With Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress, you might expect to see some budgetary restraint. Or at least some gesture to fiscal conservatism. You would be wrong. Consider the bloated budget deal the Senate arrived at on February 7.
This unlovely compromise measure, stalled as we go to press but expected to pass soon, is the consequence of divergent philosophies. Republicans, rightly in our view, reject the notion that the federal government’s primary responsibility—national defense—should be subject to the budgetary sequester that restrains growth in discretionary spending on domestic programs. Democrats take the opposite view. And since Republicans can’t pass the bill without some Democratic support, both sides are getting something. Republicans get an additional $80 billion in defense spending for the current fiscal year and $85 billion for next. Democrats get an additional $63 billion in domestic spending this year and an additional $68 billion next.
The result is a deal that lifts both military and non-military spending limits by nearly $300 billion through 2019, appropriates an additional $160 billion to overseas military and diplomatic operations, and suspends the federal debt limit for a year.
Senate Republicans were right to insist on raising the caps on military spending. The U.S. armed forces are underfunded, and a weak military has a way of encouraging threats and the globe’s worst actors. As Ronald Reagan memorably put it in 1984, “None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong. It’s weakness that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments.” Democrats, avoiding the larger question of global capabilities, argue that the Pentagon has a lot of pork-barrel spending. But for once the GOP has a good talking point on the issue: Secretary of Defense James Mattis has begun the first ever agency-wide audit. Democrats seem wholly uninterested in similar diligence. To cite just one illuminating contrast here, the Senate budget deal spends billions on backstopping Medicaid, but does nothing to address the estimated $140 billion in annual Medicaid fraud.
The real problem with the federal budget isn’t military spending. House speaker Paul Ryan correctly points out that we could get rid of the U.S. military in its entirety and we would still have a deficit. The problem isn’t even discretionary spending. The federal government supports a dizzying array of unnecessary programs and agencies. We would love to see that money given back to the people who earned it, but domestic discretionary spending, wasteful as so much of it is, isn’t ruining the republic. Entitlement spending is.
The problem starts at the top. While the president clearly understands the need for economic growth—the United States simply can’t pay its bills at 2 or 3 percent annual growth—he has ignored or dismissed the need for budgetary restraint. And he has explicitly spurned any idea of reforming entitlement spending. The vast preponderance of the federal government’s deficit and debt owes itself to three programs: Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. Mandatory federal spending—almost all of which goes to just these three programs—currently accounts for 70 percent of the federal budget. Over the next decade, according to the Peterson Foundation, this will grow to 77 percent. This will mean shrinking discretionary spending by a quarter—a 24 percent cut in defense, in transportation, in education, and so on.
Pleading for more military spending while highlighting the critical need for fiscal reform elsewhere is a tricky argument. But it’s an argument Americans are fully capable of understanding. For Republicans to make it, they’ll have to get out of the deal-making, everybody’s-a-winner mentality that gave us this improvident spending deal.
