House GOP spending bill is a wish list of deregulation
House Republicans this week put forth an almost surely dead-on-arrival spending bill aimed at blocking IRS enforcement and several SEC rules disfavored by the party.
The appropriations bill, which is now in committee and would need to be marked up by the full House, proposes funding 20 percent lower than President Joe Biden’s request and 10 percent below current levels. It also contains numerous riders for different government agencies, ranging from restrictions on federal funds around abortion to preventing the Securities and Exchange Commission from implementing its climate-disclosure rule for public companies.
Even as the federal budgeting process has become increasingly contentious and politicized, the strategy of disarming regulators through funding cuts has had little success – and few if any riders in the spending bill might ultimately be considering in the wider Congress.
“This is the first step in the House GOP’s appropriation [process]. They clearly didn’t make an effort to make it bipartisan,” said Bonnie Johnston, senior policy counsel at LXR Group. “This bill is very much likely dead on arrival.”
Largely that is because of a debt-ceiling agreement between House Republicans and the president that started with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., that limits the size of spending cuts, Johnston noted.
Along with restrictions on the SEC’s climate-disclosure rule, Consolidated Audit Trail rule, proposed swing-pricing rule, and requirements for digital assets custody, the bill seeks to cut $2 billion from the Internal Revenue Service for its enforcement funding and block spending for the agency to build publicly available tax preparation software. Additionally, the bill would bring the Consumer Financial
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