WASHINGTON — After clamoring loudly about their plans to curtail federal spending, House Republicans announced Thursday that they would cut $32 billion for the remainder of the fiscal year — a minuscule amount compared with a projected annual deficit of nearly $1.5 trillion.
The Republican proposal is effectively $58 billion less than the domestic and foreign aid programs in President Obama’s budget request for 2011 — far short of the $100 billion in cuts that Representative John A. Boehner promised before the November elections that catapulted Republicans into the House majority and made him the speaker.
March 30, 2011:
The potential difficulty of their job became clear after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., following an evening meeting with Senate Democrats, said negotiators had effectively settled on $33 billion in reductions from current spending, a substantial difference from the $61 billion endorsed by the House in February.
April 1, 2011:
Democrats and Republicans are running in two different directions when it comes to the $33 billion figure that forms the basis for the ongoing negotiations on Capitol Hill about how much to trim from the federal budget this fiscal year.
“As I said yesterday, there is no number, there is no agreement on a number,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters on Friday. “We’re going to fight for the largest spending cuts that we can get. And I’m hopeful that we’ll get it as soon as possible.”
But on Wednesday no less an authority than Vice President Joe Biden, who has been involved in the negotiations, said that two sides had agreed to that figure.
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