Turning the ship of state will take a lot of work

By Congresswoman Virginia Foxx

With all the news reports of partisan warfare in Washington, DC, you might have missed the big story of 2011: Congress is cutting spending and reining in the even-growing federal government.

Despite the fact that the Senate hasn’t passed a budget in nearly 3 years, Republicans in the House spent the last year finding ways to reduce spending and the size of government.  At times it’s been a pitched battle.  Getting the Senate to agree to even the smallest of cuts required a Herculean effort.  But the cuts happened.

For taxpayers who are familiar with the culture of Washington over the past few decades, this represents a historic shift in the way business is done.  One simple fact stands out as an illustration of just how much has changed since Republicans took control of the House.  With the passage of the final spending bill for 2012 last month, Congress has cut discretionary spending for the second year in a row for the first time since World War II. 

Let’s put that in context.  Reckless spending was so prevalent before the House switched hands last year that in the two years before the change discretionary spending increased by 85 percent.  After two years of record-breaking spending, House Republicans hit the brakes and changed the culture of spending, turning the Washington conversation towards saving money, reducing spending and ending wasteful, redundant or outdated programs.  

We’ve already wound down at least 42 programs in the past year that had outlived their usefulness.  What’s more, last month I introduced a bill (H.R. 3610) that tackles the problem of overlap, waste and duplication in federal workforce training programs head on. 

My bill targets 47 different federal workforce development programs recently identified by the Government Accountability Office as prime examples of programs that overlap, lack effectiveness or have a track record of wasting taxpayer money.  The bill streamlines 32 of the programs into four funding streams, eliminating bureaucracy, excessive regulations and making the programs more accountable to the taxpayers who fund them.

Plus, while the previous Congress continued the practice of earmarking at its typical breakneck pace, with 18,000 pork-barrel earmarks in two years, the 2011 and 2012 spending bills contained not one single earmark.  Even though earmarks made up just a fraction of past budgets, they did represent the kind of pork-barrel spending that served as the foundation of Washington’s culture of wasteful spending.  With their demise, the House struck a powerful blow against the congressional spending machine that shoveled billions of dollars into pork-barrel projects of questionable merit.

The Republican-led House has also not been content to leave our own budget unscathed. One of the first steps we took in January was to reduce the House’s budget by $55 million for 2011 and later by an additional $39.1 million for 2012.  By aiming spending cuts squarely at our own budget, we’ve led by example and paved the way for reductions across every single government department.  Finally, the proposal passed by the House to continue the two percent Social Security tax holiday included a plan to freeze raises for Congress and all federal employees, and to cut our budgets another 5 percent.

For years the federal government behaved like an enormous ship cutting through the ocean at top speed.  With so much inertia and momentum, stopping or even slowing the pace of growth was nearly impossible.  But only nearly impossible.  We’ve begun to turn the ship of state. However, like the any massive ship, getting it pointed in the right direction takes a lot more time and effort than making a U-turn in a compact car. 

We made considerable progress in 2011—eliminating earmarks, cutting spending and ending failed programs.  Plenty of work lies ahead, but I’m confident that in 2012 the House will build on its successes to slim down government and safeguard taxpayer money from runaway spending.

U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx represents the Fifth Congressional District of North Carolina.  She currently serves on the House Rules Committee and as Chair of the House Higher Education subcommittee.  You may contact her office toll free at 1-866-677-8968 or e-mail her from her website, www.foxx.house.gov.