The Fiscal Hawks Never Win

By Rich Lowry

Friday, December 20, 2024

 

It feels like 2013 again.

 

Back then, a beleaguered Republican speaker of the House was forced into a government shutdown by firebrands in his caucus who considered him insufficiently pure.

 

A revolution in GOP politics has happened since, and yet a beleaguered Republican speaker of the House has been forced to the verge of a government shutdown by firebrands in his caucus who consider him insufficiently pure.

 

The difference is that Mike Johnson — unlike his predecessor, John Boehner — isn’t just dealing with an internal revolt; he also had the most powerful Republican politician on the planet and his extremely influential sidekick blast his handiwork, namely, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, respectively.

 

Johnson did make a misstep with the so-called continuing resolution to keep the government funded past a looming deadline. In negotiations, he let it balloon into a true monstrosity. What was supposed to be a stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown became a vehicle to pass new legislation in a last-minute, 1,500-page bill that no one was going to read.

 

The yet-to-be-resolved episode shows that Republican hostility to spending still exists a decade after Tea Party Republicans roiled the establishment — and made Boehner’s life miserable — demanding massive deficit reduction.

 

Now, though, this reflex has taken a new form. It is expressed in fierce opposition to “the swamp” — in this case, business-as-usual logrolling in Congress — and excitement about the prospects for Musk’s DOGE, the new Department of Government Efficiency.

 

The bipartisan agreement in Washington, D.C., to perpetually spend more money is indeed disgraceful, and DOGE could be a welcome force for new thinking. Yet both of these are really beside the point when considering the red ink that one day — probably not tomorrow and maybe not even several years from now — could cause a horrendous fiscal crisis.

 

There are idiotic programs and senseless regulations aplenty, but the money that can be found in the federal couch cushions is relatively minimal. Most federal spending has strong public backing, and so a $6.8 trillion budget that looks like a juicy target is very hard to bring under control.

 

The math is as brutal as ever. Social Security and Medicare, together with veterans’ benefits and other health programs, account for more than half of the budget. One of Trump’s signature promises, of course, is not to touch Medicare and Social Security. Then, interest on the debt and defense spending take up about another $2 trillion.

 

What’s left is, in the scheme of things, a pittance, and even programs in this category have constituencies.

 

If the budget is ever to be put on a more rational basis, there is no substitute for making a public case for a serious reform agenda that includes entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. This is a politically perilous project, which is why the Republican Party abandoned it. How much easier and satisfying it is to tank flagrantly absurd end-of-year spending bills and to put extravagant hopes in DOGE.

 

It is telling what else was happening in Washington while Mike Johnson’s continuing resolution went down in flames. Congress was busy working to pass, on a bipartisan basis, the Social Security Fairness Act at a cost of roughly $200 billion over ten years. It doesn’t matter that the legislation is a poorly designed giveaway to public employees that experts across the spectrum think is a bad idea.

 

DOGE will be hard-pressed just to claw that money back. Musk and Ramaswamy have talked about cutting a swath of federal workers. According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2022, the federal government employed 2.3 million civilians at a cost of $271 billion. So if you can cut 10 percent of those employees, which would be a stunning accomplishment, you might cover the ten-year cost of the Social Security Fairness Act, but you are still treading fiscal water.

 

This points to another similarity with 2013. All the drama and chaos is unlikely to fundamentally alter our dreadful fiscal trajectory.