Speaker Paul Ryan is embracing the spending clawback his majority leader Kevin McCarthy has cooked up with the Trump administration, the one that cuts $7 billion from children's health. After the massive fight last year, in which funding for the program ran out, and Republicans refused to renew it for months and months, now they're outright cutting it. They say that this isn't really a cut, and in some ways it is more window dressing than actual cuts, because what they've targeted is previously appropriated money that hasn't been spent. So it's like it's not real or something, but it is. It's like a rainy-day fund that will help, for example, the next time Republicans refuse to renew the program or if there's another economic downturn and the program has more children enrolled than it has funding to cover them.
The Trump administration is asking Congress to cut about $2 billion from CHIP's special contingency fund, which was created to direct emergency money to the states that administer the program if they run out of funds, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University.
The White House wants to cut the other $5 billion from CHIP's "budget authority"—money that the federal government cannot use without additional congressional authorization. As that money was not yet approved to spend, the debate over whether the White House proposals count as "cuts" is mostly focused on the other $2 billion.
But critics say that money provided through the budget authority has been used for other health-care programs. The contingency money, critics of the Trump plan say, is an important backstop.
"This really could be a problem for CHIP," Alker said. "It sets a very dangerous precedent for the program."
This rescission would cut the funding in that reserve pool to about $500 million, and it is a dangerous precedent and an escalation in last year's precedent for the program—a willingness by every single Republican to take it hostage. To turn millions of children and families into pawns. For years taking care of children's health has been non-controversial, with strong bipartisan support. That's all over now.