When analyzing budgets like President Bush's, it's instinctive to focus on the cuts that take effect right away. But the long-term cuts—the ones that might not kick in for two or three or five years—are often really the crux of the matter. Earl Hadley of the Campaign For America's Future reveals the education and social program cuts in Bush's budget that are coming down the line—and how the GOP is counting on the American public not looking beyond next year's horizon.
Earl Hadley is the education program coordinator at the Campaign For America's Future.
The Bush administration likes to hide the truth. We saw it with commentator Armstrong Williams—who spoke out in favor of the No Child Left Behind law and later admitted to being on the Department of Education's payroll. Now we see it again with Bush’s 2006 budget. While justifying its immediate cuts to social programs with deficit-reduction rhetoric, the Bush administration has attempted to bury its plans for additional cuts over the next five years. Luckily, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) brought these projected cuts to light.
CBPP sorted through Office of Management and Budget tables to find the cuts Bush wants to hide. They looked at the difference between the impact of Bush’s cuts and the amount of funding that could be provided if education spending simply kept up with inflation. The documents they analyzed didn’t accompany the actual budget as they have in the past—probably because the Bush administration is still smarting from last year’s uproar around similar projections in the 2005 budget. And the Center’s analyses show cuts to education across the board.
Elementary, secondary and vocational education will lose out on $6.7 billion in funding in 2010, and $20.5 billion in total between 2006 and 2010. Higher education will lose $6 billion over the next five years—and $1.9 billion in 2010. Social service programs that help disadvantaged students enter school ready to learn lose $8.8 billion in this same five-year time period, and $2.5 billion in 2010 alone. Although Bush’s budget offers an increase in food and nutrition services in 2006, these programs lose out on $1.3 billion in funding in the four years after that. Overall discretionary spending will be cut by $214 billion over the next five years, including health care services, veterans’ benefits and housing assistance. Not to be outdone by their leader—and his tax cuts to millionaires while cutting aid-to-children policies—conservatives in Congress are also placing the interests of the powerful ahead of students.
At the same time that the Bush administration plays hide-and-seek with hundreds of billions in cuts, the Republican congressional leadership is trying to sidetrack a reorganization of student lending that could provide $12 billion in grant aid to students over the next decade. Reps. Miller, D-Calif., and Petri, R-Wis., and Sen. Kennedy, D-Mass., have proposed legislation giving colleges incentives to switch over to the much cheaper Direct Loan program from the Federal Family Education Loan program—where the government guarantees returns to lenders.
The bipartisan bill would allow colleges to pass the savings from switching on to their students in the form of grants, but the Republican leadership—led by House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., chair of the subcommittee that deals with higher education—is calling for more investigation into the ‘hidden costs’ of the Direct Loan program. This is a smoke screen. There have been multiple studies showing that the Direct Loan program is cheaper than its counterpart—most recently, analysis in President Bush’s budget confirmed this fact, showing that the Direct Loan program was more than 10 times cheaper. What Boehner and McKeon really want is more time. They're hoping that the truth will be buried by some hot news item so they can continue to receive donations from the loan industry. Nearly half of recent campaign contributions from lenders to the House Education Committee went to Boehner and McKeon.
These games of delay and hiding facts are being played by a party that claims to be the voice of real American values. But actions speak louder than words. Hiding billions of dollars in education cuts—while giving tax breaks to millionaires—makes Republicans nothing but the mouthpieces of the wealthy.
