In February, Congress passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 that raised the discretionary spending caps for this year by $143 billion and for next year by $153 billion. That apparently is not enough for the some in Congress: there is already an effort to raise the caps to allow for an additional $50 billion in higher spending. With massive budget deficits, lawmakers should be focused on spending reforms, but at the very least they should keep outlays under a spending ceiling that was boosted just four months ago.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is planning the implementation of a new community care program, and a fight is brewing over how to pay for it. This is the perfect place to hold the line on fiscal responsibility. S. 2372, the VA Mission Act of 2018, was signed by the President on June 6, and will cost tens of billions of dollars. The legislation creates a permanent Veteran Community Care program that reimburses costs to certain veterans who receive health care services outside the VA system. In total, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would cost $46.5 billion over five years.
When the bill was being debated in the Senate, Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Patrick Leahy (D-V) introduced a proposal that would carve out a loophole in the budget caps, allowing for unlimited adjustments for the program’s costs. This would work like the current Overseas Contingency Operations Fund which is not counted under the budget caps and has become a slush fund for Pentagon projects.
There are reports that the Senators are still seeking to implement such a policy or to otherwise increase caps to finance the community care program. The program was necessitated by unacceptable mismanagement and waste at the VA. Veterans who don’t live near a VA facility, or who are unable to get an appointment, are able to get needed treatment through this benefit. However, creating a new open-ended slush fund would further erode fiscal discipline while failing to address the VA’s structural problems. Veterans, and taxpayers, deserve better treatment.
Senator Shelby warned that there would be a yearly “hole of $10 billion in our approps” if the cap is not raised. There’s already a much larger fiscal hole in the federal budget: CBO’s budget outlook forecasts deficit spending of $12 trillion over the next decade. And that figure understates the problem. NTUF recently analyzed the CBO’s budget baseline and warned that with more realistic assumptions regarding Congressional action and accounting for budgetary gimmicks, outlays are on track to be $2 trillion higher than CBO projected. Congress should resist the temptation to bust through the spending caps yet again, or to employ new budgetary gimmicks. New spending can and should be offset within the budget.