Tea Party activists clamoring for federal spending restraint swarmed the polls in 2010 and sent dozens of fresh faces to Washington. A year after the new Congress was sworn in, the Tea Party has undeniably had a huge impact on the political and public policy debates in the nation’s capital. But what has actually happened to federal spending?
As always, there’s no easy answer to that question, because it’s heavily dependent on the context, especially given that Republicans only control the House of Representatives and anything they propose has to pass through the Democratic Senate before being signed by President Obama.
In two major budget battles – the first over the government shut down in April and the second over raising the debt ceiling in August – Tea Party pressure pushed House Speaker John Boehner to take a much firmer stance than he otherwise would have, leading to two deals to reduce spending.
The chart accompanying this article shows projected federal spending totals from 2011 through 2020 under various budget scenarios.
In March of this year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that spending over the next decade would be $43.7 trillion if Congress made no changes to current law, or an even higher $44.1 trillion if it followed the 2012 budget proposal Obama submitted that month.
By contrast, under the 2012 budget crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that was passed by the GOP-controlled House, total federal spending number would have dropped to $38.8 trillion.
After all the wrangling over the budget that took place this year, spending is now projected to be $41.1 trillion from 2011 through 2020 – or about $3 trillion less than Obama was proposing.
The caveat here, however, is that this number assumes the automatic $1.2 trillion in cuts go into effect due to the failure of the “supercommittee” to find any deficit savings.
So in this sense, the influence of the Tea Party has helped reduce the projected growth of government. But it isn’t exactly time for proponents of limited government to be popping the champagne, either.
Conservatives are still a long way from forcing the federal government to return to the spending levels that existed prior to the Obama administration.
On the positive side, federal spending is lower than it otherwise would have been and the Republican Party has embraced serious entitlement reform such as the Medicare premium program included in the Ryan budget.
But at the same time, the actual spending cuts that House Republicans succeeded in getting enacted during pitched battles with President Obama and the Democratic Senate were relatively modest – far short of what’s needed to put America on a sustainable fiscal path.
The biggest accomplishment of the Tea Party was to get almost all Republicans to unite around Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, which is the first serious attempt to tackle the nation’s long-term entitlement crisis.
Only four House Republicans voted against the Ryan budget, and while five Republican senators also voted ‘no,’ Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did so because he thought it didn’t cut enough. This outcome was by no means inevitable.
When Ryan unveiled an earlier version of his budget during previous congresses, many Republicans kept their distance, fearing that Democrats would gain political advantage by scaring seniors with political demagoguery on Medicare cuts.
But the fact that nearly all Republicans were willing to go on record supporting Ryan’s approach speaks volumes about the success of the Tea Party.
The New York Times even reported last week that some Democrats on the supercommittee embraced Ryan’s premium support model for Medicare reform.
Instead of debating policies, which will increase federal spending by $1 trillion over the next decade, like Obamacare, Congress is now debating policies that will cut spending by $5 trillion. That is a great start and it couldn’t have happened without the Tea Party.
But Obamacare is law. The Ryan budget isn’t. Much work is still to be done.
Conn Carroll is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
