The bipartisan budget deal reached in the Senate would raise the spending caps on government spending even more than President Barack Obama requested in his last budget.
In his fiscal 2017 budget, published in February 2016, Obama sought to lift the spending caps put in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act, which was the deal he hammered out with then-House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to raise the federal debt ceiling.
Specifically, Obama called for increasing the cap on defense spending by $35 billion in fiscal 2018.
The deal negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and supported by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., would increase the defense spending cap by even more, by $80 billion to $629 billion.
Obama also called for raising the cap on nondefense discretionary spending by $30 billion in fiscal 2018. The bipartisan budget deal would raise it by $63 billion, to $579 billion. Nondefense discretionary spending is a category that includes funding for federal law enforcement, many low-income programs, job training, and almost everything the government does outside of insurance programs.
Those totals don’t include other spending included in the deal separate from the caps.
Republicans who just voted to add an expected $1.5 trillion to the debt through tax cuts and who plan to vote for about $300 billion in additional spending over the next two years criticized Obama in 2016 for his spending proposals.
At the time, Ryan called the budget “a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans.”
And McConnell dismissed the document as a “call for new taxes, new spending and more debt.”
