On the campaign trail in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump promised to eliminate the entire national debt, not just the annual budget deficit, within eight years as president. On Monday, after three years in office and running the deficit up by more than $1 trillion in 2019, the Office of Management and Budget unveiled a $4.8 trillion budget proposal for 2021 that wouldn’t even come close to fulfilling his campaign promises.
It’s another reminder that, whatever his successes, Trump’s woeful handling of the budget and debt is massively disappointing.
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Of course, the budget proposal the administration released on Monday is just that — a proposal. Congress will write its own budget, taking the president’s version as a mere suggestion. But it is still worth examining as a statement of Trump’s intent. As such, it’s not exactly promising.
The sum total of federal spending proposed by the OMB in this budget is $4.8 trillion. That’s not exactly a fiscally conservative vision of what the size of the federal government should be.
The proposal does include a timeline that the administration says would lead to the elimination of the budget deficit within 15 years. This simply means that the revenue the government brings in would balance out with expenditures within 15 years so that no new debt accrues beyond that point. It does nothing to pay down the existing $23 trillion in national debt (which would actually be a much larger number after 15 years) as Trump once overambitiously promised.
But to get even that meager debt reduction, this proposal relies on ridiculously optimistic projections about economic growth and interest rates. Reality is unlikely to cooperate with OMB’s number-fudging, especially over a long-term period — to say nothing of the fact that the nation is already overdue for a recession, judging by historical averages.
This document does contain some decent cuts to various federal bureaucracies, but it fails to address the drivers of the long-term problem — entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. And Trump’s budget includes increases to one of the most bloated discretionary spending items of all: the military budget. The United States spends more money on its military than the next seven biggest-spending nations combined. If Trump’s budget cut even $100 billion from the military, his proposal could reduce the deficit by roughly 10%, and we’d still spend far more than any of our geopolitical rivals without sacrificing our safety.
There are some good things in the proposal, for which the administration deserves credit, such as the institution of work requirements on able-bodied, childless adults who receive assistance through Medicaid. I’m also happy to see this proposal include large increases in funding to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic and substantial proposed cuts to the bloated Department of Education.
But on the whole, Trump has dropped the ball in the area of government spending, even if his administration has otherwise given fiscal conservatives a lot to like.
