House and Senate GOP Budgets Are Miles Apart

Faced with their most basic task as a majority—laying out a vision for the nation's fiscal future—House and Senate Republicans are miles apart.

Just a day after the House released its budget plan, echoing Rep. Paul Ryan's long calls for entitlement reform and finding creative ways to fund the nation's defenses, the Senate took its turn and did neither.

The intraparty splits are deep enough that it's not clear whether House or Senate Republicans can pass budgets in their own chambers, much less agree on a single plan.

New Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi released his draft Tuesday afternoon without additional defense spending or any of the House's overhauls to entitlement programs. Although the Senate budget also calls for a reconciliation process to overturn the Affordable Care Act, its draft is much more vague on policy than the House's, calling for certain savings without really outlining how to get there.

Ultimately, the Senate budget would reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion over 10 years, compared to $5.6 trillion in the House budget.

And Senate Republicans break sharply from their House counterparts on one of the most contentious issues dividing Republicans: how to deal with defense spending. Enzi's draft sends a strong message for defense hawks: Find your money elsewhere.

With another round of sequestration set to hit the Pentagon in September, defense hawks have been pushing budget writers to break the spending caps and increase funding, particularly as the nation continues its fight against ISIS.

But fiscal hawks are skeptical of undoing the sequester set up in the Budget Control Act for fear of increasing the deficit.

On Tuesday, Enzi sided with the fiscal hawks, offering not an additional cent for defense funding.

With Republican leaders hoping to pass each budget on the party line, their margins for error are incredibly small, particularly in the Senate where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell needs all but three of his members to pass the budget. Already, Sens. Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain have said they will not support a budget that doesn't increase defense spending. If they vote no, one more defection and the budget will fail.

The fear of losing defense hawks, who make up a vast contingent of the party's establishment base, is so great that House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, a former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee and strong ally of Ryan's, found the money.

The House budget floods money into Overseas Contingency Operations accounts—emergency funds that don't count against the deficit—far over the president's requests for 2016 to help alleviate the defense cuts. Beginning in 2017, the House plan would maintain the overall sequestration caps, but raise them for defense while cutting funds from non-defense programs.

Enzi took a very different route. The Senate budget funds OCO at the exact levels Obama requested for 2016 and maintains the Budget Control Act caps through the 10-year budget period.

The Senate budget does offer a concession to defense hawks, however. Like the House budget, the Senate document leaves open the possibility of creating a reserve fund that could be used for additional defense funding. Unlike the House version, the Senate's budget does not specify that the money be used for defense. The fund was designed to allow for the possibility of another Ryan-Murray-type deal over sequestration for defense and non-defense funding, according to the Senate Budget Committee.

Any change to sequestration, including using those reserve funds, would require Congress to pass a separate law—which would be subject to a 60-vote threshold in the Senate. In other words, the Senate budget kicks the can down the road on defense funding. Whether the promise of a later attempt to fund defense will be enough for Cotton, Graham, McCain, and other hawks in both chambers remains to be seen.

Graham plans to introduce an amendment in the Senate Budget Committee that would raise the OCO account to the same level as the House. The Senate Republican budget needs to "spend more on defense than Barack Obama," the South Carolina Republican told reporters Wednesday.

Overall, the Senate Republican budget is a much less detailed draft than that in the House, relying on savings from departments and committees without laying out how those panels—much less a stalled Congress that has barely been able to keep the federal government's doors open—should achieve them.

The panel seems to be following the advice one of its members, Sen. Chuck Grassley, gave earlier this week to The Hill: "From the standpoint of a budget, the less words of the English language you use, the better off you are."

That's especially true with entitlements, where Senate budget writers say they've extended the Medicare Trust Fund five years through savings that never are really outlined; encouraged committees to transform Medicaid into "a new program based on [the Children's Health Insurance Program] to serve low-income, working-age, able-bodied adults, and children who are currently eligible for Medicaid"; and fully offsets the costs of Social Security—all while reducing mandatory spending by $4.2 trillion over the next ten years.

Those kinds of promised savings without specific policy changes attached to them have frustrated fiscal conservatives for years and likely will draw skepticism in both chambers.

One issue on which the House, Senate, and members across the party spectrum seem to agree is repealing the Affordable Care Act, although that would have to be done through either a separate law or reconciliation. Either would be sure to earn a presidential veto.

Although Enzi was critical in a WAMU interview earlier this week of past House Republican budgets for relying on "gimmicks" like repealing the Affordable Care Act, while also including savings from the law in its deficit-reduction; the Senate Republican budget does the same thing.

"The fiscal condition of Medicare requires that the Obamacare savings be maintained to keep the trust fund from insolvency," a Senate Budget Committee staffer said.