The federal workforce might first feel the wrath of the new GOP-run House’s budget cuts as a 10 percent reduction in the amount of government employees tops the list of $150 billion in slashes Congressman Kevin Brady, Texas Republican, is recommending. Brady’s cuts would shrink the annual budget deficit by about 12.5 percent.
In his “Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending (CUTS) Act of 2011,” Brady pushes for a “start” to spending cuts in Washington. Recommendation for spending cuts include the 10 percent Washington workforce reduction, immediate cuts to the White House and congressional Budgets and the elimination of several “obsolete” programs, as Brady calls them. Some of the “obsolete” programs include the “Safe and Drug Free Schools” program, “Public Broadcasting funding,” and the LEAP college scholarship program.
“We’re running a trillion dollar deficit and, by some estimates, several trillion dollar deficits in coming years, so this is just a start,” Brady told The Daily Caller. “We’re going to have to go, I think, much deeper and cut even more things if we’re going to get back on track to a balanced budget.”
Brady said these spending cuts, recommended by the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as the president’s bipartisan debt commission, are a “test case” to see if Congress has the “political will” to make difficult. He said this legislation is already getting pushback from the AFL-CIO and other unions that represent government employees. Brady has a piece of advice for anyone opposed to any specific cut, though: “If you don’t like a certain item, great. Simply replace it with a cut of equal or greater value.”
No official co-sponsors have signed onto Brady’s legislation yet, but he said that’s because Congress is just getting organized this week. Fiscally conservative advocacy groups like the Club for Growth, Americans for Limited Government and Citizens Against Government Waste have all come out in favor of Brady’s cuts, and he expects more to do so.
Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson agreed with Brady that these cuts are a start to fixing Washington’s spending problem and that this is a test of the 112th Congress’s “political will.”
“Cutting 10 percent of the federal workforce is a good first step to restoring fiscal sanity,” Wilson said. “If we can’t do this basic cut, then it is impossible to believe that the political will exist to make the cuts necessary to recover form the Pelosi-Reid spending binge.”
Brady told TheDC that, from here, he and other House GOP members will put a YouCut recommendation up for a vote on the floor every week. He said they’ll look for possible cuts in obsolete programs, stimulus funded programs and from programs that didn’t exist before Obama took office.
“Just like it took years, unfortunately, the last two years, to get these deficit numbers, we can’t just overnight balance the budget so our thought is, every week, how do we find the way to cut the dollars we can no longer afford,” Brady said.