Budget season is upon us, which can only mean one thing: Get ready for more debt and deadlock.
Every single year, Washington, D.C., goes through the same ritualistic charade. The president sends a massive budget request up to Capitol Hill — in this case, a $4.7 trillion budget that includes a hike in defense, weak Medicare savings, and a balanced budget within 15 years — one filled with hundreds of billions of dollars on programs and policies the administration considers top priorities for the nation. Lawmakers in the opposition party take a few minutes to review the request before customarily throwing all the hard work in the garbage. Individual lawmakers release their own budget proposals in order to demonstrate to their constituents how responsible and workman-like they are. And the budget and appropriations committees knock heads for the remainder of the year until they send a product to the floor, where it may or may not be debated and passed.
Sometimes, the process ends with a simple extension of current government funding. In extreme cases, Americans will watch their government shut down for a few days or a few weeks as their politicians argue about unrelated, poison-pill policy riders. The whole affair seems like one giant gladiator fight. By the time the appropriations bills are finally passed into law, we all tend to forget what the president requested in the first place.
Such will be the case this time around. President Trump has his main priorities and pet projects, and Democrats have theirs. For Trump, it’s about finally addressing growing deficits and coddling the Pentagon with additional taxpayer money; the Pentagon is otherwise known as that gargantuan bureaucracy that can’t pass an audit. According to early releases of the White House budget request, the president wants to cut discretionary spending by 5 percent across the board while increasing defense spending by nearly 5 percent. In order to get around the mandatory budget caps, Trump will add extra defense dollars to the Overseas Contingency Operations account, which essentially serves as a separate Pentagon fund unaffected by sequestration.
Democrats have recoiled at the maneuver. House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., has called a 139 percent increase in OCO funding a “nonstarter” and an accounting gimmick meant to protect the Defense Department while slashing everything else. The administration understands that getting a $750 billion defense budget through a Democratic-held House will be impossible without a massive increase in non-defense funds. Yet the White House has sent the signal that it intends to fight for every dollar regardless.
It’s a fool’s errand to predict how the budget wars will pan out. Trump’s blueprint won’t go anywhere, but he may very well get much of what he asks for in terms of defense. Democrats don’t want to be labeled as anti-military, particularly when the party will be devoting the next year and a half to campaigning against Republicans up and down the ballot. The universal domestic spending cuts are about as likely to happen as Hillary Clinton running and winning the presidency in 2020.
We can, however, be relatively certain that government spending will go up. Washington’s addiction to allocating other people’s money is just too powerful a sensation to beat.
But don’t worry: for the few remaining deficit hawks in the capital who quiver as they watch the balance sheets get deeper into the red, there’s always next year.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
