Democrats on both sides of Capitol Hill
have been demanding a long-term funding bill for the highway trust fund and an end to the last-minute, short-term funding mechanisms that have been the norm for years now. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's opening bid to give Democrats just that is typically diabolical: you can have your bill, but at the
expense of retirees and the disabled.
The total package of spending cuts and program changes would raise about $80 billion, enough to pay for between three to four years of federal funding for road, bridge and transit projects while fulfilling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise to introduce a long-term highway bill this month. The retirement proposal would raise more than $30 billion of that total by cutting the rate of return on a popular retirement investment for federal employees.
The list of financing options is extremely tentative and negotiators are expected to continue working through the weekend to reach a deal.
"That menu… it has the support of neither the Democratic or Republican caucuses at this point," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters.
In addition, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
warns about two other proposals that are being floated as sacrificial lambs, both coming out of the Social Security trust fund. One would cut off payments to any senior with an outstanding arrest warrant. "Almost none of the seniors who would be affected by this provision are actual fugitives from justice and most of the warrants in question are many years old and involve minor infractions," the committee's president, Max Richtman writes in a letter to senators. Besides that, the Social Security Administration has already tried to enforce that ban, "with catastrophic effect for many vulnerable elderly seniors, employing procedures that did not withstand judicial scrutiny." The other proposal is to end concurrent payments of Social Security Disability Insurance and unemployment benefits. "Given the importance that all policy makers ascribe to encouraging disabled Americans to return to the workforce, I am perplexed by the desire on the part of some in the Congress to strip working SSDI beneficiaries of their eligibility to receive unemployment compensation when, through no fault of their own, they lose a job," Richtman writes.
Senators as varied as James Inhofe (R-OK) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) say that the cut in federal pensions is a non-starter. Social Security should be just as off-limits. Cutting Social Security benefits—and siphoning off money from the trust fund—to pay for completely unrelated programs should never be an option.