OMB: Budget Deal Raised Spending

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Congressional Budget Office cast a new shadow on Republicans’ claim to have made deep cuts in spending in the April law setting the final budget for fiscal 2011.

A new analysis released Monday found that the bill would actually produce a net increase in discretionary outlays of $3.2 billion in the remaining months of the year because defense spending would rise by $7.5 billion as domestic programs would drop $4.4 billion.

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) dismissed the significance of the revised estimate of discretionary spending as “an uneven snapshot’’ of Republicans’ record of cutting spending because it did not take account of key factors such as the bill’s one-time rescissions in mandatory programs such as farm subsidies and spending cuts made in earlier short term funding bills.

The report marks the second time that the CBO has offered ammunition for conservatives who complained that the 2011 spending-cut bill was oversold by GOP leaders. The measure had been billed as a $38 billion cut from 2010 spending levels. That reflected how much it reduced spending authority, but because some of those cuts were slow to take effect, the short-term impact on actual outlays was far smaller.