This week, Congress debated the merits of various policy riders that members would like to see jammed through the omnibus (which must be passed before the March 23 deadline), ranging from internet sales taxes to gun policies to immigration. The House version settled on including $1.57 billion for wall building and border security, fully funding a 2.4 percent pay raise for troops, the Fix NICS Act, and the Student, Teachers and Officers Preventing School Violence Act, among many other things. While not everything is set in stone and small government advocates are likely to be disappointed by the final product, President Trump’s “An American Budget,” released in February, has some wishlist items for 2019 that Congress would be wise to include in amendments to the omnibus bill. Instead of focusing on including every member’s erroneously expensive pet project, this wish list includes some cuts and reforms that would lead us away from trillion dollar deficits that are projected next year.
Separate from the actual budget, the Office of Management and Budget includes a detailed, 200-plus page document with major savings and reforms. In this document, the Trump administration has highlighted nearly $50 billion in discretionary savings in addition to more than $1.7 trillion direct spending cuts through 2028. With the recent budget deal threatening to add more than $1.5 trillion to the debt, and with $1 trillion deficits lurking around the corner, Congress should take these cuts into consideration and address the unsustainable path we are on.
Last year, before the horrendously expensive budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that debt held by the public would skyrocket. It would jump from $15 trillion or 77 percent of GDP at the end of 2017 to 91 percent of GDP ($26 trillion) by 2027. That would mean public debt would be the highest since 1947 and more than double the average over the past half-century in relation to GDP. This is a rosy outlook. Military spending is set to rise even more next year, so cost savings are essential to putting the U.S. back on a sustainable fiscal path.
The White House’s blueprint for savings includes many things fiscal hawks can latch on to. They propose discretionary cuts by eliminating programs in every department, including the Community Development Block Grant and the Office of Education within NASA, programs that are wasteful and do not provide a great enough impact to defend their funding. The administration also proposed cutting funding towards acquiring federal lands and Overseas Contingency Operations within the State Department, often referred to by both Democrats and Republicans as a slush fund used solely to fund foreign missions outside the budget caps.
There are also proposed cuts to the mandatory side, or in other words, the spending that is on autopilot and is not voted on every year. Big cuts can be found in reforms to the farm bill, like limiting crop insurance premium subsidies, which pay rich farmers if something happens to their crops, and fixing conservation efforts so that multiple departments and agencies are not working duplicatively — just those two proposals would save an estimated $35 billion over 10 years. Some of the proposals that were considered off the table, like to Medicare, were also suggested in the budget. This includes things like reforming payments to hospitals and physicians and reducing coverage of bad debts to levels comparable to the private sector.
Though not everything in Trump’s budget was encouraging for fiscal conservatives. The budget requests additional funds for several departments, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services. The budget also proposes an 18 percent increase to the Department of Energy’s National Security Administration, totaling $15.1 billion. About $2 billion of the increase will be modernizing nuclear weapons and technology (as if the 6,780 warheads the U.S. has weren’t enough). None of the proposed cuts target the Department of Defense, where potential spending cuts are plentiful and have the ability to save trillions in the long-run. Reforming unemployment benefits within the VA or purchasing F-16s and F/A-18 aircraft instead of F-35s are a few viable solutions that save billions over the decade. Reassessing our foreign policy goals and the number of bases we have stationed overseas would save even more money. It’s disappointing that these costly measures were overlooked.
Before appropriating billions in the omnibus, Congress should look at the White House for some guidance on how they can cut spending. After passing a deficit-soaring budget deal earlier this month, and far from budget-neutral tax reform, Congress must eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in order to get the country on the right track. To those with a more “radical” view, the major savings and reforms document doesn’t go far enough. While not everything in Trump’s budget is politically palatable, many ideas attract bipartisan support and should be implemented. It’s not clear when investors will determine that the national debt is too risky for their money, but what we do know is that we aren’t moving in the right direction.
Jake Grant (@thejakegrant) is a Young Voices Advocate and outreach director for the Coalition to Reduce Spending. The views expressed here are his own.
