POLITICO
Congress fears Trump could stumble over next fiscal cliff
Lawmakers will try to ink a deal, but Trump could blow up their plans.
By SARAH FERRIS
04/02/2019 05:02 AM EDT
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
Administration officials, led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are pushing for a “clean” debt ceiling hike that extends the federal borrowing limit without making other policy changes. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A looming battle between President Donald Trump and Democrats over government spending and the debt limit could make the 35-day government shutdown look like a blip.
A series of budget deadlines converge in the coming months that could leave Washington on the precipice of another shutdown, $100 billion in automatic spending cuts and a full-scale credit crisis. And lawmakers are openly worried about stumbling over the edge.
“It could all go terribly wrong,” House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said.
Some top Democrats have begun quietly pushing for a grand bargain to simultaneously raise the debt ceiling and Congress’ stiff budget caps — avoiding market turmoil and staving off harsh cuts to domestic and defense programs, according to multiple lawmakers and aides.
But the White House, focused on Trump’s reelection bid, is resisting talk of another massive deal that could cost as much as $350 billion over two years. Administration officials, led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are instead pushing for a “clean” debt ceiling hike that extends the federal borrowing limit without making any other policy changes.
The fiscal fights will reach a boiling point this fall — around the same time that Congress must pass its annual funding bills, which is guaranteed to dredge up the same border wall fight between Trump and Democrats that sent the government sputtering into a five-week shutdown.
By September, lawmakers could be faced with a fiscal cliff rivaling that of 2011, when another divided government nearly defaulted on its debt.
“This is the Congress of the United States. Of course there will be a cliff,” said a senior Republican lawmaker involved with the budget negotiations.
The conflict is still at arm’s length for most of Washington. Talks between House and Senate leaders have only just begun, and while there’s some hope that a deal could come together as soon as this spring, neither party has finalized its strategy.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are confident they can avert a doomsday scenario in which the U.S. government fails to pay its bills for the first time in history, according to lawmakers and aides. Senate Republicans eager to defend their majority in 2020 will be in no mood for any shenanigans surrounding the debt limit.
Officials in both parties say they’re committed to reaching a deal to avoid sequestration and lift the budget caps. Without a bipartisan agreement, the Pentagon would be forced to slash $71 billion from the next fiscal year’s budget, with an additional $55 billion cut from domestic programs.
The White House, however, isn’t on board.
“We’ve been saying that we should move beyond these unaffordable, dollar-for-dollar caps deals that hold defense spending ransom to billions of dollars in wasteful discretionary spending,” a senior administration official said.
CONGRESS
And with an erratic Trump still demanding money for his southern border wall and angry about accepting a previous deal to boost spending, some lawmakers fear how the White House will handle such a fraught moment.
“My biggest concern is that there are irrational people who are willing to risk the country’s financial status for hyperbolic gain and that there are folks out there who’ve forgotten compromise.” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), an Appropriations Committee member, said in an interview.
The first key question for Democrats and Republicans is whether to try to strike a deal that would lift the debt ceiling and budget caps at the same time. Entangling the two — in theory — would offer just enough incentive for both parties to hold their noses and ink the deal.
“That’s what deals are for — to put some things in that one side doesn’t love and some things that the other side doesn’t love,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a top Democratic spending negotiator. “Sweeteners and bitter pills for both — and hope that we get there.”.
A broader accord could also relieve some pressure on party leaders in both the House and Senate. Republicans, for instance, would be hard-pressed to vote against boosting the Pentagon budget, while Democrats rarely, if ever, vote against raising the debt limit.
That could deliver just enough votes for an otherwise unpopular budget deal — expected to total as much as $350 billion over two years, aides say — that will inevitably become a partisan battle over funding in the first full year of a Democratic House and Republican Senate.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has told other Democratic leaders that they should not rule out a broader deal.
“It should remain an option to do them together and remove two major drivers of uncertainty at the same time before that uncertainty metastasizes,” a Democratic aide said of his thinking.
But the tactic could also backfire.
Democrats say they can’t rule out the possibility that Trump would deploy the same “shoot-the-hostage” strategy that he did during the border fight, when he embraced the shutdown as a nod to his conservative base even after Congress refused to fund the wall.
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Border security will again be in play this year. Trump demanded $8.6 billion for a border wall with Mexico in his latest budget plan, even as the fate of his emergency declaration at the border lies with the courts.
As Trump embraces the 2020 campaign in earnest, he could easily decide to demand border funding as part of the broader deal — effectively daring Democrats to risk international financial turmoil if they refuse to grant money for wall construction.
The risk is heightened, some lawmakers say, by Trump’s circle of advisers, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who as a congressman threatened to refuse to raise the debt limit in 2011 until then-President Barack Obama agreed to deep spending cuts.
And Trump’s own budget chief, Russ Vought, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he supported attaching spending cuts to debt ceiling hikes.
Vought — who was only narrowly confirmed when he joined the administration — has also indicated that he could deploy some budget tricks to guarantee funding for the Pentagon, regardless of the threat of automatic spending cuts set to take effect at year’s end.
The stakes are higher — along with the levels of anxiety in both parties — after the longest shutdown in U.S. history. This time, Trump could fuel an international financial crisis if the government breached the debt ceiling.
“I’m fearful. It’s going to be really ugly,” said one House Republican appropriator, who has been involved with past talks.
Publicly and privately, the White House has said it wants a no-drama debt ceiling lift. That would mean none of the spending cuts that Republicans have demanded in past years. But this time, Democrats see the debt limit as a potential pressure point to persuade Trump to agree to another massive budget agreement.
The administration has indicated to lawmakers that it wants to delay any budget deal beyond the Sept. 30 government funding deadline to maximize its leverage, ensuring fights over a possible shutdown, automatic spending cuts and debt ceiling align toward the end of the year.
Meanwhile, another little-known math problem could severely complicate Congress’ ability to produce a two-year budget deal: the $350 billion budget boost being discussed could actually cost more than $2 trillion on paper.
Because lawmakers would be technically phasing out the 10-year Budget Control Act sequester, its cost would not only include the two years’ worth of spending hikes, it would also account for many years of future projected spending increases, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars that the government had “saved” during the sequester.
The final cost, as much as $2 trillion over a decade, according to a source familiar with the process, would even exceed the cost of the GOP tax law.
Nancy Cook and Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.
© 2019 POLITICO LLC
ABCNews
Trump lashes out at Puerto Rico’s ‘incompetent or corrupt’ politicians after Senate fails to advance disaster aid bill
By Morgan Winsor
Apr 2, 2019, 7:22 AM ET
President Donald Trump directed his outrage at Puerto Rico on Monday night, calling the U.S. territory “a mess” and its politicians “incompetent or corrupt,” after Senate Democrats clashed with their Republican counterparts over sending more disaster aid money.
Senators took test votes on two competing measures – one drafted by Senate Republicans and another passed by Democratic-led House of Representatives earlier this year – that would allocate billions of dollars in aid to U.S. states and territories ravaged by hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and other natural disasters in recent months. But neither piece of legislation got the support required to advance to a full floor vote. Democrats shot down the GOP legislation while Republicans rejected the House-passed bill, which proposes more aid for Puerto Rico than the Republican version.
Democrats said they wanted the federal government to release the money already appropriated to Puerto Rico in a previous relief package, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars more. Republicans echoed Trump’s claims that Puerto Puerto Rico has been given much more than disaster-hit states and hasn’t spent the money wisely.
“The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any ‘place’ in history. The people of Puerto Rico,” Trump posted on Twitter, “are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works.”
“FEMA & The Military worked emergency miracles but politicians like,” Trump continued. “the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health. 91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!”
Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, the capital, responded to Trump’s remarks in her own tweets. She called the president “unhinged” and accused him of lying about the inadequate response to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall on the island in September 2017 and caused some $100 billion in damage.
“Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds. He is unhinged & thus lies about the $ received by PR. HE KNOWS HIS RESPONSE was innefficient [sic] at best. He can huff & puff all he wants but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch. SHAME ON YOU!” Cruz tweeted.
“Mr President I am right here ready to call you on every lie, every hypocrisy and every ill fated action against the people of Puerto Rico. My voice,and the voices of the people of Puerto Rico, will continue to unmask your insentive [sic], incapable & vindictive ways. SHAME ON YOU!” Cruz tweeted again.
The storm struck as Puerto Ricans still were recovering from Hurricane Irma, which unleashed heavy rain and high winds just two weeks earlier.
Though 64 people died as a direct result of Hurricane Maria, an estimated 2,975 died as a result of its aftermath, according to Puerto Rico’s most recent official counts based on a study, published in August of 2018, conducted by George Washington University and the University of Puerto Rico.
A car drives on a damaged road in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Humacao, Puerto Rico on Oct. 2, 2017.
Jeremy Kirkland, general counsel to the Inspector General’s Office at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced last Tuesday that his office has launched an internal investigation at the request of Congress to investigate whether there was any “interference” in the distribution of aid money to Puerto Rico.
Over the weekend, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer penned an op-ed in The New York Daily News, saying the Trump administration “has yet to disperse nearly $20 billion in long-term recovery and mitigation funds for Puerto Rico, more than a year after they were approved by Congress and a year-and-a-half after the historic hurricanes made landfall.”
“[The president] claims that Puerto Rico is getting $91 billion in disaster relief,” Schumer wrote, “but no one can discern where he’s getting that figure, which is many times higher than the actual number.”
ABC News’ Stephanie Ebbs, Anne Flaherty, Joshua Hoyos and Trish Turner contributed to this report.
© 2019 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.
The Trump Impeachment
Unfit To Lead
Trump doesn’t know Puerto Rico is part of the USA. Seriously.
Puerto Rico remains devastated after Hurricane Maria due to lack of adequate funding and resources. Yet, in another racisTwitterer tirade, Trump bashes Puerto Rico pols who “only take from the USA!”
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA…
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent,
@AndrewLearned
We should fire the President of Puert
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA…
He should really get the President of Puerto Rico on the phone to hash this out.
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take .
We need to fire the President of Puerto Rico. #PuertoRicoUSA #PuertoRico
6:26 AM - Apr 2, 2019 · New York, NY
See Beth Frank’s other Tweets
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What can we expect though from a President who gets his information from sources like Fox News?
Rick Wilson
@TheRickWilson
· 5h
Puerto Rico is the USA you racist lout.
@exavierpope
Of course 45 doesn’t know Puerto Rico is the USA, he gets his policy from a network that thinks Mexico is 3 countries and Africa is 1 pic.twitter.com/NXncjSjdSD
399
5:34 AM - Apr 2, 2019 · Chicago, IL
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Trump’s recent outburst was in reaction to Democrats’ refusal to accept a package for Puerto Rico that falls short:
On Monday, Democratic leaders balked at the $600 million for Puerto Rican food stamps in the $13.45 billion package, arguing it wasn’t enough. But Republicans refused to back a Democratic House bill that failed to account for the historic Midwestern flooding, as it passed before that catastrophe. Democrats have said they support paying for flood relief and attempted Monday to amend their House bill with that money, a move the GOP blocked.
In his tweets, Trump raised a familiar, contested figure for disaster relief in Puerto Rico. Although the president has repeatedly claimed that $91 billion has been spent there, that figure actually reflects a high-end, long-term estimate for recovery costs; a fraction of that has so far been budgeted, and even less has been spent.
[Here’s why Trump says Puerto Rico is getting $91 billion in disaster relief]
The president also took aim at Cruz, San Juan’s outspoken mayor who has often taken Trump to task over the federal response to Hurricane Maria, which killed an estimated 2,975 people on the island.
“FEMA & the Military worked emergency miracles, but politicians like the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health,” Trump tweeted. “91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!”
Qasim Rashid, Esq.
@QasimRashid
This is a flat out lie. Puerto Rico has NOT “got $91B.”
•$91B is due incrementally over the next 20 years
•~$11B has been delivered
•3,000 Americans still died due to Federal Govt failures
We must demand better from our leadership. This is wrong. washingtonpost.com/politics … er-relief/ …
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA.
The idiot only knows how to lie, steal, con, cheat, grope women, demean, debase, mock, spew buffoonery, lie, steal, oh I said that, ok whatever, he just doesn’t know his ass from a hole .
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Daily Sound and Fury
TRUMP EFFECT
Trump, McConnell clash on closing the border
“If we don’t make a deal with Congress, the border’s going to be closed,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “100 percent.”
“Security is more important to me than trade,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Joshua Roberts / Reuters
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April 2, 2019, 2:59 PM ET / Updated April 2, 2019, 3:30 PM ET
By Jonathan Allen and Rebecca Shabad
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is “100 percent” prepared to shut down the U.S. border with Mexico to block an influx of migrants.
“If we don’t make a deal with Congress, the border’s going to be closed,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “100 percent.”
At almost the same time, less than two miles down Pennsylvania Avenue, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that might be a financial disaster for Americans.
“Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country, and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing,” McConnell said, noting that he agrees with the president that there is “a border crisis.”
The disagreement between the top two Republicans in Washington illustrates again the ongoing tension between the president and his own party in Congress as lawmakers try to bat down Trump proposals they believe are ill-advised politically, on policy grounds or both.
McConnell also said Tuesday that he and Trump now see eye to eye on waiting until after the 2020 election to work on health care legislation following Trump’s promise to move earlier. McConnell had balked at that idea. And last week, Trump quickly retreated on two of his own budget proposals — cuts for the Special Olympics and Great Lakes restoration — after hearing criticism from GOP members of Congress.
But it remains to be seen whether he will back off on the border, a signature issue for him that he views as critically important both as a policy matter and in terms of fulfilling a key promise from his 2016 campaign. Increasingly, Trump has shown a willingness to go it alone when Congress rejects his immigration and border-control plans.
On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen directed Customs and Border Protection to send up to 750 additional officers to the border to assist with a policy designed to keep asylum-seekers in Mexico while they await adjudication of their cases. NBC News first reported on that decision last week. The number could be increased to 2,000, according to the department.
Earlier this year, Trump shut down parts of the federal government for five weeks over a demand that Congress provide $5.7 billion to fund new barriers along the border. After he reopened the agencies, he and Congress agreed to a border package that included money for technology upgrades and about 55 miles of new fencing but prohibited the construction of a solid wall.
Trump then announced he would unilaterally transfer previously appropriated money from the Pentagon’s accounts for building military bases and other areas of the government to build more wall without congressional approval — a move that immediately drew lawsuits from state attorneys general who argue he acted outside his constitutional authority as president.
Trump said Tuesday that he now wants Democrats in Congress to accede to his long-held goals of rewriting the visa lottery system and rules that give favor to family members of people who already have immigrated to the United States.
“Congress has to meet quickly and make a deal,” he said.
Though experts have sounded a similar note to McConnell, warning that shutting the border could hurt the U.S. economy — goods worth more than $1.5 billion cross the border on a daily basis — Trump said that’s a secondary concern for him.
“Security is more important to me than trade,” he said.
Trump also addressed his recent decision to cut off aid to three Central American countries — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — from which many of the migrants have traveled to the U.S. border.
Critics say that decision will likely create more, not fewer, refugees from those countries.
Trump framed it as a natural response to what he views as the failure of the recipients of U.S. aid to give reciprocal value.
“They don’t do anything for us,” he said, and have been “taking advantage of the United States” for many years. “They arrange these caravans, and they don’t put their best people in those caravans … We’re not going to have it anymore.”
Jonathan Allen is a Washington-based national political reporter for NBC News who focuses on the presidency.
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