Conservatives are spoiling for an election-year spending fight, saying if President Obama wants any of the nearly $2 billion he has requested to fight Zika, the budget will have to be cut elsewhere.
Democrats, however, are declaring the fight against the mosquito-borne illness to be an emergency similar to wars and hurricanes, in which Congress routinely tacks the costs onto the deficit rather than searching for offsets.
Heritage Action, an influential conservative group, said last week that if Republicans agree to Mr. Obama’s request for more money, it should come from somewhere else. The group suggested cutting money to combat global warming or to the United Nations.
“One of the reasons House Republicans won their majority in 2010 was in response to the Obama administration’s reckless overspending,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action. “If lawmakers believe the administration’s funding request is important, the cost should be fully offset within the fiscal year. A Republican-led Congress should be able to demonstrate an ability to prioritize spending.”
The fight over offsets could sour a deal shaping up in the Senate, where Republican and Democratic negotiators say they are nearing a package that would at least partially fund Mr. Obama’s $1.9 billion request.
The offsets debate frequently pits Republican leaders intent on fiscal discipline against party centrists and Democrats who say crises demand swift action, even if it means running up the deficit.
Eric Cantor, as House majority leader, said five years ago that if Congress provided funding to help victims of a devastating tornado in Joplin, Missouri, it would have to offset the money with spending cuts elsewhere.
Democrats labeled the Virginia Republican “heartless,” but Mr. Cantor wanted to avoid the type of conservative backlash that stung Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2005, when he said it was right to borrow billions of dollars for Hurricane Katrina relief because the federal budget had no more fat to trim.
Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee kicked off similar fights over supplemental spending less than two years before Republican leaders were slammed for slow-walking billions of dollars in relief for Superstorm Sandy recovery after a contentious vote to resolve the “fiscal cliff” standoff at the dawn of 2013.
In 2014, Democrats sounded the alarm over expiring unemployment benefits, while Republican leaders said any reauthorization bill needed be fully offset and include job creation measures.
As a political matter, these fights are born from “a general distaste among some members for federal spending, but also from a belief that Congress uses emergency spending bills as vehicles for spending that not everyone thinks is an emergency,” said Molly Reynolds, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
She said routine use of emergency supplemental bills to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as targeted spending for Sandy victims, contributed to that perception.
“If there was an expectation that Congress would finish the regular appropriations process in a timely manner, there might be less of an incentive to use the emergency appropriations process to ensure the money comes through,” Ms. Reynolds said.
Those appropriations bills are starting to move, but Democrats say there is no time to waste on Zika, which is spreading in Puerto Rico and could cause a crisis on the mainland once temperatures climb, allowing disease-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to proliferate.
With summer looming, Democrats say Congress shouldn’t get bogged down in a fight over an offset.
“We didn’t need it for Ebola. We had four cases of Ebola, and we appropriated $4 billion in emergency funding,” said Sen. Christopher Murphy, Connecticut Democrat. “We’ve already had hundreds of cases of Zika. I’m not sure why it would be a different standard.
“I think moving forward, we need to have reservoir funds to be able to use to get out of these crises,” he added. “We have to get out of this habit of waiting until an epidemic is on us to be able to appropriate dollars.”
Others say Congress shouldn’t be waging these fights in the first place, arguing that disaster relief falls primarily on state and local governments.
“More and more, because of politics, those are being kicked up to the federal level,” said Chris Edwards, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute.
He said federal agencies should step if they have capabilities beyond what state and local government can do, like when the Coast Guard swooped in to save lives after Hurricane Katrina.
Otherwise, he said, there is no advantage to federal intervention: States fall back on Washington’s safety net instead of saving for contingencies, and federal involvement makes it hard to tell who’s in charge amid the chaos.
“There’s too many chefs in the kitchen,” Mr. Edwards said.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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