On January 20, 2011, months before the Republicans would use leverage of a baleful debt-ceiling-default to extract additional cuts, the Republican Study Committee (RSC)—a group of fiscally conservative members of the U.S. House of Representatives—announced a plan by which $2.5 trillion could be cut from the U.S. Government's spending over ten years. According to The New York Times, the proposed cuts “would exclude the military, and would not touch the big entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security. As a result, [their] effect on the entire array of government programs, among them education, domestic security, transportation, law enforcement and medical research, would be nothing short of drastic." The leaders of the RSC claimed that the cuts were “appropriate and necessary, given the government’s $14 trillion debt and annual deficits at their highest levels since the years just after World War II." The RSC "proposed generally reducing agency budgets to their levels in 2006 — the last time Congressional Republicans controlled the budget process — and then freezing them, with no annual inflation adjustments.” The RSC also recommended “slashing the federal workforce by 15 percent and canceling pay raises for five years, for a total of $2.29 trillion in savings.” Finally, the proposal included “an additional $330 billion in cuts to specific programs, including Amtrak, foreign aid and even the Washington subway system" (Source #1).
Analysis is at "Leadership as Slashing Programs."
