Rand Paul has proposed cuts that go much further than those favored by House Republicans. Rand Paul unveils $500B in cuts

Not to be outdone, Republican freshman Sen. Rand Paul introduced legislation Tuesday that seeks to cut $500 billion from government spending in one year alone, wiping out three cabinet departments and the entire foreign aid budget while sparing neither the Pentagon nor 2011 war-related funding for overseas military operations.

“This is not a satire,” Moira Bagley, Paul’s communications director, told POLITICO, but she signaled that the Kentucky conservative was prepared to stretch out his timetable beyond 2011 in hopes of garnering support for the reductions he wants. “He sees this as a way to begin the conversation.”


The risk is that for some, it could just as quickly be the end.

At one level Paul follows the House Republican standard of rolling back appropriations for many agencies to the levels set three years ago under the Bush administration. But elsewhere, he clearly goes much further, folding the Energy Department into the Department of Defense and wiping out most of the Education Department but for Pell Grants to low income college students.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is a third casualty, together with seven independent agencies including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and national endowments for the humanities and arts.

Paul’s 12-page bill appears to state its defense cuts as a series of 10 percent reductions from President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget request—not yet fully enacted. But as described in accompanying material provided by the senator’s office, the end result would be about a 2.7 percent cut below 2010 levels—far more severe than anything envisioned by House Republicans.

Most controversial could be a proposed $16 billion reduction from the overseas contingency funds provided for the military for the current fiscal year.

“War funding from 2001 to 2010 has cost the taxpayer $1.109 trillion,” reads Paul’s materials. “That amount doesn’t include the $159 billion that will likely be spent funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for FY2011. The proposal seeks to reduce war funding for FY2011 by $16 billion, in other words to provide $144 billion.”

In his own statement, Paul said: “I am proud to introduce my own solution to the mounting debt our spendthrift, oversized government has accrued. By rolling back to 2008 levels and eliminating the most wasteful programs, we can still keep 85 percent of our government funding in place by removing programs that are beyond the constitutional role of the federal government, such as education and housing, we are cutting nearly 40 percent of our projected deficit and removing the big-government bureaucrats who stand in the way of efficiency in our federal government.”