WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 (Xinhua) -- The future path of U.S. discretionary spending may be affected by the actions of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said on Wednesday.
The powerful 12-member super-committee was created by a bipartisan debt reduction deal inked in Aug. to tackle mounting U. S. budgetary challenges.
Discretionary outlays -- the part of federal spending that lawmakers generally control through annual appropriation acts -- totaled about 1.35 trillion U.S. dollars in 2011, or close to 40 percent of federal outlays, with slightly more than half of that going to defense, Elmendorf said.
Discretionary outlays declined from about 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) during much of the 1970s and 1980s to 6.2 percent in 1999, mostly because defense spending, as a share of GDP, declined over that period, according to Elmendorf's written testimony.
Since then, U.S. discretionary outlays have risen relative to the size of the economy, totaling about 9 percent of GDP in 2010 and 2011, in part because of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and in part because of the discretionary funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to cope with the financial crisis, CBO data showed.
The federal government's mandatory outlays including entitlements spending are surging over the past years, Elmendorf said at the second testimony held by the super-committee since its establishment.
Without containing the entitlement spending, it is difficult to rein in the U.S. federal government's deficits and put the nation' s fiscal house in order, he stressed.
The committee is tasked to identify at least 1.2 trillion dollars in deficit cuts by Nov. 23. Failure to do so will trigger automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense domestic programs.
Senator Patty Murray, co-chair of the panel, said on Wednesday that committee members are working very hard to find a bipartisan way to slash deficits. However, some experts have cast doubt on the panel's ability to reach an agreement within less than four weeks, as committee members from the two parties still have divergent opinions on deficit cutting priorities.