Paul Ryan's budget is proving to be a bridge too far for House Republicans. House GOP budget plan collapsing

Like an army that’s outrun its supply line, the Republican budget strategy in Congress shows almost daily signs of coming apart.

The central premise, as sold by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, was that Washington could wipe out deficits in 10 years and protect defense spending, all while embracing the lower appropriations caps dictated by sequestration.


Four months later, it’s proving to be a bridge too far.

Only three of the 12 annual spending bills have even been debated — by far the worst record since the GOP took over the House.

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Against their better judgment, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have been required to cut important investments in science, community development and foreign aid. Senate Republicans are peeling off in protest — setting up a crucial procedural vote at noon Tuesday on the transportation and housing budget.

Time is running short.

After the August recess just nine legislative days remain on the House calendar before the next shutdown crisis Oct. 1. Already there are discussions of retreating into a stopgap continuing resolution calibrated to the post-sequester appropriations level of $988 billion.

But this begs the question: Is the CR a bridge to a larger deal or just another ramp down to the “new normal” of sequestration that President Barack Obama, for one, will find hard to accept?

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The president goes back to Knox College Wednesday for an economic speech billed as a bookend to one he gave at the Illinois campus as a young senator in 2005. In the years since, Obama has broken many hearts on the Appropriations Committees with his feckless approach. But the White House is adamant now that he will not stand by and watch his second term be bled to death by an endless succession of cuts.

Republicans are not without risk, too, with the $988 billion number. That’s $21 billion more than Ryan allowed in the House-passed budget and comes minus his defense increases. Most important, no CR alone can change the math this winter, when the Budget Control Act will kick back in — superseding Ryan’s budget and imposing deep new cuts on defense.

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The fragile illusion of it all — like Cinderella’s coach turning back into a pumpkin — was underscored again last Wednesday at a House Republican meeting in the wake of the farm bill debacle.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had called together about 20 House conservatives to explore options on resurrecting the nutrition title — stripped out of the House bill. The Virginia Republican has been a strong advocate of more cuts but he was also candid in explaining that Ryan’s claim to save $125 billion by simply block-granting the program in 2019 was short of policy details.

According to two persons in the meeting, Cantor never said outright that the $125 billion was a “plug” — slang for a budget estimate without backing. But others in the conversation took it that way — and did use the term.

Indeed, to achieve that level of savings in a five-year period would require a one-third cut from what the Congressional Budget Office is currently projecting for food stamps. The loose assumption had been that total enrollment would somehow get back to 2008 levels by 2019. How to get there was never worked out.

“Details beyond what can be found in the budget resolution would be left to the Agriculture Committee,” a Ryan spokesman said.

For the House Appropriations Committee, plugs are a luxury it doesn’t have. Each of its bills must answer “how” to meet Ryan’s goals.

Republicans on this panel have not been shy of cutting. With the March sequestration order, nonemergency discretionary spending is already a full $100 billion below 2010 when Democrats were in power.

But the telltale strains are evident as the committee goes into territory now where it would not tread a year ago.

POLITICO went back to look. The contrast is striking, as these examples show.

In June 2012, the House panel recommended $3.34 billion for Community Development Block Grants, a bipartisan program created in 1974 with the help of Republican President Gerald Ford. Yet now funding would be cut to $1.6 billion, less than Ford himself got from Congress nearly 40 years ago.

In April 2012, the House panel approved $200 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy known as ARPA-E. That was $150 million less than the administration had requested but represented a real commitment to a government unit that has won bipartisan praise for its work developing new energy technologies judged too risky to attract sufficient private capital.

This year’s committee bill, by contrast, cut ARPA-E to just $50 million for 2014 — 80 percent less than current funding even after sequestration.

All pretense seemed to drop away last Thursday when the House rolled out its State Department and foreign aid budget. Title V of the bill, covering multilateral assistance had been reduced to three paragraphs with entire accounts left bare. The total appropriation was $1.15 billion — about half of what the same panel had recommended in May 2012.

Monday brought still more cuts — this time from land and wildlife programs important to Western Republicans. Total spending for the natural resources bill would fall to $24.3 billion, $4 billion less than sequestration and almost $8 billion below 2010.

What makes the Ryan budget doubly difficult is it lowers total spending while also tilting the remaining funds to the Pentagon at the expense of nondefense programs.

Total appropriations fall to $967 billion even as defense spending is restored to $552 billion — about $33 billion above post-sequester levels. To make room, nondefense spending must drop then to approximately $414.4 billion.

That’s a 12 percent cut on top of the reductions made in sequestration and far deeper than what was anticipated in the 2011 BCA. But without some compromise, the BCA will reassert itself this winter with the opposite result.

Domestic appropriations will be largely untouched. Defense will be reduced to $498 billion or $54 billion less than what the House is proposing.

This helps explain the agonized tone of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s recent letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee spelling out the cuts that will be needed if no deal is reached.

Congress must become “a full partner in ending business-as-usual practices” that make it harder to achieve savings, Hagel wrote. But “the cuts are too steep and abrupt to be mitigated by flexibility, no matter how broadly defined,” he said.

Senate Democrats have been living in their own parallel universe all this time: writing bills to fit a $1.058 trillion target — a full $91 billion higher than the House.

It’s a gamble by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, who wants to paint a canvas of what the government would look like with restrained spending — not the ax of sequestration. Critics would argue that it’s all borderline delusional. But the Baltimore Democrat has consistently invited Republicans to join her and won over some converts.

Her support will be tested Tuesday when the Senate is to vote on taking up an estimated $54 billion transportation and housing budget — almost $10 billion larger than the comparable House bill. Six Republicans backed the measure when reported from the committee, and this should be enough to overcome the first 60-vote procedural hurdle.

A second may soon follow on whether to proceed in the absence of a final budget resolution. Democrats have the required votes to waive this point of order with a simple majority. But the GOP could choose to filibuster that debate — requiring 60 votes to overcome.

It makes for a dragged-out process but it’s also political catnip for Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who doubles as the bill’s manager and also is chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee.

That’s because many of the same GOP conservatives objecting have also been blocking Murray from going to conference with Ryan on his budget.