Congressional Reaction Mixed To Obama’s Budget

VPM | By David Welna

Published February 27, 2009 at 11:00 AM EST

Updated July 13, 2023

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And I’m Renee Montagne.

The budget President Obama proposed yesterday is preliminary, really just an outline. But the 10-year plan drew a big response on Capitol Hill. Democrats praised the president’s commitment to expanding health care coverage, education funding and clean energy. Republicans were skeptical, especially about plans to raise taxes on businesses and the affluent.

NPR’s David Welna has the story.

DAVID WELNA: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was among the first to pan President Obama’s budget. In his statement, McConnell took aim at what he called that plan’s unprecedented spending increases. While the American people are tightening their belts, he added, Washington seems to be taking its belt off.

And Mr. Obama’s plan to let tax cuts expire at the end of next year for those making more than a quarter-million dollars a year prompted this from House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio): The administration’s plan I think is a job killer, plain and simple. And it raises taxes on all Americans while we’re in the middle of a recession.

WELNA: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, defended the tax hikes on the wealthiest. In fact, the top Congressional Democrat said she would have had them take effect even sooner than the year after next, as called for in the president’s plan.

Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California, Speaker of the House): It’s not about raising taxes; it’s about ending a tax cut that should not have been there in the first place that contributed enormously to our deficit, which has not contributed very much to the growth of our economy. Do you need any more evidence of that?

WELNA: Another Democrat, Senator Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, said Republicans seem to overlook the fact that the Obama budget makes the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 permanent for everyone but those in the top tax bracket.

Senator KENT CONRAD (Democrat, North Dakota): They talk about massive tax increases. If you look at the scoring of this budget that would be done by the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, what you see is on a net basis there are substantial tax reductions here.

Senator CHARLES SCHUMER (Democrat, New York): This budget is aimed at the middle class like a laser.

WELNA: That’s New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer. He praised President Obama for making permanent the two-year college tuition tax credit that Schumer managed to include in the big stimulus package.

Sen. SCHUMER: And this a real shot in the arm because it’s a credit – $2500 in effect off on your tuition ’cause you get to deduct that full amount from your taxes. And I want to thank and salute the president for putting that in. It’s another example of focusing tax cuts not on the wealthy, as was done in the past, but on the middle class.

WELNA: In his budget proposal, President Obama promised that by the end of his fourth year in office he will have cut the more than trillion dollar budget deficit he inherited in half. That deficit reduction target did not impress Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, who briefly agreed to be the president’s Commerce secretary before backing out.

Senator JUDD GREGG (Republican, New Hampshire): That number, that 500 billion, is very, very large, obviously. But more disturbing about it is the fact that it goes on forever. Once they hit that, they plateau at that number. And why is that? Well, it’s because there is no fiscal restraint in this budget. There is no attempt to address the spending side of the ledger in any aggressive way.

WELNA: And Paul Ryan, who’s the ranking Republican on the House budget panel, accused the president of using slight of hand to claim he’s included $2 trillion in deficit reductions in his budget.

Representative PAUL RYAN (Republican, Wisconsin): They’re taking the highest level of spending in the war – that 2008 level – and they’re inflating it into the baseline. And then the inevitable drawdown accrues $1.6 trillion in savings that then they take credit for to spend and grow government. That’s not real good budgeting. That’s not honest budgeting.

WELNA: A more complete budget proposal is being promised for April. Then Congress has to act. Over the past few years, Congress has tried and failed to approve a budget, but that did not seem to faze President Obama yesterday.

President BARACK OBAMA: I am absolutely confident that as messy as this process can sometimes be, that we are going to be able to produce a budget that delivers for the American people.

WELNA: And he’ll be counting on his big democratic majorities in both chambers to approve that budget.

David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.

MONTAGNE: And if you want to know more about the President’s budget, you’ll find a breakdown of the spending at npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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David Welna

David Welna is NPR's national security correspondent.

Having previously covered Congress over a 13-year period starting in 2001, Welna reported extensively on matters related to national security. He covered the debates on Capitol Hill over authorizing the use of military force prior to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the expansion of government surveillance practices arising from Congress' approval of the USA PATRIOT Act. Welna reported on congressional probes into the use of torture by U.S. officials interrogating terrorism suspects. He also traveled with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to Afghanistan on the Pentagon chief's first overseas trip in that post.

As a national security correspondent, Welna has continued covering the overseas travel of Pentagon chiefs who've succeeded Hagel. He has also made regular trips to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to provide ongoing coverage of the detention there of alleged "foreign enemy combatants" and the slow-moving prosecution of some of them in an episodically-convened war court. In Washington, he continues to cover national security-related issues being considered by Congress.

In mid-1998, after 16 years of reporting from abroad for NPR, Welna joined NPR's Chicago bureau. During that posting, he reported on a wide range of issues: changes in Midwestern agriculture that threaten the survival of small farms, the personal impact of foreign conflicts and economic crises in the heartland, and efforts to improve public education. His background in Latin America informed his coverage of the saga of Elian Gonzalez both in Miami and in Cuba.

Welna first filed stories for NPR as a freelancer in 1982, based in Buenos Aires. From there, and subsequently from Rio de Janeiro, he covered events throughout South America. In 1995, Welna became the chief of NPR's Mexico bureau.

Additionally, he has reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Financial Times, and The Times of London. Welna's photography has appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Covering a wide range of stories in Latin America, Welna chronicled the wrenching 1985 trial of Argentina's former military leaders who presided over the disappearance of tens of thousands of suspected dissidents. In Brazil, he visited a town in Sao Paulo state called Americana where former slaveholders from America relocated after the Civil War. Welna covered the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, the mass exodus of Cubans who fled the island on rafts in 1994, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the U.S. intervention in Haiti to restore Jean Bertrand Aristide to Haiti's presidency.

Welna was honored with the 2011 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress, given by the National Press Foundation. In 1995, he was awarded an Overseas Press Club award for his coverage of Haiti. During that same year he was chosen by the Latin American Studies Association to receive their annual award for distinguished coverage of Latin America. Welna was awarded a 1997 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In 2002, Welna was elected by his colleagues to a two-year term as a member of the Executive Committee of the Congressional Radio-Television Correspondents' Galleries.

A native of Minnesota, Welna graduated magna cum laude from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, with a Bachelor of Arts degree and distinction in Latin American Studies. He was subsequently a Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellow. He speaks fluent Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

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