Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013
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| Long title | Making continuing appropriations for fiscal year 2014, and for other purposes. |
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| Nicknames | Budget bill |
| Enacted by | the 113th United States Congress |
| Citations | |
| Public law | Pub.L. 113–67 |
| Codification | |
| Acts amended | Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, and others |
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The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 (H.J.Res. 59; Pub.L. 113–67) is a federal statute concerning spending and the budget in the United States, that was signed into law by President Barack Obama on December 26, 2013. On December 10, 2013, pursuant to the provisions of the Continuing Appropriations Act, 2014 calling for a joint budget conference to work on possible compromises, Representative Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray announced a compromise that they had agreed to after extended discussions between them. The law raises the sequestration caps for fiscal years 2014 and 2015, in return for extending the imposition of the caps into 2022 and 2023, and miscellaneous savings elsewhere in the budget. Overall, the bill is projected to lower the deficit by $23 billion over the long term.
In forming the deal behind the bill that was passed, Ryan and Murray explicitly avoided trying to find a "grand bargain", in which Democrats would buy into reduced entitlements spending while Republicans would agree to higher tax rates, as several past negotiations along such lines had failed. Instead, in Ryan's words, negotiations sought to "focus on common ground ... to get some minimal accomplishments". The deal did represent a rare example of bipartisanship during this period and promised to end for a while the last-minute, crisis-driven budget battles that had consumed Congress for much of the prior three years.
The bill caps the federal government's overall discretionary spending for Fiscal Year 2014 at $1.012 trillion and for Fiscal Year 2015 at $1.014.
This deal would eliminate some of the spending cuts required by the sequester by $45 billion of the cuts scheduled to happen in January 2014 and $18 billion of the cuts scheduled to happen in 2015. Federal spending would thus be larger in these two years, but would be less in subsequent years until 2023, due to other provisions such as imposing sequester cuts in 2022 and 2023, raising airline fees and changing the pension contribution requirements of new federal workers. Paul Ryan said that the bill would lower the deficit by $23 billion overall. The increased spending for 2014 and 2015 was spread evenly between defense spending and non-defense discretionary spending, leaving the cuts to mandatory spending unchanged. The bill did not make any changes to entitlement programs.
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