Paul Ryan, of all people, was in a defensive posture about his commitment to fiscal discipline. Speaking on February 13 to Maria Bartiromo of the Fox Business Network, the speaker of the House insisted that the two-year budget deal Republicans in Congress had just brokered was a necessary compromise with spend-happy Democrats. “We had to give to get,” Ryan explained. “So we had to do some domestic spending that the Democrats wanted so that we could get our defense spending. We got a lot of the spending cuts that we wanted that they didn’t want either. So yes, this was a bipartisan compromise. You don’t get everything you want.”
It’s a reasonable explanation. Increasing defense spending was a major GOP goal. The narrow Republican majority in the Senate meant dealing with Democrats was inevitable. And besides, what threatens the federal government’s solvency isn’t really discretionary spending, domestic or defense.
“At the end of the day, I’m the same old guy,” he told Bartiromo. “We’re doing the same old thing in the House, which is that we’ve got to have entitlement reform, and that is why we keep pushing for our health-care reform, that’s why we keep pushing for entitlement reform. Baby boomers are retiring, and we’re not ready for them.”
Ryan’s recommitment to fiscal discipline came just two weeks after Donald Trump delivered a State of the Union address in which neither the country’s $20 trillion debt nor the government’s trillion-dollar budget deficit earned a mention. It was one day after the White House released a $4.4 trillion budget proposal that made cuts but no reforms to Medicare, the entitlement program that most threatens our solvency. And it was in the middle of a week in which the president began touting an infrastructure proposal that includes $200 billion in new federal dollars.
The administration’s rollout of its infrastructure plan was a good indication of where the party of cutting spending has moved in the Trump era. The White House calls the spending an “investment,” which would, Keynesian-style, create jobs for Americans. And while the official goal is to spark more than $1 trillion in additional state, local, and private infrastructure spending, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said the federal government’s $200 billion was a “minimum.” White House officials confirmed to us that the president is willing to negotiate on that number.
Congressional Republicans don’t sound particularly eager to put Trump’s proposal into law. “Oh, you know I don’t know the answer to that,” Texas’s John Cornyn, the number two Republican in the Senate, said when asked which house of Congress will be taking the lead on infrastructure. “I guess we’ll both do our thing and try to meet in the middle.” Some GOP lawmakers are concerned about the plan’s price tag. “The challenge is always the pay-fors, trying to find it,” Jason Lewis of Minnesota, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, says of Trump’s proposal. “But I’m focused on infrastructure that spawns productivity, not just a stimulus plan. And that’s a crucial difference.”
House majority leader Kevin McCarthy, however, was effusive in his praise of the plan, saying “we must invest in America” in a statement. “The president’s bold plan would improve American safety, make our economy more efficient, and restore and create pieces of civic engineering that our country can be proud of.” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell simply ignored the spending component of the plan in a vague statement of support, as did Paul Ryan.
More alarming for any deficit hawks left on the Hill was the speaker’s assessment of President Trump’s budget. Ryan called the document, which neither balances the budget nor addresses entitlement reform, a “thoughtful, detailed, and responsible blueprint for achieving our shared agenda.” The next morning, with Bartiromo pressing him on the subject, Ryan argued the White House had only put out a “discretionary spending budget.” “This wasn’t a full macro budget,” he said. “No two ways about it,” he continued. “We have to go after mandatory.”
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, was certainly in agreement last May about the only path to a balanced budget: “It’ll be very difficult in the future to do that because of the role that [entitlement] programs play in our future spending.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked about Ryan’s call to “go after” mandatory spending, told us, “I know the president certainly would like to reduce the deficit, and it’s one of the reasons that his budget, this budget, reduced the deficit by $3 trillion, which is one of the largest in history. And he’s going to continue to look for ways to do that.”
Yet the truth is that the president isn’t just uninterested in cutting deficits by reforming entitlements, he’s actively opposed to the idea. Years before he ran for president, Trump was already telling conservative audiences that changes to Social Security and Medicare were political losers. “As Republicans, if you think you are going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you are going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013. Three years later, in the midst of the Republican primaries, Trump told an Illinois radio host that Paul Ryan “wants to knock out Social Security, knock it down, wants to knock Medicare way down.” The future GOP nominee continued:
With definitive statements like that from the party’s leader, is fiscal conservatism effectively dead? The most ardent budget hawks of the House Freedom Caucus don’t sound optimistic. “It’s on life support,” says Arizona congressman Andy Biggs. Another Freedom Caucus member, Warren Davidson of Ohio, said “a lot of us were really stunned that our party, a party that has for a long time represented fiscal discipline, would even be voting” for the recent budget deal. Kentucky senator Rand Paul was so infuriated by the budget agreement, he delayed the Senate’s vote on the package, triggering a brief government shutdown. “Are we to be conservative all the time or only when we’re in the minority?” Paul asked in a floor speech.
But Ohio senator Rob Portman, who wrote balanced budgets as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, disagrees that his party has lost the mantle of fiscal conservatism. Portman, who voted for the February 9 deal that scrapped budget caps and authorized $300 billion in new discretionary funding, counters criticism of that agreement by pointing to the White House’s own budget proposal. “The president also just sent up a budget that has lots of cuts in it on the domestic side,” says Portman.
Others are more willing to admit this White House has done little to curb deficits. “To date, President Trump has talked financial responsibility,” says Alabama’s Mo Brooks, another Freedom Caucus member. “I yearn for the day when he exercises his veto power to make it happen.” Of his party’s concern for reining in federal spending, Brooks says he is “hopeful that, like a phoenix, it will rise again.”
Michael Warren is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Haley Byrd is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
