Spending Bill Cuts $10 Billion From IRS, House Speaker Says

January 7, 2024

Dear Colleague,

Happy New Year to you and your family! This letter is to provide you with an update on the status of FY24 appropriations.

After many weeks of dialogue and debate, we have secured hard-fought concessions to unlock the FY 24 topline numbers and allow the Appropriations Committee to finally begin negotiating and completing the twelve annual appropriations bills.

The topline constitutes $1.590 trillion for FY24 — the statutory levels of the Fiscal Responsibility Act. That includes $886 billion for defense and $704 billion for nondefense.

As has been widely reported, a list of extra-statutory adjustments was agreed upon by negotiators last summer. The agreement today achieves key modifications to the June framework that will secure more than $16 billion in additional spending cuts to offset the discretionary spending levels.

As you know, the Senate marked up their appropriations bills $14 billion above the FRA levels and the adjustments. The agreement reached today thus allows for none of that funding, and combined with the additional savings described above, results in an overall $30 billion total reduction from the Senate's spending plans.

While the levels of emergency spending from FY23 will be maintained, no additional emergency funding, or additional no-outlay changes in mandatory programs (CHIMPS), will be included, thus eliminating two of the worst accounting gimmicks included in the FRA framework. Unlike other adjustments, which are by nature limited in time or amount, the adjustments described above threatened to become permanent fixtures of the funding baseline as in previous budget agreements. Removing them now could save taxpayers more than $200 billion over the next 10 years.

In summary, the concessions we achieved will include an additional $10 billion in cuts to the IRS mandatory funding (for a total of $20 billion), which was a key part of the Democrats' “Inflation Reduction Act.” In addition, we will cut $6.1 billion from the Biden's Administration's continued COVID-era slush funds, which we achieved despite fierce opposition from the White House. The result is real savings to American taxpayers and real reductions in the federal bureaucracy.

Overall, this agreement represents an actual year-over-year cut in non-VA, nondefense spending. The agreement also represents an overall cut of tens of billions below the levels in the current CR. It does this while allowing for full funding of the President's Budget request for defense. As such, this represents the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade.

While these final spending levels will not satisfy everyone, and they do not cut as much spending as many of us would like, this deal does provide us a path to: 1) move the process forward; 2) reprioritize funding within the topline towards conservative objectives, instead of last year's Schumer-Pelosi omnibus; and 3) fight for the important policy riders included in our House FY24 bills.

While work on finalizing appropriations must move quickly now, it is important to note that negotiations will be informed by the most robust House and Senate appropriations process we have seen in years, driven by the hard work and pressure exerted by this Republican Conference.

More soon,

Mike Johnson
Speaker of the House