House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy wants, desperately, to be the next speaker of the House. As much as he wants to be popular vote loser Donald Trump's BFF, buttering him up with candy and picture books. So he's become Trump's and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney's point man on the spending cuts Trump has been fuming over since he signed that omnibus spending bill in March. Those "spending cuts" should be released Monday.
The White House is expected to scale up its spending cuts proposal to $15 billion, according to multiple Republicans familiar with the request.
The Trump administration had last week planned to send Congress a package of $11 billion in spending reductions, but since then some conservatives have demanded a more austere approach, those Republicans said.
The White House initially floated as much as $60 billion in cuts, including an unprecedented attempt to cancel money from this year’s omnibus spending bill. The proposal was later said to have been downsized to $11 billion, targeting only unused funding from past years.
So what had been Trump's big plan for clawing back spending he didn't like is now basically smoke and mirrors this time around, as a budgeting guru points out. It's "more of a PR stunt than a serious policy plan." Collender is working on the $11 billion estimate, but his point remains:
Even if it were completely enacted and implemented, the spending reductions in the Trump plan would be less than 0.3 percent of the total federal budget, 1.5 percent of domestic appropriations and about 1.4 percent of the projected 2018 deficit.
Does the phrase "rounding error" immediately come to mind?
But if it fools Trump and all the House conservatives McCarthy is also trying to woo in his speaker bid, then it's job done.