Maine’s senators vs. House budget cuts

Last Monday representatives of 85 organizations rallied in Bangor and Portland to express concerns about proposed federal budget cuts pending in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Unfortunately press coverage and our own statements did not sufficiently highlight the extraordinarily positive work that Sen. Olympia Snowe has done to date to avoid harmful cuts in Medicaid and other critical human service programs in the Senate Finance Committee.

Sen. Snowe and Sen. Susan Collins both voted for an amendment to the budget resolution last spring to delete all cuts in Medicaid from the Senate budget resolution. Unfortunately the final Senate-House budget agreement then established the target of

$35 billion in entitlement cuts, including $10 billion from health care programs, including Medicaid.

In the last six months both senators, and particularly Sen. Snowe in her position on the Senate Finance Committee, successfully worked hard to ensure that the cuts adopted in the Senate budget reconciliation bill would have virtually no effect on low-income program beneficiaries if ultimately enacted.

In September, Sens. Snowe and Collins joined 22 colleagues in a letter urging Sen. Saxby Chambliss, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committeee, “to keep cuts to federal food assistance programs as close to zero as possible.” At the same time, Sen. Snowe joined a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee,

“to indefinitely delay consideration of the portion of the reconciliation that addresses entitlement cuts” in order not to reduce funding for programs needed to assist victims of the hurricanes.

Within recent weeks the Senate Agriculture Committee adopted a plan that achieved its budget-cutting targets with cuts to commodity and conservation programs but none to the food stamp program. Sen. Snowe succeeded in persuading the Senate Finance Committee to adopt savings to reach their target by reducing payments from

Medicaid to pharmaceutical companies and from Medicare to managed care companies, and to make no cuts that harm low-income beneficiaries.

These achievements in the Senate budget reconciliation bill stand in stark contrast to the proposals being advanced by the House leadership, over the vigorous objections of Reps. Tom Allen and Mike Michaud and the misgivings expressed by moderate Republican Representatives, to reach $50 billion in entitlement cuts over five years:

. The House Agriculture Committee has now adopted cuts of $844 million in food stamps, which would eliminate thousands of Maine households – mostly working families with children – from eligibility.

. Medicaid is reduced under the House Energy and Commerce Committee plan by allowing states to impose higher premiums and co-payments that are likely to make needed care unattainable for many low-income children. That same bill also allows

governors to weaken the comprehensive health care benefits that millions of low-income children rely on.

. The House Ways and Means Committee budget bill reduces child support enforcement payments to states by $5 billion over five years. According to calculations by the Center for Law and Social Policy Maine could lose $22 million in child support

effort over five years, and thereby lose as much as $36 million of collections for low-income children from their absent parent if this becomes law.

While the Senate reconciliation bill contained language to permit drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opposed repeatedly by both Maine senators, the House leadership went one step worse by proposing to lift the 20-year moratorium on offshore drilling exploration including our own sensitive coast.

Last Thursday the Senate reconciliation bill finally passed by a vote of 52-47 with both Maine senators voting no. Sens. Snowe and Collins each released statements expressing their concerns for the lack of additional low-income heating assistance (LIHEAP) in the bill and Sen. Collins reiterated her concerns about the Arctic drilling provision.

The whole budget reconciliation process this year appears a perversion of what was originally intended as a way to reduce federal deficits. The House leadership has justified their deeper cuts on the grounds that they are needed to “offset” disaster relief spending on the Gulf Coast. But rather than use the occasion of the demonstrably greater need for low-income supports to slow the rush to extend tax cuts, the House plan asks already over-burdened low-income people to pay for more tax cuts paid for by permanent cuts in entitlement programs. The Senate may have secured entitlement savings in ways that don’t hurt struggling families, but it too uses those savings to help offset a portion of the cost of more tax cuts. And both proposals actually increase the deficit.

Once again the fate of these proposals will rest with a House-Senate Conference Committee and subsequent passage by both houses. It appears now to us and apparently to our entire delegation that no bill at all would be preferable to a final budget reconciliation bill that harms children, the elderly, those with disabilities and others. We also hope that Congress does not adopt further tax cuts, especially tax cuts that benefit largely wealthy families.

We thank all our congressional delegation again and hope they can persuade just a few more like-minded Republican Senate colleagues to share their view.

Christopher St. John is the executive director of the Maine Center for Economic Policy.