President Trump’s budget director blamed Congress for increasing deficits as legislators look to enact a massive spending bill coupled with new big tax cuts.
The House this week passed a $1.4 trillion government spending bill for fiscal year 2020 that also includes $500 billion in tax cuts over the next decade, adding to the deficit. White House officials have not yet said that President Trump will sign the bill, but he is not expected to veto it.
During Trump’s tenure, Congress has increased spending and cut taxes. The federal debt has risen by nearly $2.5 trillion on his watch and is expected to rise indefinitely, both in dollar terms and as a share of the economy.
Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, responded Wednesday to outside criticisms of the latest round of deficit-increasing legislation by placing responsibility on Congress.
“I’m not sure how any of the people who work in this president’s administration, or the president himself, [are] somehow on the hook for the fact that Congress is not coming along with an appetite to cut spending,” Vought said in an editorial meeting with the Washington Examiner.
Vought noted that the president’s latest proposed budget would balance within 15 years, although he acknowledged that such a reform “is something everyone said is not possible.”
“We’re happy to have a debate about: Can you balance faster? [Or is it] going to [take] longer? We think 15 years, given the size of our structural deficits, is still a very, very good fiscal goal,” Vought added.
He also said that the goal of balancing the budget would not come just from what budget experts call “discretionary spending,” meaning the funding for agencies appropriated by Congress each year, but instead from a “substantial amount” of reforms to “mandatory spending,” or spending that is disbursed automatically, such as through Social Security programs and Medicare.
