Sessions wants budget office to provide details

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) demanded Tuesday that the White House provide funding and details about how the administration will pay for its proposed $447 billion jobs plan.

Sessions sent a letter to Jack Lew, head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, saying he had expected to see "a precise and detailed estimate of the fiscal impact of the president’s proposal" when the legislation arrived on Capitol Hill on Monday.

"Perhaps even more troubling, however, is that despite the emphatic promise that we would learn yesterday how the bill would be offset, this information is missing too," Sessions wrote.

"This is not satisfactory."

The White House has said about $400 billion in revenue would be raised by capping at 28 percent itemized deductions and some other exclusions for individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and married couples who make more than $250,000.

"OMB must provide to the Congress and the American people, at a minimum, the basic information that demonstrates in detail, as promised, how this bill will be funded," Sessions wrote. "This information should be provided without delay."

Sessions is specifically requesting OMB to provide a table showing the expected budgetary effects, by specific policy, on an annual basis for the next 10 years, a schedule showing the added interest that the federal government would have to pay yearly and the resulting change in the federal debt and a table showing deficit changes over the next 10 years as a result of the legislation.

"The bill would presumably create a sudden increase in near-term borrowing, but the offsets are stretched out over a decade," he wrote.

The debt-limit agreement saves $7 billion in budget authority for next year’s annual appropriations, but Sessions argued that the bill, regardless of its offsets, would erase those savings.