The Great Game behind this year’s budget debate is how far Republicans can stretch the field before having to compromise with President Barack Obama on the strict appropriations caps imposed by the Budget Control Act in 2011.

For the past four years, those spending limits have been a powerful tool for the GOP, allowing one house of Congress to restrain much of the president’s domestic agenda. But now that Republicans are in full control of the Capitol, the shoe’s on the other foot — and beginning to pinch.


Mindful of this, Obama crafted his 2016 budget as an open invite for talks on some compromise adjusting the caps. But distrustful of the president and divided internally, Republicans are more intent on stalling for time and maximizing their leverage before any such negotiations begin.

The uneasy tension resembles Rick’s Café in “Casablanca.” There’s shock, shock that gambling’s going on in the world of appropriations. But what everyone wants most are those exit visas hidden away in Sam’s piano.

Indeed, the false piety can get pretty rich. One man’s salvation is the other’s gimmick.

Without a blush, Republicans bought off their hawks by going around the caps and adding tens of billions in war-related funds to the military’s overseas contingency operations account. This was an obvious ploy to stall for time since none of the OCO money can survive without Obama’s signature. But it didn’t stop righteous conservatives from next demanding an end to old budget tricks which help Obama fund his domestic priorities under the same BCA caps.

Having seen this movie before, Republican staff on the House Appropriations Committee successfully worked against such rules changes in the House budget resolution. But when House and Senate negotiators sit down this week to hammer out a final deal, the topic will be back on the table in the form of new points-of-order that would require supermajorities of 60 votes in the Senate to overcome.

At issue is the long-standing practice of allowing the Appropriations leadership to claim savings each year by temporarily imposing limits on spending under mandatory programs outside its province.

Take, for example, the conservation reserve lands program under the Agriculture Department. The farm bill typically assumes that up to a certain number of acres can be enrolled each year. By capping this at a lower acreage level, the Appropriations Committees can pocket the savings to help pay for extra discretionary spending under the BCA caps.

It’s an eye-watering business, involving dozens of accounts and best known by the comical acronym CHIMPS. That stands for Changes in Mandatory Programs and lends itself to monkey humor: “This gimmick is bananas” quips a recent blog by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The truth is CHIMPS are nothing new. But just as Prohibition bred the speakeasy, the Republican crackdown on spending has spawned a steady rise in their dollar value and frequency since 2010. For the last big omnibus appropriations bill in December, the Congressional Budget Office needed 25 pages to list them all — totaling $19.03 billion.

Conservatives argue, with good reason, that the system invites abuse. Not all CHIMPS are without impact: Some generate real savings. But more often they are paper transactions that take advantage of the fact that past authorization bills allowed for more spending than was needed.

That same CBO scorekeeping table in December tells the story. Of the $19 billion-plus CHIMPS in 2015, the true outlay savings over the next decade would be just $913 million—a fraction of what had been advertised.

The popular Children’s Health Insurance Program — which extends Medicaid coverage to the children of working-class families earning above the poverty level — is a case in point.

Congress overestimated how much aid would be required, and since 2011, the Appropriations Committees have been able to claim billions in annual offsets from CHIP to help pay for education and health programs squeezed by the BCA caps.

But since the CHIP money was never going to be spent in any case, CBO estimates the true outlay savings to be zero.

The Crime Victims Fund in the Justice Department is a second favorite. Established in 1984, it supports state victim compensation and assistance programs and is largely financed from criminal fines collected by the federal government. Since these receipts vary from year to year, Congress began setting limits in 2000 on the annual obligations. But what seemed a prudent budget move since has become a bookkeeping ploy to generate billions in annual CHIMPS savings.

No money is actually diverted from the fund, and in fact, the annual obligation cap was raised to $2.36 billion in 2015 — a three-fold increase over what 2014 allowed. But as the fund’s balance has grown, so has the value of each year’s CHIMP. For 2016, Obama is asking to spend just $1 billion from the crime victims fund, meaning this CHIMP alone could be worth about $12.4 billion in offsets under the caps.

In fact, these CHIMPS dollars help to pay for other law enforcement costs. But the image of somehow taking money from crime victims is unnerving for many lawmakers. And the Senate-passed budget resolution proposed two new points of order to discourage this and other such CHIMPS.

One addresses the Crime Victims Fund alone. The other seeks to phase out the use of all CHIMPS unless they can be shown by CBO to yield real savings over time.

As drafted by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the Appropriations Committees would be allowed just $19 billion in “non-scoring” CHIMPS in 2016 — essentially a freeze at current levels. But in 2017, the ceiling would be lowered to $16 billion, then to $12 billion in 2018 — and so on until it reaches zero.

This sounds reasonable enough except for two points.

First, CHIMPS were part of the woodwork when the BCA caps were first imposed four years ago. Second, CHIMPS most often apply to domestic programs and to change the rules now amounts to a substantial backdoor cut in nondefense spending.

More than half, or $8.4 billion, of those savings in 2011 were generated by CHIMPS directly related to the same CHIP and crime victims fund shenanigans so ridiculed now.

When the BCA was negotiated in August just months later, the caps could have been adjusted to do away with CHIMPS. This was not done — a conscious political decision at the time but also an opportunity lost.

More than many of his colleagues, Corker admits to a measure of hokum on both sides. His bottom line is he wants a 60-vote threshold in the Senate not just for future CHIMPS but the excess defense spending under OCO as well.

“I’m crimping domestic spending. I agree with you, I understand that, but I still think we ought to do away with this gimmick,” he said in an interview. “And the only way to really deal properly with defense spending … is not through using another gimmick, which is OCO.”

“To me the OCO piece, I hate to be too pejorative, it’s really a slush fund,” Corker said. “For the military hawks that was total optics. What they wanted was to show that they were spending $1 billion more than the president.”

Corker himself voted against the most recent big compromise on the appropriations caps in 2013, which was negotiated by the then-chairs of the House and Senate Budget Committees: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). House Republicans are reluctant to go the Ryan-Murray route again, which is why they must pretend to keep the BCA caps in place. But for all his past doubts, Corker suggests that Ryan-Murray may be the path to follow.

“I look at the budget as only the first gate to move through,” he said. “What comes after that is the policy that has to be bipartisan. Budgets pass on a partisan basis but the only way that we solve the problems we have is on a bipartisan basis.”

“Yes, I am almost certain there will be a significant effort at a Ryan-Murray II-type effort,” he said. “As I looked at the various moves I made to get a budget through the first gate, it was always with the understanding that there will be that second policy move that has to be bipartisan.”

The clock’s ticking.