The budget plan being quietly circulated by House Budget Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, would slash spending by $100 billion over five years through many now-familiar cuts, with $54 billion in savings coming from entitlement programs, according to a copy of the plan obtained by CongressDaily.
"What you will find in our budget is a shrinking of government's excesses in order to make those additional reforms we believe are necessary to secure a brighter future," Budget Committee Republicans said in the introduction to their 43-page outline.
House Republicans were expected to discuss the plan at a conference Wednesday night, with the Budget Committee marking it up next week.
Asked if Kasich has the votes to pass the plan, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said, "He's closer." Gingrich said he is not worried about Republicans going home with the budget pending in the House, saying: "We believe in the public actually knowing what we do. This is not the Clinton health plan."
The Kasich budget would phase out the marriage penalty in the tax code, at a cost of between $50 billion to $100 billion over the next five years. While it does not contain some controversial budget cuts Republicans have proposed in the past, such as terminating the National Endowment for the Arts, it does contain many others, including terminating the Americorps and Legal Services Corporation programs, privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, repealing the Davis-Bacon Act and limiting the Earned Income Tax Credit to families with children. It would tighten food stamp work requirements, saving almost $2.3 billion over five years, reduce federal flood insurance subsidies and reform Federal Housing Administration programs.
Kasich has said the budget will call for abolishing the Energy and Commerce departments, although the budget document uses the term "restructuring." It would corporatize the national energy laboratories. In education, the Kasich plan would individualize the Title I program and create an educational block grant program by consolidating many elementary and secondary education programs.
According to the Associated Press, the Kasich plan would also eliminate about 1,000 of the 2,800 politically appointed jobs in government.
The plan would encourage privatization of Amtrak by 2002 and cut outlays for local mass transit programs. It also calls for selling, over five years, the federal power marketing administrations, as well as reducing hospital capital payments in the Medicare program by 25 percent. It would block grant the Medicaid acute care program and consolidate community planning and development programs.
In addition, it would increase the maximum Pell Grant by $350 by consolidating 15 higher education programs and block granting the Job Training Partnership Act. The budget plan also would boost funding for the National Institutes of Health by almost $5.5 billion over five years.
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