FY2023 Budget: Center for Renewing America
The CRA Budget addresses the nation’s fiscal challenges with a comprehensive effort to revitalize the economy while removing the scourge of woke and weaponized government bureaucracy aimed at the American people.
Top Line Path to Balance:
- Balances the budget in ten years, reducing debt as a percentage of the economy from 100% to 71%.
- Revitalizes a strong economy, assuming policies that will achieve 3.1% growth in FY23 and roughly 2.8% throughout the budget window.
- Makes permanent the Trump-era TCJA and provides full expensing of all capital assets.
- Generates $3.8 trillion in increased revenues over ten years from lower taxes, renewed deregulatory efforts, aggressive energy exploration, and spending restraint.
- Achieves nearly $9 trillion in savings over ten years, including nearly $3 trillion to annual discretionary spending and $6 trillion in mandatory reforms.
Discretionary Spending:
- Nondefense: Provides $542 billion in non-defense discretionary spending, a cut of $91 billion or 14% compared to FY21, achieving $2.5 trillion in savings over ten years.
- Defense: Provides $824 billion in defense spending, an increase of $83 billion or 11% compared to FY21, to ramp for a potential confrontation with China, with key investments in Navy shipbuilding, nuclear modernization, missile defense and space platforms. Reduces Army endstrength and eliminates funding for Ukraine and the European Deterrence Initiative to reflect a pivot away from Europe as allies bear the costs of their own defense.
- Homeland Security: Increases DHS funding by 6%, including $5 billion to restart construction of the border wall, double the number of border patrol agents, and increase the Coast Guard by 11%.
- Woke & Weaponized Bureaucracy: Prioritizes cuts to woke and weaponized federal bureucracy, including:
- 7% cut to DOJ, including a 13% cut to the FBI intelligence and counterintelligence programs (while increasing resources for actual crime fighting by 18%).
- $22 billion or 20% cut to HHS, including a 37% cut to CDC to refocus its efforts towards fighting infectious diseases away from sexually transmitted and chronic diseases, a 50% cut to NIAD (led by Anthony Fauci) because of its commitment to gain-of-function research, and eliminating woke bureaucracy.
- $26 billion or 43% cut to HUD, including a three-year phase out of Section 8 grants that are a magnet for crime and decreased property values and cuts to the fair housing bureaucracy committed to breaking up neighborhoods with single family homes.
- $26 billion or 45% cut to foreign aid, ensuring that State & USAID are no longer funding drag shows in Equador, the training of LGBT activits in Senegal, or gay pride parades in Prague.
- $18 billion or 26% cut to the Department of Education’s bureaucracy funding CRT and ensuring that states avoid this bureaucracy with a large blockgrant.
- Infrastructure: Increases funding for the Transportation Department by 10% with large increases for airports, seaports, and freight rail improvements. In addition, $187 billion is provided to improve the nation’s infrastructure.
- NASA: Fully funds the Artemis Project for the US to return to the moon with a 37% increase in space exploration paid for by sizable cuts to NASA science programs.
Mandatory Savings:
- Achieves $6 trillion in savings from reforms that increase labor force participation and scale back an overly generous welfare system. There are NO changes to Medicare and Social Security retirement beneficiaries.
- Medicare: Grows Medicare spending by 6% annually (down from 7%) with reforms that will not negatively impact beneficiaries, including:
- Lowering the cost of prescription drugs ($178 billion);
- Move certain unrelated programs outside of Medicare such as graduate medical education and uncompensated care for hospitals to grow slower ($167 billion);
- Various site neutrality reforms to ensure Medicare compensates equally for services and between different facilities ($337 billion);
- Automatically enrolls Medicare beneficiaries in the lowest-cost plan in a given region, while seniors could still change plans without penalty ($98 billion); and
- Eliminating payments to hospitals for “bad debt,” removing incentives to not recoup payments where they are owed ($44 billion).
- Medicaid: Freezes Medicaid spending (down from 3% growth), eliminates the Obamacare coverage expansions, and returns the program to its focus on vulnerable populations. Reforms include:
- Eliminate the Obamacare expansion of coverage for able-bodied working age adults, allowing states to disentangle their Medicaid programs from Obamacare ($1.1 trillion);
- Eliminate the Federal Assistance Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) floor that covers 50% of wealthy blue state Medicaid excesses ($653 billion); and
- Given that up to a quarter of Medicaid spending is deemed improper, increase program integrity controls and eliminate state scams to increase Medicaid reimbursements ($509 billion).
- Disability Insurance: Removes disincentives for beneficiaries to avoid reentry into the labor force and reforms the current vocational considerations (age, education, work experience) that are not specifically linked to a disabling medical condition ($253 billion).
- Food Stamps: Adds a work requirement for able-bodied adults to transition to self-sufficiency, limits food stamp benefits to pre-pandemic levels, and provides a portion of food through Harvest Food Boxes ($412 billion).
- Student Loans: Phase out the price-distorting Federal Student Loan program and introduce repayment reforms that simplify the options and ensure gainfully employed individuals pay off their loans in a timely manner, including one income-driven, capped payment option ($266 billion).
- Eliminate Tax Credits for Illegal Aliens: Ensures that illegal aliens without a SSN cannot qualify for Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) and Child Tax Credits ($73 billion).
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