House Approves $310B In Cuts; Medicaid And Children’s Health Care Targeted

The bill is designed to shield the Pentagon from automatic cuts that were laid out in last year's debt accord.

The New York Times: House Approves $310 Billion In Cuts, But Passage In The Senate Very Unlikely
Of the savings, $23.5 billion came from Medicaid and children's health care; $4.2 billion from hospitals that serve the poor and uninsured; and $33.7 billion from supplemental nutrition assistance. In all, about a quarter of the cuts would come directly from programs that benefit the poor (Weisman, 5/10).

Los Angeles Times: House Approves Republican Plan For Spending Cuts
The legislation to cut $240 billion over a decade is expected to stall in the Senate, where Democrats have the majority, but the exercise Thursday allowed the GOP to contrast its agenda with President Obama's efforts to reduce the deficit (Mascaro, 5/10).

Politico: GOP Leaves Debt Accord In Dust
Building on the March budget resolution, the measure continues what has become an aggressive Republican rewrite of last summer's agreements both in terms of annual spending caps and now the sequester mechanism. Nondefense appropriations in 2013 already face cuts of $27 billion from what was anticipated under the Budget Control Act, and the new measure adds a second round of savings (Rogers, 5/10).

The Fiscal Times: Congress May Toss the Economy over the Fiscal Cliff
Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., refuses  to consider a replacement for the defense cuts until Republicans show willingness to consider mixing some new revenues with spending cuts (Pianin, 5/11).

CQ HealthBeat: Report Says Automatic Cuts Would Hit Health Agencies Hard
If Congress doesn't pass alternative legislation later this year to block automatic cuts required under the budget control law, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would lose $2.39 billion, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) $445 million, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) $191 million, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) $29 million from their fiscal 2013 budgets. That’s the finding of an analysis released Thursday by Research America, an organization that lobbies for medical research funding (Reichard, 5/10).