Congress is back in Washington D.C. this week after the April Recess, and the House is sprinting to meet its self-imposed deadline to pass a federal budget reconciliation bill before the next recess in May. Amid a steady stream of headline-grabbing news, CFI continues to closely monitor the fast-moving federal budget plan in both chambers.
The federal reconciliation process is often confusing and full of jargon, but this year, it boils down to something simple: real cuts to federal funding for healthcare, food assistance, and other critical investments in families, all to pay for giant tax handouts for billionaires and corporations.
To help keep it all straight, let’s break down where we are right now in this process and how we can engage.
The federal budget reconciliation process begins with the creation of budget resolutions, or blueprints, that the House and the Senate each pass separately. The federal budget resolutions direct specific House and Senate committees on how much to spend or cut, which then craft pieces of legislation that will ultimately become one reconciliation package.
The Senate passed its federal budget resolution on April 5, followed by the House on April 10. The Senate budget resolution directs a broader set of instructions for spending and cuts for committees, while the House budget resolution gives instructions for bigger cuts for each committee but both will lead to significant reductions in funding to critical programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The federal budget resolutions tell committees how much, at minimum, to spend or cut — but not exactly how. Committees are tasked with creating federal legislation that actually makes the changes to programs to meet their budget resolution spending targets. This process is generally known as markups. Committee leaders won’t make these proposals public until a couple of days before markups are actually passed. This helpful table from the Progressive Caucus Center shows what the budget resolution directed House committees to spend and cut, and what important programs those committees oversee. We are focusing on this House since their budget resolution directed the biggest cuts to committees, and therefore, fulfilling their budget resolution could result in the biggest reductions for assistance programs.
According to the House budget resolution, the Agriculture Committee, which oversees SNAP, must cut at least $230 billion. The Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, must cut $880 billion. To be clear, SNAP and Medicaid are the biggest programs these committees oversee; directing cuts of that magnitude to these committees necessitates cuts to these programs, putting the 218,000 Colorado households who use SNAP and 1.1 million Coloradans covered by Medicaid at risk.
Any cuts to Medicaid and SNAP would not be able to be backfilled by our state budget, which is already experiencing a structural deficit due to TABOR. That means that cuts to these programs would fall directly onto program recipients — the majority of whom are working families with kids. The largest health insurer for children in the United States is Medicaid; the largest nutrition assistance for children in the United States is SNAP.
The best time to engage is right now. By mid-May, the proposals will be public and largely — it will be difficult to change the cuts in the House budget by then. Contact your representative and demand that they reject any budget that would mean higher food costs for families, more people without health coverage, increased poverty and hardship, and higher debt — all in service to tax cuts for the wealthy. Coloradans deserve better.
In the next couple of weeks, submit handwritten letters about the importance of nutrition assistance programs; have your local, state, tribal, or national organization sign on to the National Coalition on Child and Family Well-Being’s reconciliation letter; contact legislators to oppose cuts to programs like Head Start; and, finally, make sure your voice is heard by your House representatives. Find your representative and congressional district here.
We know that specific committees will be cutting funding to specific programs. The Energy and Commerce committee will oversee cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the House Agriculture committee will oversee cuts to SNAP, and the House Education and Workforce committee will oversee cuts to Head Start. Colorado Representatives Diana DeGette and Gabe Evans sit on the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Join CFI and partners in our federal defense coalition. We meet monthly to share information, insights, resources, and updates on the federal budget and budget reconciliation. Contact Caroline Nutter at nutter@coloradofiscal.org for more information.
Follow CFI’s Federal Insights, where we break down the details of the federal cuts and what they mean for Colorado’s families and economy.
After markup madness concludes, CFI will be back with our part two, Reconciliation Reckoning, that will detail what the program and tax cuts will actually look like.
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