“I‘m going to cut spending big league,” President Trump said when he was campaigning for the White House.
Even before he took office, Team Trump busily scoured the federal budget for lines to cut and agencies to slash.
Trump wants cuts at the Commerce, Energy, Justice, State and Transportation departments. Some could see their budgets reduced by as much as 10 percent, with one in every five staff positions eliminated.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, are to be privatized. The National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities are on the block to be axed entirely.
Trump may think these count as “big league” spending cuts. “We’ve got to start balancing budgets,” he said during the campaign. “We can’t keep doing this.”
But while cutting the National Endowment for the Arts is worthy in its own right, it’s not going to get the budget anywhere near balanced. None of Trump’s proposed cuts will, even taken together, make a dent. They will not even scratch the mountain of federal overspending.
So far, Trump’s proposed cuts are only to discretionary spending. That’s the spending debated and approved every year in appropriation bills. While these outlays certainly deserve scrutiny and reform, all of them together make up only 30 percent of the federal budget. Mandatory spending, largely on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — hugely expensive programs protected amongst other things by being called “entitlements” — takes 63 percent of the federal budget.
It is mandatory spending that makes the federal government the behemoth that it is. But Trump has sworn off any cuts to entitlements, promising that he’ll only trim the “waste, fraud and abuse” within them.
But ending “waste, fraud and abuse” in Social Security, for example, would save just $5 billion in a program that spends $944 billion every year.
If mandatory spending is taken off the table, as are net interest payments of 7 percent, and defense spending of 15 percent, Trump will find himself with only 15 percent of the budget to trim. If he slashed every agency’s discretionary spending by 20 percent, it would amount to just a 3 percent cut in the overall budget. That’s little league fiscal restraint.*
Trump’s desire to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is rooted in a good instinct. Many people rely on these programs, and, after paying into it for decades, they expect to take their share out. But you cannot cut spending in a meaningful and effective way unless you find ways to reform entitlements and roll back the spending on them that threatens to bankrupt the country.
It won’t be politically easy, but being president always was going to be hard.
*We’ve changed the Ls in this phrase to lower case because the people at Little League International wanted to make sure no one thought it had anything to do with them. It doesn’t. We doubt readers were confused on this matter but, either way, now you know.”
