There are some pretty severe complications that arise from the capitulation to the MAGA faction in the United States House of Representatives. One of their demands that was memorialized in the House’s rules package was that the infamous debt ceiling would not be raised without $130 billion in spending cuts in next year’s budget as reported by Heather Cox Richardson. What does that equal? Statista gives a good breakdown of on-budget budget toplines for the main departments. Keeping with the main assumption also made in the MAGA demands that the military not be cut and that Social Security/Medicare not be cut you wind up with this being a probable force fit of what that $130 billion in cuts would eliminate in whole:

  • EPA ($15 billion)
  • Department of Commerce ($16.7 billion)
  • Small Business Administration ($1.7 billion)
  • National Science Foundation ($9.1 billion)
  • NASA ($24.9 billion)
  • Department of the Interior ($22.8 billion)
  • All other on-budget “independent agencies” ($36.1 billion)

That leaves $3.7 billion which probably would be shaved off the $185 billion budget of the Department of Education. I picked agencies that have drawn the ire of Republicans over the years and the ones I picked as likely elimination targets are the usual favorites proposed by the party. The Republican caucus in the House would probably favor the imagery of shutting down as many agencies as they could in lieu of only severely hindering one like the Department of Education.

Would the Senate under the control of the Democrats agree to cuts like this? No, not really. Could these cuts be done anywhere else? No, not really. We’re potentially heading towards an economic crisis and there are people in the House deliberately pushing this forward.

Yeah, we’ll see how this plays out it seems…