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Vice President Cheney provides Tie-breaking Vote to Ensure Passage of Senate Bill to Cut Services for Poor
Action Needed:
Thank your Senators who voted against S. 1932, the Budget
Reconciliation Act of 2005. All Democrats, one Independent and 5 Republicans (Snowe, ME; Collins,
ME; DeWine, OH; Smith, OR; Chafee, RI) could not in good conscience support the almost $40 billion in
cuts to human needs programs. The bill raises health care costs for the lowest income families, cuts
child care for families moving from welfare-to-work, imposes new stringent work requirements for welfare
recipients, cuts assistance for abused and neglected children, reduces funds for child support
enforcement and increases the cost of student loans ? and that's just for starters.
Because several provisions in the Senate bill were dropped due to Senator Conrad's (D-ND) insistence
that the Senate follow its own rules ? known as the Byrd rule ? the House must now vote again
on the final package. The House is not slated to meet for full roll call votes until they come back at
the end of January, although they could call members back for votes before then.
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Background:
The House
vote on this package in the wee hours of December 19 gave Republican moderates just a few hours to
review the 774-page package and many voted for the bill out of sheer exhaustion and political pressure.
And, 16 members missed the vote altogether! Now that the contents of the harsh proposal have come to
light, we'll need to make another effort in January (unless they convene earlier) to persuade them to
change their vote to no.
According to the National Women's Law Center, some of the cruelest cuts in the bill are:
- Child Care/TANF: In renewing the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)
and Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) programs, the bill imposes harmful new mandates that
states meet a 50 percent work participation rate in their TANF program in order to avoid federal
penalties, while providing woefully inadequate child care funds to help states meet these new mandates
or maintain existing services. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the cost to
the states of meeting the work requirements is even higher than under the original House-passed bill!
As a result, states will be under pressure to cut child care for low-income working families, impose
tighter eligibility requirements for TANF and adopt stricter sanctioning policies-denying help to
families who need it most. The final bill also imposes limits on the flexibility of states to develop
their own policies for helping needy families using state funds-restrictions that were not in the
original House bill.
- Medicaid: Low-income families will face increases in co-payments and premiums to
access health care services and medications, leading many to forego needed care. In addition, states
would be allowed to cut back on health care services for poor women, including family planning.
- Child Support: Federal funding for child support enforcement will be cut about
$1.5 billion over the next five years. This is less than the $4.9 billion cut in the original House
bill-but it still means that about $2.9 billion in child support owed to children will go uncollected
over five years; about $8.4 billion in child support will be lost over ten years.
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