A routine committee meeting tomorrow will formally lock down this reality about the congressional budget engine: it has totally seized up, and as early as ever — fully 20 weeks before it’s supposed to finish spitting out thousands of line-item decisions about discretionary government spending for next year. The majority Republicans on House Appropriations will push through the spending caps they will use in drafting the dozen bills expected of them for fiscal 2014. All the Democrats will oppose the numbers, because they completely disregard one of the central tenets of the too-tough-to-swallow sequester that Congress swallowed anyway this year: The spending cuts are supposed to be as severe for defense programs as they are for domestic operations. Instead, the House will set about drafting three measures — for the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs (which also includes military construction) — that in the aggregate would cut spending by less than 1 percent from current levels. (more…)
