House Republicans Release Limited Details on 2013 Budget Resolution

Congressional budget resolutions are notoriously light on details. That is by design. Congress uses the budget resolution as a framework for overall funding and revenue guidelines for 10 years out. And Congress may or may not follow that framework as it writes actual spending and revenue bills later in the year. The budget committees need not specify any tax policies, program cuts, or the like in their resolutions; instead, they just set broad targets.

Of course, though, the budget committees do have to develop a sense of which types of policies they could enact to keep spending, revenue, debts, and deficits within the proposed guidelines. Those “assumptions” are about the only aspect of the resolution that could have meaning for education policy stakeholders.

Last week, the House Budget Committee approved a fiscal year 2013 budget resolution that was full of assumptions about education programs. And despite the flurry of media coverage last week, the committee waited until this week to make any of those assumptions public. Even so, the documents currently available only illuminate a few key assumptions and do not provide an estimate of how the proposals would reach the spending levels outlined in the new fiscal year 2013 budget resolution.

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