CBO says GOP's negotiating skills MIA on budget deal

By Nicholas Wilbur

The Republicans' hard-fought battle to curb the "ballooning deficit" and "reign in excessive government spending" backfired in the worst kind of way this week.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office delivered the knockout blow to the party of fiscal conservatism on Monday morning, when it published an updated estimate of the actual savings agreed to in the bi-partisan budget deal that avoided a government shutdown in early April.

Republicans were already sour over the deal, which both parties claimed would cut $38.5 billion in spending from this fiscal year's budget (or approximately $78 billion compared to the president's budget request, which was never enacted). A quarter of the most conservative Republicans in the House voted against the measure on the basis that the cuts didn't come close to the $61 billion (or approximately $100 billion) they promised their constituency during the midterm election campaigns. Since the agreement was reached, the news has only grown more disappointing.

On the eve of Congress' vote to enact the "budget compromise," the CBO issued a report estimating that the actual savings from the alleged $38.5 billion in cuts would come out to more like $352 million (not billion). The discrepancy was due to lawmakers increasing spending for certain defense programs and including both unspent budget allocations and rescissions (programs whose funds were already cancelled by Congress) in their budget savings calculations.

Most recently, the CBO issued a revised report projecting that spending reductions actually would result in a net increase in government spending – to the tune of $3.2 billion. According to the report, the estimated cuts to non-military spending totaled only $4.4 billion, or approximately 90 percent below the $38.5 billion Republicans believed they were agreeing to, as a compromise, in order to avoid a government shutdown.

Rather than decreasing the deficit and cutting wasteful government spending, Republicans passed a bill that actually increased spending and added to the deficit.

So much for fiscal conservatism.

So much for campaign promises.

And so much for the ol' reliable campaign tactic of labeling Democrats as spend-thrift socialists bent on turning American into a broken and bankrupted welfare state. It will be painfully amusing to watch the GOP try to justify how they managed to fight for three months over a budget they claimed didn't do enough to address the country's apocalyptically high deficit, only to settle on a deal that actually increased the deficit.

On the other hand, if it's true that nothing in politics happens accidentally, then it's entirely possible that Republicans are gearing up for another massive swipe of Democratic seats in Congress, this time by appealing to the left-wingers who believe, with good reason, that government spending during a time of nominal growth is the best remedy for an ailing economy.

I wouldn't count on it, but that's a better justification for achieving the opposite of the party's stated intentions than walking up to the podium at a press conference and explaining in congratulatory prose how President Obama's negotiating skills are so monumentally superior to those of the GOP.

"We were as shocked as you were" isn't exactly a campaign motto that will rile the base in 2012.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)