President Donald Trump’s economic policies have frequently been attacked by conservatives, who target his decidedly un-conservative stances on issues like tariffs. Now a conservative website published an article singling out how Trump and congressional Republicans are abandoning perhaps the cornerstone of right-wing economic philosophy — responsible spending.
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Republicans are on the verge of finally fixing our out-of-control budget deficits,” wrote The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell on Thursday. “But first they need to get just one more unfunded spending binge out of their system—and then (they swear) they’ll get around to that purge.”
She added, “This is the story we’ve been hearing from supposed fiscal hawks in the GOP about why they have repeatedly voted to jam costly budget bills through the fast-track process known as ‘reconciliation.’ Once a rarely used procedural tactic, reconciliation allows a budget bill to get through with only a simple-majority vote. In recent years, the majority party has typically pulled the reconciliation trick at most once per Congress, when it’s trying to expedite some big, splashy, high-priority measure or a must-pass budget bill; in this Congress, however, Republicans are trying to do it a record four times.”
Rampell then listed how Republicans have passed two reconciliation bills since the start of Trump’s second term, legislation that respectively added $4 trillion in deficits over a decade and $70 billion in new spending.
“We are today on reconciliation 3.0,” Rampell said. “Still no spending cuts, or other forms of deficit reduction.1 And yet again, the Republican fiscal hawks in the House said they were unhappy. Some, like Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), demanded pay-fors as a condition for their votes. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) declared the budget resolution ‘DOA,’ saying that there was ‘no path’ to passage without some sort of offsets.”
Yet despite their poor track record in holding to their promises for fiscal rectitude, Rampell noted that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise promised “we’re right now looking at a reconciliation 4.0 to do the things that are left out of this one.” Although Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) expressed reservations about the new bill, saying that “obviously our country is having a problem with deficit spending, so it should be offset,” Rampell sarcastically said “we’ll see how long this professed commitment to fiscal discipline lasts.”
She also pointed out that Trump and his allies instead slash programs that help vulnerable communities and are liked by liberals, even though doing so does not reduce deficits at all.
“But it is just a fig leaf: When you hear that Trumpers are slashing funds for the Smithsonian, Community Development Financial Institutions, USAID, medical research grants, and so on, you might think they are substantially slimming down budgets,” Rampell argued. “In reality, while these cuts will devastate the individual programs themselves, the dollars in question represent pocket change in the grand scheme of federal spending and tax-cut costs. But Trump and GOP lawmakers can still claim to be ‘saving money’ when questioned about their unfunded tax cuts, wars, deportation machine, and farmer bailouts.”