The Congressional Budget Office cast a new shadow on Republicans’ claim to have made deep cuts in spending in the April law setting the final budget for fiscal 2011. A new analysis released Monday found that the bill would actually produce a net increase in discretionary outlays of $3.2 billion in the remaining months of the year because defense spending would rise by $7.5 billion as domestic programs would drop $4.4 billion.
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R.,Ohio) dismissed the significance of the revised estimate of discretionary spending as “an uneven snapshot’’ of Republicans’ record of cutting spending because it did not take account of key factors such as the bill’s one-time rescissions in mandatory programs such as farm subsidies and spending cuts made in earlier short term funding bills.
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