WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden will ask House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., today for details on what budget cuts his party is demanding in order to raise the federal debt limit and for assurances that McCarthy will not accept an economically debilitating government default, White House officials said.
The demands, outlined in a memo that the White House released Tuesday, are an attempt by Biden to force Republicans to engage in a debate over taxes, spending and debt on terms that are more favorable to the president than to newly empowered conservatives on Capitol Hill.
Biden is seeking to force McCarthy to specify which programs he would cut -- a list that most likely includes some spending that is popular with the public -- and to calculate how much Republicans would add to the debt with additional tax cuts. In the memo, Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council, and Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the president would release his annual budget March 9 and asked when McCarthy would do the same.
"It is essential that Speaker McCarthy likewise commit to releasing a budget so that the American people can see how House Republicans plan to reduce the deficit -- whether through Social Security cuts; cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health coverage; and/or cuts to research, education and public safety -- as well as how much their budget will add to the deficit with tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations," Young and Deese wrote.
McCarthy responded to the memo in a tweet Tuesday, saying "I received your staff's memo. I'm not interested in political games. I'm coming to negotiate for the American people."
With a potential national debt crisis looming, Biden and McCarthy prepare for their first official meeting today at the White House since Republicans took control of the House.
"You know, when I met with him as the vice president, he was always eager to sit down and talk," McCarthy recalled to The Associated Press ahead of the meeting. "He was always a person who would like to try to find solutions, work together."
Biden has signaled no such open-ended hospitality this time as newly emboldened House Republicans court a risky debt ceiling showdown.
At a fundraiser Tuesday in New York, Biden called McCarthy a "decent man" who was being pulled by demands from restive Republicans.
"He made commitments that are just absolutely off the wall" in order to win the speaker's gavel, Biden said.
In many ways, Biden and McCarthy are picking up where they left off from those breakfast meetings in 2015 at the Naval Observatory when Biden was the vice president.
"I think he'll start by listening more than he talks, by getting to know Speaker McCarthy a little bit more as a person and by exploring what their common priorities might be," said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close ally of the president.
Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former history professor, said of the two: "They're career public servants. They're both intensely political. I think they're both hail-well-met fellows. It seems to me that they'll have a reasonably good discussion."
MANY TOPICS
Administration officials have said the discussion will touch on a wide range of topics, but its principal backdrop is the threat by the House speaker and his caucus not to increase the debt limit unless Biden agrees to steep cuts in federal spending.
The president has said repeatedly that he will not negotiate over raising the limit, which the government reached last month.
Economists warn that the country could experience financial crisis and recession if lawmakers do not raise it before the government runs out of its ability to pay its bill. But Republicans so far have not listed specific demands for raising the limit or released an official budget.
"We're all behind Kevin, wishing him well in the negotiations," Senate Minority Leader McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday. "The deal has to be cut, obviously, between the House majority and the Democratic president, in order for it to have a chance to survive over here."
Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., said Biden and McCarthy "don't have the historic relationship that Senator McConnell and Biden have had through the years, but I do think circumstances necessitate and dictate at times that people have to come together -- whether they like it or not."
Despite vague proposals to restructure the safety net programs, most Republicans insist they merely want to cut waste from the programs to preserve them for the long term.
"I know the president said he didn't want to have any discussions, but I think it's very important that our whole government is designed to find compromise," McCarthy told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "I want to find a reasonable and a responsible way that we can lift the debt ceiling, but take control of this runaway spending."
At a news conference Tuesday, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana suggested that House Republicans would outline their budget priorities in April and criticized Biden's stance.
"President Biden said, 'Just give me more money,'" Scalise said. "He just wants to spend more money; said he wouldn't even have a conversation with Speaker McCarthy. That's an untenable position."
Rep. Chip Roy, who withheld support from McCarthy in his run for House speaker, said McCarthy had committed to enact the biggest discretionary spending cuts in history for the upcoming fiscal year.
Roy, R-Texas, said a $130 billion reduction could be accomplished without cuts to military spending, Social Security or Medicare.
Instead, he said on Twitter, money that goes to "woke & weaponized bureaucrats" would be scaled back. But other influential Republicans contend that big changes to so-called entitlement programs must be considered.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said on Fox News last week that he was disappointed that some of his colleagues had given up on overhauling safety net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food stamps. He called for changes that would make fewer people eligible to receive the benefits.
"If we impose work requirements on SNAP and on Medicaid expansion for able-bodied adults, we would have the ability to save $1 trillion during the 10-year budget window," Gaetz said.
Some Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, have been calling for "penny plans" that would cut total spending across the board by a percentage to balance the budget in as little as five years.
MOST-DETAILED PLAN
Russell Vought, who was Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, has produced the most-detailed budget proposal thus far. He has been talking with House Republicans since late last year about how to balance the budget without making cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
The plan includes a $22 billion cut to the Department of Health and Human Services that would gut funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and cut $26 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including a phaseout of Section 8 grants that Vought says are "a magnet for crime and decreased property values." It would also freeze Medicaid, eliminate the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansions and reduce disability benefits for veterans.
Like the Republicans, Democrats are skeptical of dealing with the opposing party. They're pushing Biden to drive a hardline bargain against any trade-offs.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal said Biden "has seen over the last two years who he's negotiating with -- these are not people who are actually about negotiating something that makes sense for the working people."
The president, she added, has been "such a champion of working people and reversing inequality" that any budget-slashing deal with Republicans "would reverse all of that work."
Refusal to negotiate with Republicans has been off-brand for Biden, who has championed his decades of experience in building relationships with lawmakers, governors and administrations of both parties.
In the memo, Deese and Young said Biden would demand that McCarthy "commit to the bedrock principle that the United States will never default on its financial obligations."
They also took aim at some early proposals in the House that would add to the nation's $31 trillion debt, including a bill passed in January that seeks to undercut an initiative that Biden championed for the IRS to crack down on wealthy tax cheats.
Information for this article was contributed by Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport of The New York Times and by Lisa Mascaro, Seung Min Kim and Josh Boak of The Associated Press.