The $1.7 Trillion Omnibus Is a Scandal

By Philip Klein

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

 

Just two days before an expected Senate vote, congressional leaders cooked up an outrageous $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill, demanding that lawmakers open wide and swallow its 4,155 pages so everybody can leave town for the year.

 

This is a scandal.

 

It is not a scandal to be added to the salacious and shocking catalogue of notorious Washington scandals, but a scandal precisely because what is happening has become a completely ordinary way for business to be conducted in Washington. The scandal is that it is so unremarkable. The scandal is that it will be repeated again and again, no matter which party is in power.

 

Critics say that the omnibus shows that Washington is broken and that senators and members of Congress are incompetent. They lament the fact that lawmakers procrastinate to the last minute what they could have accomplished all year. In reality, the system is functioning just the way people in power want it to function.

 

Sure, lawmakers could have followed a process in which a budget is unveiled and passed in the spring, and all priorities are discussed within relevant committees in full public view for months. Legislative text could be released well in advance of any vote, allowing for plenty of time to view it and debate amendments. And lawmakers could divide different policies into different bills so that each can be evaluated on its own merits. But running things this way would risk subjecting policies to actual debate.

 

Instead, Congress has passed a series of short-term funding measures since the fiscal year began on October 1 so they could manufacture a crisis in the waning days of 2022. This has allowed congressional leaders and their staffs to hide behind closed doors, load a freight train with their preferred government-funded goodies, get the media to describe it as a “must-pass bill,” and dare anybody to vote against the final product and risk shutting down the government ahead of Christmas. Any senator who wants Electoral Count Act reform will have to vote to increase funding for Medicaid; anybody who wants to finance the military will need to vote to increase spending on food stamps and for more infrastructure money. Anybody who does not blindly agree to pass this mammoth piece of legislation will be accused of leaving a lump of coal in the stockings of America’s veterans.

 

This may look like a chaotic mess, but describing it in such a way lets congressional leaders off of the hook. This is not a system that is buckling. From the perspective of those in power who want to ram through their priorities with as little scrutiny as possible, this is a system operating at peak efficiency.

 

It is a scandal for lawmakers to be sending $1.7 trillion out the door with so little debate under the shadow of rampant inflation and a looming fiscal crisis. During the pandemic, federal debt eclipsed the value of the nation’s annual economic output for the first time since World War II. After the World War II emergency passed, spending retreated to more normal levels, and the debt steadily diminished. But the end of the Covid crisis is not following the same pattern. Debt is expected to remain at elevated levels, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and blow past the World War II record within a decade. This is a result of rising health-care costs, an increase in the retirement-age population, and Congress’s deciding to bake some of the Covid-era emergency-spending initiatives into the regular budget.

 

The Medicare Trust Fund is set to be depleted by 2028 — within the next president’s term — and Social Security’s by 2034, according to the trustees of the programs. If no gradual changes are made to the programs before then, it would translate into a sudden 10 percent cut to Medicare benefits and 23 percent cut to Social Security benefits.

 

Yet not only was the idea of entitlement reform ignored by lawmakers, Congress voted to increase funding for entitlements and scale back efforts to contain spending (for instance, the bill scales back scheduled cuts to doctors’ pay within Medicare thanks to industry lobbying).

 

During the pandemic, lawmakers spent $6 trillion on legislation claiming to respond to the health emergency and the economic crisis caused by the government response. The $1.9 trillion “relief” law, signed by President Biden after the economy had already showed signs of recovery, helped fuel the inflation that followed.

 

Given that government spending helped fuel this crisis, one of the tools available to fight it is to stop spending so much money. But instead of using inflation as an argument for less spending, lawmakers are using it as an argument for more.

 

“The pain of inflation on American families is real, and it is being felt right now across the federal government,” Senator Pat Leahy, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said. “From funding for nutrition programs and housing assistance, to home energy costs and college affordability, our bipartisan, bicameral, omnibus appropriations bill directly invests in providing relief from the burden of inflation on the American people.”

 

It isn’t as if Republicans are much better.

 

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, in praising the bill, boasted that it increases defense spending by 9.7 percent (or above the 7.1 percent inflation rate) and nondefense spending by just 5.5 percent. As a result, he is trying to tout it as a “real-dollar cut” to nondefense spending, even though the number excludes spending on veterans, which increased by 22 percent.

 

In other words, McConnell, like Leahy, is accepting the premise that spending decisions should be measured against a baseline that was inflated by previous decisions to spend excessively. It’s yet another example of how big government begets even bigger government.

 

This bill should never have existed, it should be voted down, and Congress should get serious about tackling our very real spending problems.

 

But that won’t happen. Republicans will go along with Democrats to pass this monstrosity, they will go home, and all will be forgotten by the time Americans sit down for Christmas dinner, because the public has been acclimated to accept this as normal.

 

That is the scandal.