Sponsors (9)
The bill increases fiscal recouping and transparency for emergency-designated spending while protecting several major benefit programs, but does so by imposing automatic, across-the-board cuts that create uncertainty and risk disproportionately harming non-exempt programs and emergency response capacity.
Seniors, veterans, Medicare beneficiaries and national defense programs are protected from the automatic cuts because key accounts (Social Security, Medicare, VA, Railroad Retirement, and national defense) are exempted.
Taxpayers could see reduced federal outlays over five years as emergency-designated spending is recouped in one-fifth annual increments, lowering near-term federal deficits.
Congress and the public get greater transparency and oversight: committees must include detailed justifications for emergency designations and OMB must notify Congress of affected accounts.
State governments, federal employees, low-income individuals, and beneficiaries of non‑exempt programs would face uniform percentage cuts that can reduce services and benefits and fall disproportionately on programs with less flexibility or higher fixed costs.
State governments, nonprofits, and federal program administrators will face greater budgeting uncertainty and planning difficulty because emergency spending later triggers multi‑year automatic cuts.
Taxpayers, state governments, and emergency responders may have reduced capacity to respond to future emergencies because the mechanism effectively penalizes emergency responses by imposing automatic across‑the‑board savings when offsets are limited.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires OMB to sequester one‑fifth per year for five years of designated emergency spending, with uniform cuts across non‑exempt accounts and specified exemptions.
Requires the Office of Management and Budget to automatically sequester (cut) budgetary resources over five years whenever a fiscal year includes designated emergency spending, so that outlay savings equal one‑fifth of that emergency spending each year. The cuts must be uniform across affected non‑exempt accounts, confined to the same spending type (discretionary or direct) as the emergency spending, and the statute lists several programmatic exemptions and reporting requirements to Congress explaining why the spending qualified as emergency spending. Also requires OMB to notify Congress of affected accounts, allows the sequestration total to be reduced by any offsets enacted in the same law that provided the emergency spending, and defines key budget terms and which authorities count as "emergency spending." Sequestration orders begin on October 1 following the fiscal year that included the emergency spending and continue for five years (one‑fifth of savings per year).
Official title: To require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to offset emergency spending, and for other purposes.
Introduced June 5, 2025 by Marlin A. Stutzman · Last progress June 5, 2025