Inside the spending cuts House Republicans are fighting over

Tuesday is a big test for House Republicans.

They will vote on a procedural motion - a rule - to advance four of the 11 remaining individual spending bills the House hasn’t passed. If the vote fails, the chamber’s Republicans will seem even more unable to govern.

The vote is a last-minute play to appease a small group of hard-line Republicans and demonstrate that the party is working to enact deep, year-long spending cuts - but it will do nothing to prevent a government shutdown on Sunday.

The only viable way to prevent a shutdown - which now seems likely - is to pass a continuing resolution, or CR. Senate leadership is nearing an agreement on a CR and will vote Tuesday night to move on to a shell bill that would house the resolution.

Negotiations have revolved around how “clean” to make the CR - limiting the amount of other priorities such as disaster and Ukraine aid.

But the administration is pushing back against not including at least some Ukraine funding - perhaps proportional to how long it funds the government. The White House’s request for Ukraine aid was meant to cover the next three months, but any CR is expected to be shorter.

“The Biden-Harris Administration continues to work with members of both parties in the Senate and the House to secure supplemental funding as part of any continuing resolution - which would ensure our efforts to support Ukraine continue alongside other key priorities like disaster relief and regular government activities,” Timothy White, an Office of Management and Budget spokesman, said in a statement Monday evening.

Limiting Ukraine aid in a CR could give Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) a lifeline in the House.

But it’s unclear whether McCarthy would put even a clean CR on the House floor if it’s unable to pass with only Republican votes because that could lead a group of hard-right Republicans who’ve been making his life hell to try to oust him. He could also try again to convince House Republicans to pass their own CR - although a bill that could pass the House along party lines would probably never clear the Senate.

With House Republicans are focusing on year-long spending bills, here’s a closer look at what’s in those bills:

The 12 bills would cut nondefense discretionary spending - which doesn’t include Pentagon funding or mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - by $58 billion more than the amount to which President Biden and McCarthy agreed in May when they struck a deal to raise the debt limit, according to an analysis by Bobby Kogan and Jean Ross of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. (The analysis also excludes Department of Veterans Affairs medical care spending.)

But the cuts would hit some government programs much harder than others - and several bills that House Republicans have made the most progress passing would raise spending rather than slash it.

The only spending bill House Republicans have passed to date - the military construction and veterans affairs bill - would raise spending by 4.8 percent compared with the previous fiscal year, according to the analysis by Kogan and Ross.

The four spending bills the House will take up Tuesday include the homeland security bill (which would raise spending by 3.9 percent, according to the CAP analysis), the defense bill (which would raise spending by 2.2 percent, per the analysis), the agriculture bill (which would cut spending by 2 percent, according to the analysis) and the State Department and foreign operations bill (which would cut spending by 15 percent, according to the analysis).

One quarter of all the savings House Republicans’ bills would achieve comes from cutting a single program that provides funding for low-income schools, known as Title I education grants.

House Republicans want to cut Title I by nearly 80 percent, saving $14.7 billion.

The cuts are even steeper than education funding reductions proposed by the Center for Renewing America, a think tank led by Russ Vought, former president Donald Trump’s White House budget director.

The think tank put out a budget proposal in December that called for cutting $8.2 billion from the Department of Education’s elementary and secondary education programs, which include Title I grants. (House Republicans would cut $14.7 billion from Title I in the 2024 fiscal year compared with the previous year, while the Center for Renewing America proposed cutting $8.2 billion from almost 30 elementary and secondary education programs in the 2023 fiscal year compared with the 2021 fiscal year.)

The Title I cuts are included in one of two appropriations bills that haven’t made it out of committee yet. The House Appropriations Committee is expected to meet Tuesday to discuss how to move forward, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Democrats have warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts could cost up to 224,000 teachers their jobs, and teachers unions have mobilized to lobby against them.

“Title I funding helps fill in the gaps that have existed in all our systems for generations, especially in our public schools,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement to The Early. “It is unconscionable that House Republicans would try to strip away desperately needed funds from our most vulnerable, most marginalized students.”

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee behind the proposed Title I cuts, said Republicans want to cut the program so deeply for two reasons.

First, that’s where the money is. It’s a relatively big program, and Republicans could achieve a lot of savings by cutting it deeply.

Second, Washington sent more than $100 billion in relief funds to public schools during the pandemic, and some of the money remains unspent.

“There was $27 billion that was provided from pandemic legislation that is still in the pipeline, so to speak,” Aderholt said in an interview this month. “Therefore, you would expect that that money be spent before you would be going and asking for more money.”

Democrats say any unspent relief funds are needed to help schools and students recover from the pandemic. The legislation was designed so that schools don’t need to spend the money until next year.

“We need the money to fight learning loss,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee and the subcommittee that Aderholt leads.

What’s more, House Republicans’ cuts don’t take into account how much schools have left in pandemic relief funds.

“Title I is a formula grant based on how poor the school district is,” Kogan, who previously worked in the Biden White House as an OMB adviser, wrote in an email to The Early. “House Republicans didn’t modify it to be based on how much money is left over. So, if your school district is very poor and so is most likely to have used up all its [American Rescue Project] money, this 80 percent cut will simply leave you without money for this coming year.”

Aderholt, who represents a poor district himself, said he understood DeLauro’s argument. But as Republicans looked to make deep spending cuts, he said, he tried to prioritize what he believed schools truly needed as opposed to “what would really be nice to have.”

“When you’re forced to make cuts and you’re given a budget and you see [pandemic relief] money that’s already in there, it’s just hard to give more money into an area where you see there’s money that’s already available,” he said.