It wasn’t Ted Kennedy—not that he’d want it to be—but House speaker Paul Ryan quipped Tuesday morning that his dream of entitlement reform hadn’t died.
“I never give up a dream. I’m a Green Bay Packer fan,” he told reporters several hours before President Donald Trump is set to deliver an address to Congress. His cause, the centerpiece of his career for as long as he’s led a committee, is receiving a fresh round of attention ahead of the speech, which is expected to elaborate on the White House’s budget priorities: some of which Ryan shares, and one of which is glaringly absent.
Trump has proposed to boost defense spending and offset it with spending cuts elsewhere in the government, in programs over which Congress has routine control. Ryan said Tuesday that Republicans ran on a promise last year to restore military strength, since it was their assessment the Armed Forces had been “hollowed out”. But, at least at the outset of the new administration, the health of Medicaid and Medicare—where Obamacare isn’t concerned, that is—seems to be off the table. Nor is there expected to be a conversation about Social Security, a program with relatively less fiscal dangers, but also the one that Trump singled out during the campaign as being untouchable. Such a stance is anathema to the Ryan agenda, which has guided the GOP’s fiscal policy for much of the last decade.
He implied on Tuesday, however, there isn’t as much distance between him and the president as it may appear.
“We’ve never proposed, and this is what I think the president is talking about, we’ve never proposed to change benefits for current seniors and people who are about to retire,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer. Such individuals would be subject to policies made within the 10-year “budget window” that Congress uses when crafting spending frameworks. Ryan has long stated that entitlements pose more of a long-term threat—a catastrophic one, given just how much the government is expected to owe for growth in Medicare, in particular, and the accumulating interest payments as a result of more borrowing.
“What people like me have been saying is for those of us in the younger generation, [Generation-X] on down, these programs will be bankrupt by the time we get there. We have to reform them for the next generation,” Ryan said. When asked if he thought the president agreed with him, he responded, “I believe he does.”
His characterization of the situation makes sense for now. Ryan and Trump are already consumed with doing whatever it is they’ll end up doing on Obamacare—which the speaker spun as entitlement reform “just this spring,” and thus a “pretty good way to start.” Trump has other campaign-season vows on his mind: a Mexican border wall, which Democrats loathe, and infrastructure, which Democrats may come to love, and some Republican fiscal hawks may fight. Neither issue will make for easy legislating.
Entitlement reform will still be more difficult than both. The famous “first 100 days” of a new presidency notwithstanding, not every battle can be waged at once.
