What's in the 99-page debt ceiling bill?

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THE NOT-SO-SIMPLE DEBT DEAL
By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent

At 99 pages, the bill that President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy produced to ward off the debt ceiling deadline is off the charts in the page-per-significance.

It’s a short bill. But not a simple deal, as we learned on phone call after phone call in the past few days. (You can read the full text of the Fiscal Responsibility Act here.)

Let’s lay out the agreement’s contours — with a reminder that things can shift as lawmakers work on a solution before June 5, the date the Treasury Department has said the United States could default on its debt obligations.

First, some big picture truths about the bill.

Watch the segment in the player above.

A debt ceiling extension. It suspends the debt ceiling until Jan. 1, 2025. (Notably, that’s past the next presidential election in 2024.)
It will increase defense spending about 3 percent next year.
And essentially freezes nondefense spending next year, when all the math is boiled down.
In 2025, it would limit both — defense and nondefense spending — to a 1 percent increase.
Those changes do change the deficit curve, bringing it down. But it is a decrease relative to years of spending led by both parties in the White House and Congress, including COVID relief money and tax cuts, among other things.
Work requirements. It expands work requirements for older able-bodied people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or who receive aid from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. It imposes new work requirements for those aged 50 to 54, so long as they don’t have dependents. It also exempts new groups: veterans, people without housing and foster youth.
Permitting reforms. This would speed-up the review process for energy and other projects, with the idea of getting them more in line with a one- or two-year time frame.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline. The deal is assertive and clear in creating a super fast track for a natural gas pipeline through Virginia and West Virginia.
Student loans. The deal would end the Biden administration’s pause on student loan repayments this fall. (A separate court case is underway about loan forgiveness.)

Here’s the complicated part of the deal.

This is an unusual situation – a good deal of this deal is not in the bill. Let me try to lay this out.

In the bill:

Defense spending increases 3 percent. (Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Penn., testified this point to lawmakers on the House Rules Committee on Tuesday.)
Nondefense spending — outside of veterans care — is set to be cut by 7 to 9 percent below this year’s level. But, read on.

A series of sidecar deals – which have not been put on paper publicly, but we have confirmed with multiple sources – would essentially erase those nondefense cuts, by adding in separate spending. Here’s how:

The overall agreement includes some $69 billion in “adjustments.” Sources tell us there is a “hand-shake deal” to use that amount of one-time funds to make up the nondefense money that would otherwise be cut.
With that money, nondefense spending actually stays about where it is today.
What are the “adjustments”? That is A LOT of money. Here is the list for next year, again confirmed by multiple sources: $11 billion in unspent COVID money; $10 billion from money that was to go to IRS enforcement; $23 billion from adjusting the base spending for emergencies; and $25 billion from an accounting mechanism known as CHIMPs (not kidding) that essentially turns unused authorizations into real funding.

And now the complicated politics.

This deal has received sharp criticism from the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.

Nearly a dozen Republicans held a news conference Tuesday morning declaring that the spending cuts that Speaker McCarthy touts are not real. (Like us, they are doing the math and including the “adjustments” outside of the bill.)

They are hard “no” votes.

Then there’s the critique from the left. Progressive Democrats, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., are deeply concerned about the changes to food stamp benefits and permitting, and they are not sure that the “adjustments” are guaranteed.

The first hurdle will be the House Rules Committee, where we’ve been sitting in the back row and typing. (Glad they turned on the air conditioning!)

If the bill gets through this committee, then it goes to a key House floor vote tomorrow. Here is the math for that vote:

217 votes are needed for a majority currently. (Two Democratic members have announced they will be absent.)
150 is the number of votes that Democrats say they expect Republicans to bring. And then Democrats would need to supply 70 or so.
But it is not yet known if Republicans can clear that bar. They’ll meet late Tuesday.
The numbers may shift, with Democrats providing as many votes as Republicans.
Or this could be very close.

One thing to remember: It takes roughly 214 “no” votes to kill a bill in the House. As we write this, as of 5 p.m. Eastern, opponents are not yet close to that number.

But it will be a dramatic few days.

More on politics from our coverage:

Read: In an extraordinary move, Texas lawmakers voted to impeach state Attorney General Ken Paxton. He faces 20 articles of impeachment after years of scandal.
One Big Question: What is Paxton accused of? Sergio Martinez-Beltran, politics and government reporter of NPR's The Texas Newsroom, runs through the impeachment charges.
A Closer Look: The state-level battles brewing in America over LGBTQ+ rights.
Perspectives: Many school systems have considered reversing the decision to remove police officers from campus. Franci Crepeau-Hobson, a University of Colorado Denver professor who focuses on school violence prevention, provides some insights into the conversation.

HOW GUN VIOLENCE IS AFFECTING ALL OF US
By Laura Santhanam, @LauraSanthanam
Health Reporter and Coordinating Producer for Polling

Four in 10 Americans say they or someone they know has experienced gun violence, according to the latest poll from the PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist.

That number grows to about five in 10 when you ask parents with children under age 18. Between 2019 and 2021, gun deaths among children rose by 50 percent, according to Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Image by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour

Since then, the United States became the only developed nation in the world where gun violence was ranked the top cause of death among children and teens, outpacing motor vehicle accidents.

It’s now been one year since the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, when 19 children and two teachers were killed and support for controlling gun violence has hit its highest level in a decade of Marist data.

“There’s a real increase [in violence] and danger for young people,” said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist who leads the RAND Corporation’s Gun Policy in America initiative.

So far in 2023, there have been roughly 260 mass shootings in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive, defined as when at least four people are injured or killed. Since Friday and over the Memorial Day weekend, at least 16 people were killed in mass shootings across different states.

America’s decadeslong epidemic of gun violence has led to a unique form of collective trauma, as explored in the PBS NewsHour documentary, “Ricochet: An American Trauma,” last year. It is felt by survivors, the families and friends of victims, first responders, community members — and everyone else across the country who witness events unfold on television and social media.

“At some point in our lives, almost every single American is going to know someone who has been impacted by gun violence,” said Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist at University of Arizona. “This is not something that only happens when the headlines grab us. This is something that is threaded through society and that touches all of us if we're willing to hear it and willing to acknowledge it and willing to witness it.”

#POLITICSTRIVIA
By Cybele Mayes-Osterman, @CybeleMO
Associate Editorial Producer

After weeks of negotiations, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy finally reached an agreement to raise the debt ceiling for the next two years. Now, the bill needs to pass muster with the hardline conservatives of the House Rules Committee, some of whom have already voiced criticism that the deal does not cut enough spending.

When adjusted for inflation, the United States’ level of federal debt has steadily climbed since 2001 before reaching a peak during the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and declining slightly to its current level of $31.47 trillion. Former President Bill Clinton’s push to cut the deficit produced the last time the nation — in fiscal year 2001 — saw a budget surplus.

Our question: Only one president’s administration in history has managed to pay off all of the U.S.’ interest-bearing debt. Who was that president?

Send your answers to [email protected] or tweet using #PoliticsTrivia. The first correct answers will earn a shout-out next week.

Last week, we asked: In 1870, this former minister became the first African American to serve in Congress after he was sworn in as senator. Who was he?

The answer: Hiram R. Revels. The Mississippi Republican was sworn in days after the state was readmitted to the union, but not before Southern white Democrats attempted to block his seat.

Congratulations to our winners: Tom Holston and Peggy Jeanes!

Thank you all for reading and watching. We’ll drop into your inbox next week.

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