Freedom Caucus Appropriators See Open Lane for Spending Slashes

House Freedom Caucus members who secured spots on the Appropriations Committee — empowered by promises from GOP leaders to slash spending — are ready to hit the gas on plans for cuts and clawbacks.

The key conservatives — whose roles on the powerful panel were part of the negotiations to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaker — said they’ll take a fine-toothed comb to agency budgets, working out the details of House Republicans’ broad plans to cut funding to fiscal 2022 levels.

Still, the conservative bloc of the panel — including Republican Reps. Michael Cloud (Texas), Andrew Clyde (Ga.) Andy Harris (Md.), and Ben Cline (Va.) — say that while they’ll lean into their roles as spending hawks, they don’t foresee deep divisions between themselves and more leadership-aligned GOP appropriators now that the toughest intraparty negotiations to cut overall spending levels are behind them.

“Yes, we are perhaps on the more conservative edge of things, but we’re a conservative conference,” Harris said in an interview. “Our majority on the Appropriations Committee is a conservative majority who I think will back a lot of these issues, because again, from the chair level, the chair has said yes, we will hold to FY22 levels.”

The upbeat outlook mitigates concerns that House GOP appropriations bills will founder on the floor due to a narrow majority and plans for a relatively open amendment process.

“Members of the Freedom Caucus traditionally did not want to be on Appropriations,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), a long-time appropriator who chairs the Energy and Water Subcommittee, said. “Now they do. And we welcome them.”

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) speaks during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in June 2020.

Al Drago/Bloomberg

Plans to Undo Parity

The members are the front line in Republicans’ goal to end the years-long tradition of “parity” in spending negotiations, in which both parties have agreed to increase defense and nondefense spending by roughly similar amounts each year. Harris said Republicans would seek to maintain spending for defense and for the Department of Veterans Affairs, rooting out waste where possible while increasing funding for some programs. Clyde, meanwhile, said he’d support “a little bit of a bump on defense spending.”

“The conservative members want to break this parity between defense and nondefense,” Harris said. “It’s an artificial parity.”

Clawing back unspent funds appropriated in Covid-19 emergency bills is also a top priority for the conservatives. Harris said there may be “hundreds of billions of dollars of unspent Covid money.”

Harris is the senior member of the Freedom Caucus appropriators and is the new chairman of the Agriculture-FDA Subcommittee, where he also aims to cut the Food and Drug Administration’s budget, block Chinese purchases of US agricultural land, and impose stricter work requirements for nutrition aid.

A measure to ban Chinese purchases of US agricultural land, previously proposed as an amendment to House appropriations bills by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), “will almost certainly be in the draft bill,” Harris said.

Harris also said he’ll aim to reduce Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding to its pre-Covid levels, which would be a roughly 50% cut.

Republicans Jostle for Power to Oversee Cuts to Nutrition Aid

Clyde, a new member of the committee, initially gained notoriety as a gun shop owner who had $950,000 seized by the Internal Revenue Service, eventually getting $900,000 back in a settlement with federal officials. He said he looks forward to scrutinizing the Justice Department’s budget.

“I can be very valuable in Commerce-Justice-Science, especially with regards to the Justice Department,” Clyde said, referring to his decades as a civilian dealing with the department.

The north Georgia conservative will also seek cuts on his other two subcommittees: Labor-HHS-Education and Legislative Branch.

Clyde was especially critical of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which provides resources for new arrivals to the US, including unaccompanied children.

“Literally, HHS has put the federal government as the last link in the chain of human trafficking, regarding children,” Clyde said.

He pointed specifically to contracts for the nonprofit Family Endeavors for emergency site services, which Republicans have broadly criticized.

Clyde said fighting President Joe Biden’s executive orders on abortion access would be a top priority for virtually the entire House Republican Conference. Clyde last month reintroduced a bill (H.R. 407) to block an executive order that broadly sought to protect access to abortions.

“I don’t think there’s any, any place whatsoever for abortion law in the federal government, in promoting abortion,” Clyde said.

Clyde also said he expects to find savings in the Legislative Branch funding bill, saying he’s previously returned some money from his office’s budget.

Subcommittee Match-Ups

The conservative members had mixed results when it came to winning the subcommittee assignments they wanted. Harris unsuccessfully sought the chairmanship of the Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee, which has the biggest allocation of any domestic spending bill. Clyde, meanwhile, sought a spot on the Defense Subcommittee — the most popular panel among Republicans, which didn’t take on any new appropriators this Congress. He said he’d like to get a spot on the subcommittee sometime in the future.

Cloud, who represents a portion of South Texas near the US-Mexico border, said he was happy to get a spot on the Homeland Security Subcommittee.

“That’s all happening in our backyard,” Cloud said. “So we’ll be able to bring a lot to that discussion because we’ve been their eyes on everything that’s happening.”

Fleishmann said subcommittee assignments will be key in determining the success of Clyde and Cloud as new appropriators. In a January interview, Fleischmann said spending hawks may be most cooperative on panels where they can get behind the funding. Such a conservative “might prefer to be on Homeland rather than Labor-H.”