Removing draconian budget cuts isn’t enough: Bring back the COVID safety net

After agreeing with the White House on topline numbers, Congress is working on funding the government for fiscal year 2024.

On the bright side, the plan avoids the extreme, draconian cuts that far-right lawmakers demanded last year when they nearly shut down the government, threatened a national default and ousted former GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

But as Congress allocates our tax dollars, it’s clear that ordinary families and communities are still getting short shrift while the Pentagon hoovers up another record budget and a separate tax package comes together.

The House, Senate, and White House confirmed they will stick to the topline spending levels agreed to last spring in the debt ceiling deal. This month, leaders again agreed to spend $886.3 billion for defense and $772.7 billion for everything else except Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which are separate, mandatory funding streams. 

The Pentagon gets a $3.5 billion increase. The rest of us get a kick in the pants, with programs for regular people frozen at last year’s levels. And a freeze, amid inflation and increasing need, is a cut.

Which programs get what kind of cuts will be determined in the coming weeks as Congress hashes out the details of 12 separate spending bills. But funding is likely to be effectively cut for nearly everything outside defense.

With COVID-19 cases rising again, public health programs and health research could get a cut. After Republican lawsuits blocked debt relief for student borrowers, Pell Grants for low-income students may get a cut. Amid rising poverty after pandemic-era aid programs were cut back, food assistance, rental assistance, support for infants and children and other help for low-income people are subject to the freeze and possible cuts. 

This is simply bad policymaking. Vital pandemic assistance programs in the 2021 American Rescue Plan grew the economy, reduced overall poverty by 20 percent and cut child poverty in half. But when Congress failed to renew them, 2022 saw a historic spike in poverty. Millions more Americans lost health care last year as Medicaid “unwound,” and homelessness hit a record high just last month.

This fall, Biden sent an emergency $1.4 billion domestic spending request to fill an increased need for childcare assistance and the critical Women, Infants and Children Program, or WIC. WIC helps pregnant, postpartum and nursing parents and their babies with groceries, breastfeeding, health care and other critical assistance. Thus far, it has not been included in any spending bill or stop-gap funding bill.

One huge successful pandemic-era program, the expanded Child Tax Credit, may return in limited form — though Congress unnecessarily links helping struggling children to helping wealthy corporations. The package contains an insufficient but necessary $33 billion Child Tax Credit expansion but hooks it to a $35 billion tax giveaway for businesses. 

The new Child Tax Credit expansion would help some 400,000 children out of poverty and make 3 million children less poor in its first year. By contrast, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that the fully expanded Child Tax Credit from the American Rescue Plan would help 60 million children in the first year alone if enacted again.

Skewing national priorities away from the well-being of our nation’s families isn’t the only thing wrong with the budget. That $886.3 billion for the Pentagon is only part of the militarization of our federal budget.

According to the National Priorities Project, in fiscal year 2023, a whopping 62 percent of the federal discretionary budget went to defense and other militarized programs such as detentions and deportations, prisons and policing. 

That comes even as we spend more on our militaries than the next 10 highest spenders combined — and even after the Pentagon just failed its sixth audit. In fact, the Defense Department is the only federal department that has never passed an audit showing how it spends its obscenely high annual budget. 

This isn’t what voters want.

In surveys, voters of all parties strongly agree that the Pentagon should pass an audit before any increases to its spending are allotted. Large majorities also believe military spending should stay where it is or come down. In contrast, 7 in 10 Americans want more, not less investment in families and communities.

How our tax dollars are spent is a direct expression of our national priorities. If we want better results for our families and communities, we need to move them up from the bottom of the list.

Karen Dolan is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.