国际英语新闻:Spotlight: Debt ceiling and budget deal draws backlash from advocacy groups

WASHINGTON, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Several advocacy groups have criticized the two-year debt ceiling and budget deal recently reached between the White House and Congressional leaders, expressing grave concerns about the ballooning budget deficit in the United States.

"Policymakers are dodging the hard policy decisions while adding hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit spending in the short-term and setting the stage for more than a trillion dollars added to the debt in coming years," the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan government spending watchdog, said in a statement Tuesday.

"This budget deal and its fictitious offsets are really the Art Of The Steal from future generations," the group said.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said the budget deal may end up being the worst in the nation's history.

In a statement released on Monday, MacGuineas said this agreement, which as reached Monday, is "a total abdication of fiscal responsibility" by Congress and the White House, proposed at a time when "our fiscal conditions are already precarious."

Echoing MacGuineas's remarks, Brandon Arnold, executive vice president of National Taxpayers Union, a conservative advocacy organization, said "this is a horrendous deal and a complete abdication of fiscal responsibility," calling on members of Congress to oppose the deal.

The massive spending hike will blow through the caps put in place by the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011, which was signed by former President Barack Obama, Arnold said. "This deal puts the final nail in the coffin of the BCA."

The agreement, announced by President Donald Trump and Democratic congressional leaders on Monday, would suspend the federal debt ceiling until July 31, 2021, and raise overall spending levels by 320 billion U.S. dollars above the limits set in the Budget Control Act of 2011, which aims to cut spending for federal agencies totaling 1.2 trillion dollars during a decade.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 was once considered a victory for Republicans under the Obama administration, as it set strict spending caps and stipulated automatic across-the-board spending cuts, which has been opposed by the Democrats.

The newly reached deal would lift the budget cap for discretionary spending to 1.37 trillion dollars in 2020 and 1.375 trillion dollars in 2021, expanding defense outlays, demanded by Republicans, and boosting domestic spending, including health care for veterans, sought by Democrats.

"This was a real compromise in order to give another big victory to our Great Military and Vets (veterans)," the U.S. president tweeted on Monday.

Taxpayers for Common Sense said it's a compromise in the sense that the White House got some of what it wanted and Democratic leadership in the House got some of what they wanted. "But it was additive, rather than looking for the most efficient way to meet goals," the group noted.

The expected growing debt burden in the coming years, the group said, is on top of the nearly 2 trillion dollars the last Congress added to the debt by passing a 10-year "deficit-financed" tax cut and another budget cap boost that wasn't offset.

The so-called "offsets" in this bill, the group continued, are "nothing more than a weak attempt to hide the fact that the agreement is yet another exercise in promising to reduce deficits later in exchange for increasing spending today."

The White House has projected a 1-trillion-dollar budget deficit for the fiscal year 2019, the highest since 2012, Office of Management and Budget said in its recently released Mid-Session Review. The federal budget deficit reached 747 billion dollars in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up 23 percent from the previous year.

The debt ceiling was previously set at 20.5 trillion dollars, and expired on March 1 this year. Since then, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has urged congressional leaders to raise the federal debt limit as the Treasury Department began accounting maneuvers to avoid a default.

Mnuchin recently said that in "the most conservative scenario," the department will run out of cash in early September, which is near the end of this fiscal year, and will be unable to pay its over 22-trillion-dollar debt.

"It's a good thing to put off the walk up to the debt ceiling -- we should never play chicken with the country's full faith and credit," Taxpayers for Common Sense said, calling the delay of the impending debt limit "critical."

The group added that the new budget deal just sets the top line spending level for fiscal years 2020 and 2021, and Congress still needs to work out the "nitty-gritty details" of the dozen annual spending bills that fund government, warning that "the specter of shutdowns remain."

A House vote is expected before Friday, when lawmakers leaves for the August recess, and the Senate is set to take a break beginning Aug. 2. MacGuineas, however, urged members of Congress to "cancel their summer recess and return to the negotiating table for a better deal."

"If they don't, those who support this deal should hang their heads in total shame as they bolt down," she said. "This deal would amount to nothing short of fiscal sabotage."