How to Avoid Accountability

David Super

     The cuts and chaos generated by the Orwellian-named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have done lasting damage to the federal government’s ability to meet the nation’s needs.  The arbitrary arrests, deportations, and renditions of immigrants and those perceived to be or associated with immigrants have both caused immense, unnecessary hardship in the short-term and debased this country’s moral authority for decades to come. 

     Yet beyond all this devastation, these actions have had an additional destructive effect:  distracting journalists and the public from transformative legislation making its way through Congress.  Even among politically engaged people, few are aware that the most important social legislation since at least the Affordable Care Act is on track to gut the most important parts of the social safety net, reverse the central achievement of the Affordable Care Act, and so vandalize our nation’s finances that major social initiatives may be effectively unaffordable for a generation to come.  This obscurity of President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is very much part of the plan:  everything about it has been designed to remain in the shadows until it becomes too late.

     Even the choice to proceed with one bill, which President Trump and Speaker Johnson forced on an unwilling Senate, sought to cut in half the news coverage it would receive.  The steady roll-out of extreme executive actions and a skeletal spending outline for the next fiscal year further serve to push the major legislation from the headlines. 

     The Congressional Budget Act requires the House and Senate to agree on a budget resolution – a fiscal blueprint for the next decade – as a pre-condition to accessing the special parliamentary advantages of “budget reconciliation”.  Differences between House and Senate positions have derailed many budget resolutions in the past and have provided opportunities for public debate on the country’s direction. 

     This year, however, House and Senate Republicans agreed upon a budget resolution in name only.  It does not even unite the chambers behind a single broad overview of the budget.  Instead, the resolution directs the House to pass massive, devastating cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and student loans.  The budget resolution then sets far lower, though still quite harmful, targets for the Senate.  What will the final legislation look like?  The budget resolution allows everyone to imagine whatever they want.  House Republicans can vote for devastating cuts with the promise that the cuts will be moderated in the Senate.  Senate Republicans can vote for profligate upper-income tax cuts with the promise that they will be paid-for with unspecified “savings” that the House will pass. 

     The House committees assigned to achieve these cuts have been very close-lipped about what they are planning.  In both Medicaid and food assistance, the vast majority of the savings will come from one of two approaches.  First, they plan to purge unemployed people from the programs.  And second, they will shift enormous costs onto state governments – which, in turn, will likely deny aid to even more vulnerable people. 

     When people hear about “work requirements”, they imagine that agencies will assign unemployed people to jobs and continue benefits to those that appear.  In fact, the “work requirements” envisioned here simply deny aid to people who cannot prove to an overwhelmed bureaucracy that they are working more than some arbitrary threshold of hours per week.  If their employer is unwilling to cooperate with verification, if they are combining several part-time jobs and cannot document sufficient hours, if they lack the skills to work effectively with the bureaucracy, or if they simply cannot find enough work, they are automatically terminated.  And the huge cost-shifts to states will translate into even more threadbare social service agencies, even more unreachable by phone and even less able to process this tsunami of work verifications. 

     Shifting vast costs to state and local governments is precisely the sort of thing conservatives used to abhor.  Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America led to the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act and Chief Justice Roberts warned in NFIB v. Sebelius against the devastating effects of losses of federal funds, especially Medicaid funds, on state budgets.  A sudden, dramatic rewrite of the fiscal constitution is hardly a way to bring power closer to the people or to invigorate “laboratories of democracy”. 

     Republicans are drawn to cost-shifts that they can argue they are fulfilling their promise not to hurt recipients of Medicaid or food assistance.  Only the most gullible took that vow seriously:  purging millions of recipients who cannot find jobs certainly hurts recipients.  Moreover, the distinction is illusory:  states cannot and will not absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting eligibility and benefits for vulnerable people beyond the cuts in the federal legislation. 

     Low-income working families – a group Republicans traditionally have praised – are likely to take the brunt of the eligibility losses if Congress shifts costs onto states.  Proposed reductions in the federal share of costs for the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion could drive states to cancel that expansions and return to the days when incomes as low as one-quarter the poverty line disqualified parents of children from coverage.  And states suddenly forced to start paying for part of food assistance benefit costs – which have been entirely federal for over half a century – likely will abandon rules adopted after the 1996 welfare law to cover working families previously disqualified by the vehicles they drove to work. 

     What precise mix of eligibility cuts, benefit reductions, and cost-shifts remains hotly contested within the House Republican Caucus.  With many Members loathe to vote for these measures to partially fund huge upper-income tax cuts, the leadership is doing everything it can to hide what it is doing until it becomes effectively too late to stop it. 

     First the leadership delayed votes in the three most important committees:  Energy and Commerce (Medicaid), Agriculture (food assistance), and Ways and Means (tax cuts) until next week.  It has also kept details of their proposals under close wraps until the deadlines under the committees’ rules set for releasing text.  Even when those “chairmen’s marks” appear Sunday or Monday night, however, they will tell us far less than it appears.  The chairmen’s marks will only contain provisions Members are comfortable defending.  More politically repellant provisions will be included in substitute amendments the chairs will offer and push through in the midst of the committee meetings.

     Even these substitutes will not tell the true story.  The committee-approved bills will go to the House Budget Committee, whose role is largely ministerial:  bundling together the various committees’ proposals.  But then the Budget Committee’s bill will go to the House Rules Committee, which can add odious provisions that could not have passed the substantive committees.  The Rules Committee also can allow the leadership to offer a further substitute on the House floor at the last minute, further obscuring what the legislation actually does until after the Members have cast their votes. 

     And then even after passage, the inconsistent budget resolution will allow House Republicans to insist that they opposed many provisions of the legislation but were merely voting to “move the process along”, confident that the Senate would moderate the final result.  Senators, in turn, can remove any provisions that draw political criticism knowing that they can accept the same provisions in conference with the House. 

      The House Republican leadership has been negotiating with Members of the Freedom Caucus (demanding deeper cuts in safety net programs), Northeastern and California Members (demanding a return to more generous deductions for their relatively high state and local taxes), self-identified moderates (concerned about some of the Medicaid and food assistance cuts), Republican governors (worried about cost-shifts and seeking greater latitude to cut eligibility and benefits to offset those losses), and numerous individual Members serving special interest groups (seeking more goodies in the tax package). 

     Reaching consensus among all these varied interest groups with incompatible agendas is obviously impossible.  Accordingly, the leadership plans to order the committees to meet and dare any Republican Members to vote “no”.  So far this Congress, neither “moderates” nor Freedom Caucus Members have shown any real willingness to do so.  A similar ultimatum surely awaits House Republicans when the bill reaches the floor. 

     With Republicans leery of discussing this deeply unpopular legislation with their constituents, the leadership has tried hard to prevent its content from being known and amendable during congressional recesses.  They have been racing to pass their bill through the House prior to Memorial Day.  If enough Republicans balk, they may miss that deadline and declare that they are going back to the drawing board to deflect the criticism their Members would otherwise face over the Memorial Day recess. 

     Senate Republicans, if anything, are even more ardently seeking invisibility.  They do not plan to consider reconciliation legislation in committee at all.  Instead, they will put the House bill directly onto the floor and reshape it with amendments.  This will allow Republican senators to vote for numerous moderating amendments before casting their votes for final passage.  If the House’s consideration drags on into June, the Senate may be unable to finish before July 4.  That could mean a House-Senate conference committee convenes in late July or early August. 

     Procedurally, congressional Republicans can afford to take this long.  Politically, however, enacting massive cuts in Medicaid and food assistance as the economy slips into a Trump-induced recession will take a good deal of explaining back home.  Perhaps Members’ fears of primaries against Trump-backed challengers will cause them to walk that plank.  We shall see.  Some tax bill will surely pass this year, but it need not be this one.

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