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Congressman Robert Aderholt is the Chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee, which passed their fiscal year 2025 budget in July of this year. Recently, he sat down with Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson to discuss the key takeaways from the appropriations bill that passed for LHHS.
“Overall, the spending for this entire bill is about $185 billion. As you rightly said earlier, when you take all three departments and all the agencies that are under our Committee, you’ve got the second largest bill. Defense is the only one that’s larger,” said Aderholt.
The fiscal year 2025 LHHS budget reached $185 billion to be divided between the many sectors covered by this subcommittee.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of money that goes into the Department of Health and Human Services, which is probably $100-$110 billion that goes to that department alone. Then you have the Department of Education, which is about $70-$75 billion, depending on the year. Then you have about $10 billion, approximately, that goes to the Department of Labor. Those are the three components, the three large components,” said Aderholt.
These allocations ended up being $8.6 billion below the Fiscal Year 2024 enacted score, $23.8 billion below the Fiscal Year 2024 effective spending level and $36.2 billion below the President’s budget request.
“What we do is we make sure that the department is held accountable. They come to us and ask us for a budget and we look at it, examine it. We see the areas that maybe could be cut, and some that maybe aren’t doing a good job and some more funding could help. Usually, more funding is not the case, usually, we’re always looking to cut,” said Aderholt.
This appropriations bill cut funding for 48 programs and completely eliminated 57 programs from the previous year. The subcommittee also rejected programs that would bolster school diversity initiatives and Climate Corps.
Aderholt said that these kinds of appropriation bills can become difficult when everyone has a different view of where money should be spent based on their constituents’ lives.
“You’ve got 435 Members of Congress, on the House side, that think they know best how to spend that money. You’ve got 100 Members of the Senate who think they know best how to spend the money. And then, of course, you have to have the President sign off and his Administration. So that’s what makes appropriations bills tough,” said Aderholt.
