Cutting our way to oblivion
House Bill Takes a Scythe to Spending
By JONATHAN WEISMAN, NYT
WASHINGTON — Financial regulators would lose hundreds of millions of dollars needed to implement the new Wall Street regulatory law. The Internal Revenue Service’s budget would not be increased, with a prohibition on cash transfers to implement the health care law. President Obama’s energy-efficiency and renewable energy efforts would be gutted, along with international climate change programs. And regulations to force new efficiency standards in federal buildings would be blocked.
Quietly, the House Appropriations Committee is working hard to undo much of the president’s first-term ambitions — or at least provoke a showdown with the White House ahead of the fall election.
On Tuesday, the committee introduced a new agriculture spending bill that slashes the administration’s request for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by 41 percent as the agency gears up to begin regulation of the $300 trillion swaps market, assigned it by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulatory law. On Wednesday, the House moved toward final passage of an energy and water spending bill that would bring spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy to its lowest level since 2006, during the more oil-friendly Bush years.
“I don’t think there’s any question the policy that we’re trying to promote is one of fiscal prudence, but also if we feel the sort of green initiatives the president has been about are not yielding the result that was intended and the mission is not one that we would support, certainly we would focus on trying to end that,” Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, said in an interview. “There are policy implications any time you go about affecting spending levels.”
(More here.)
By JONATHAN WEISMAN, NYT
WASHINGTON — Financial regulators would lose hundreds of millions of dollars needed to implement the new Wall Street regulatory law. The Internal Revenue Service’s budget would not be increased, with a prohibition on cash transfers to implement the health care law. President Obama’s energy-efficiency and renewable energy efforts would be gutted, along with international climate change programs. And regulations to force new efficiency standards in federal buildings would be blocked.
Quietly, the House Appropriations Committee is working hard to undo much of the president’s first-term ambitions — or at least provoke a showdown with the White House ahead of the fall election.
On Tuesday, the committee introduced a new agriculture spending bill that slashes the administration’s request for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by 41 percent as the agency gears up to begin regulation of the $300 trillion swaps market, assigned it by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulatory law. On Wednesday, the House moved toward final passage of an energy and water spending bill that would bring spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy to its lowest level since 2006, during the more oil-friendly Bush years.
“I don’t think there’s any question the policy that we’re trying to promote is one of fiscal prudence, but also if we feel the sort of green initiatives the president has been about are not yielding the result that was intended and the mission is not one that we would support, certainly we would focus on trying to end that,” Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, said in an interview. “There are policy implications any time you go about affecting spending levels.”
(More here.)
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