You may remember the grim warnings of draconian budgets cuts issued by liberal pundits, congressional Democrats, and the Obama administration in early 2013. That was just before “sequester” took effect—a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which ordered automatic, across-the-board budget cuts if Congress couldn’t agree to more tailored ones to bring the deficit under control. Border patrol agents would be given the pink slip, we were told. Air traffic control towers would go unmanned. President Obama surrounded himself with firefighters and claimed the sequestration would cost the jobs of “first responders” around the country.
You may also remember that none of these prophecies came to pass.
That’s because the Budget Control Act, though not insignificant as a budget controlling mechanism, didn’t limit spending nearly enough to cause mayhem—even in its across-the-board form. Although entitlement spending accounts for roughly three-fifths of the budget, sequestration barely touched it: Social Security and Medicaid not at all; Medicare only slightly. The federal debt just sped past $20 trillion and is now more than 100 percent of the nation’s GDP—something that, before 2013, hadn’t been true since we stopped fighting Hitler and Tojo.
The Budget Control Act did accomplish one thing, though: It empowered congressional Democrats. Rather than committee chairmen influencing budget priorities, the budget’s largely been decided in secretly negotiated two-year agreements between Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate for the last five years.
The impasse arises from Democrats’ insistence in 2011 that defense spending be curtailed exactly as much as non-defense spending. But circumstances around the globe have changed for the worse, and the United States now needs to enhance its defense budget, not curtail it. We’ve seen the rise of ISIS, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, China’s military encroachment on the South China Sea, and North Korea come close to the capacity to deliver a nuclear warhead via ICBM. The sequester deal is crippling the Defense Department’s ability to meet these challenges. Pentagon officials note that the military is losing 11 to 12 service members every month in non-combat accidents—accidents reasonably attributed to cuts in training and logistics.
Senate Republicans have wanted for some time to lift the sequester on military spending, but Democrats won’t hear of it unless spending caps come off discretionary non-military spending as well.
Some Senate Republicans think Democrats are bluffing. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced an amendment to uncap military and non-military discretionary spending in September, his Democratic colleagues demurred and began demanding the removal of the cap on entitlement spending, too—this despite the fact that on three separate occasions, twice in 2013 and once in 2015, Democrats voted almost unanimously to extend the modest sequester caps on entitlement spending.
What’s going on here?
The answer, as ever, has more to do with political clout than fiscal responsibility. Stated simply, the 2011 sequester deal gives Democrats power over the federal budget they wouldn’t otherwise have. Since the deal imposes dollar-amount limits on military and non-military spending alike, the minority party can use the 2011 law as a tool in budget negotiations.
Of course, we would prefer that Congress impose the kinds of cuts to spending that would balance the federal budget and begin the marathon task of paying down the country’s debt. That’s not going to happen. It’s time to abolish sequester. Its caps on discretionary spending last only till 2021, anyway, and we may have a Democratic Senate by early 2019, so Republicans are guaranteed only another year or so to use the situation to their advantage. If Republicans think they have the will to use those months to give the military what it needs and impose substantial and rational cuts on ineffective domestic spending, we’d like to see what they can do.
