Republican Leader Boehner Leads on Spending Cuts

Thursday, July 29, 2010 3:00 PM by Renae Bartusch

In an effort to eliminate unnecessary Washington spending in the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Bill (THUD), House Minority Leader Boehner (R-OH) plans to offer several amendments that would cut millions of dollars in spending from the THUD appropriations bill. CFA applauds Boehner’s leadership in reducing wasteful government spending. Says Boehner:

“Given the state of the deficit and debit, it’s time for Congress to start evaluating each government program in terms of whether it is worth forcing our children and grandchildren to pay for it.”

The Boehner amendments bring to light the wasteful spending that Congress continues to push.  This is the kind of scrutiny we have been calling on Congress to enact and, if applied in broad strokes, could represent significant savings for taxpayers. 
The Boehner amendments would:

• Terminate a HUD program for doctoral dissertations by cutting $300,000 from HUD and prohibiting the activity, since funds to study the work taxpayers are already paying thousands of people to do fall outside the scope of HUD’s mission.
• Cut $1.6 million from DOT’s Office of the Secretary, Salaries, and Expenses. This would expand the budgets and increase hires for the bureaucrats who oversee the DOT, even though each agency within the department already has their own budget offices that do just this.
• Cut $40 million from HUD’s Transformation Initiative that funds efforts to teach communities that receive HUD funds how to use them. Spending money to teach other people how to spend money. Really?
• Cut $35 million in new spending for grants to rehab houses through the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation. This is a redundant program, one even the Obama administration has decided to not continue to fund. Why should Congress continue to funnel funds down a duplicative black hole?

These are all commonsense approaches to decreasing the federal spending burden. After all, it’s hard to see why a government agency should be spending $40 million to teach people how to spend other money the agency is giving them. This is not the first time Boehner has tried to raise the visibility on wasteful spending.  He joined House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) earlier this year in writing a letter to President Obama recommending specific cuts to THUD. The amendment he has offered today, along with several other rescission proposals by other Republican members, represent tangible steps to cutting down on wasteful spending. We continue to support Rep. Boehner’s leadership on this issue, and look forward to more spending cuts as the House confronts the remaining 11 appropriations bills later this year.

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