THE WHITE HOUSE – President Donald Trump is facing fierce backlash from his conservative caucus for a pending two-year budget deal that dramatically increases spending and deficits as it abolishes budget caps until July 2021.
The deal, made Monday evening between Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), while given a nod by congressional leaders, has yet to be passed by either chamber of Congress or signed by the president.
After Trump tweeted the deal’s announcement:
….This was a real compromise in order to give another big victory to our Great Military and Vets!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2019
Fox News host Laura Ingraham launched into an attack, tweeting:
Not acceptable. Spending out the wazoo—the only thing that began to reduce the budget deficit was the 2013 sequester spending caps. https://t.co/VZ6Ml0c0ld
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 22, 2019
Ingraham’s tweet refers to The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), known as sequestration, that enacted mandatory spending cuts if Congress couldn’t come up with a deal that would reduce deficits by $1.2 trillion dollars over 10 years.
“This latest deal effectively renders the BCA dead,” Paul Winfree, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, writes in a statement released Tuesday. He calls this deal “the worst in a decade,” and says:
“On top of the new spending, the deal suspends the debt limit for the next two years, piling on as much as $2 trillion more in debt.”
Doug Christian, The White House
