billion in additional spending cuts to offset the discretionary spending levels.” There were no spending cuts involved without the side deal. So, nondefense discretionary spending will be about $773 billion in fiscal year 2024 under this agreement, the same as was called for in the debt ceiling deal. (That’s a nominal increase over the actual spending that took place in fiscal year 2023, even though Johnson strains to call it a cut.)
What is the $16 billion Johnson refers to? First, the $20 billion IRS rescission was supposed to come in two phases, with $10 billion in this fiscal year and $10 billion in 2025. Johnson got the Democrats to move up the second tranche to this year too. Democrats already negotiated away one-quarter of their boost to IRS spending; all this does is change what fiscal year it counts in.
Conservative rage over this is likely to manifest in at least a partial government shutdown.
As for COVID spending, Johnson got an additional $6.1 billion rescinded. So in a $1.66 trillion budget, the only actual change here is an additional $6.1 billion in offsets. That’s the 0.36 percent I alluded to above.
This agreement, if passed into law, would eliminate the across-the-board cuts I discussed last week, and prevent Republicans from relying on outdated estimates to slash a larger share of nondefense spending. (Johnson says that the deal cuts “tens of billions” below the current continuing resolution, which is also misleading, as it doesn’t point out that the CR double-counts about $33 billion in spending.)
Johnson did hold off a Senate effort to try to go above the debt ceiling deal by an additional $14 billion ($8 billion for defense and $6 billion for nondefense). He uses that to say that he got “an overall $30 billion total reduction from the Senate’s spending plans,” but relative to the debt limit deal, we’re really talking about one-fifth of that.
It’s amusing that even Johnson’s putative allies aren’t buying this. The House Freedom Caucus called out Johnson’s fuzzy math immediately, pointing out that he conveniently left out the $69 billion side deal. “This is total failure,” the HFC tweeted.
Adam Brandon, president of the Koch-funded FreedomWorks, was even more blunt. “Discretionary spending isn’t driving budget deficits and debt. That’s a fact,” he said in a statement, and I agree. He added that Republicans have done pretty well on discretionary spending for a quarter-century: “The Congressional Budget Office projects that discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP will be lower in FY 2024 than it was in FY 1996.”
These appropriations deals, in other words, are fake budget fights that do nothing on their own terms. That Republicans keep constricting the size of the discretionary budget is not great, and I have said my piece on the debt ceiling deal. But Johnson clearly didn’t add much beyond the framework that was in place, which was a fairly modest concession for debt limit hostage-taking.
That’s why, perhaps, the fight has escalated elsewhere. In the joint statement from the Democratic congressional leadership, they make clear that they “will not support including poison pill policy changes in any of the twelve appropriations bills put before the Congress.” But Johnson demanded a poison pill just last week, when he said that border policy changes would have to be included in any agreement.
There is an active negotiation between the White House and the Senate on an immigration-policy-for-foreign-military-aid swap, mainly for Ukraine. The Biden administration has already signed off on tighter asylum interviews, expedited removals within the interior of the country, and new authority to essentially close down the border when the system is above capacity. Now the administration is reportedly wavering on humanitarian parole, the means by which hundreds of thousands of migrants from four countries (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) have been settled in the U.S. in the past year.
Limits on parole is the only way a deal gets passed in the Senate. But the House red line is even stronger. It wants a total end to parole, and its other demands include building the border wall, keeping all asylum seekers in Mexico until a hearing, and automatically deporting anyone caught between ports of entry. Those go well beyond what is being negotiated or what the Senate and president could bear. And the House GOP stuck these into the government funding debate, not in exchange for Ukraine funding, which is completely up in the air.
As I’ve written, I don’t think Republicans will win—or even want to win—this fight; it’s much more about keeping immigration atop the issue set. But until they admit defeat, federal employees shouldn’t get too comfortable.
