The 2011 budget deal that averted a government shutdown will in fact increase government spending by $3.2 billion over the rest of the fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday.
When negotiators hashed out the spending deal last month, it was said to reduce spending by $38.5 billion this year. In all, the nonpartisan CBO projects that the measure will reduce spending by $122 billion over a decade.
The reason for the increase, CBO says, is that defense spending will rise by $7.5 billion over the rest of the fiscal year, which ends at the close of September. The military spending increase comes in part because some funding was sped up.
Nonmilitary spending, meanwhile, will decrease by $4.4 billion.
The news comes as congressional Republicans are in the midst of another push to cut federal spending, this time as part of a deal to raise the country’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.
Officials reached a deal on this year’s spending in April, just before the government was set to shut down. As it turned out, the measure did not thrill a number of House Republicans, and the legislation needed Democratic votes to pass the chamber.
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), wrote on the Speaker’s website that the CBO numbers did not examine a full range of data and were thus “an uneven snapshot” of the budget deal.
“But one thing is clear: congressional Republicans were able to save American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in the long term,” Buck wrote.
He added that the new CBO figures did not include the spending cuts included in previous, more short-term budget agreements and other savings.
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