President Trump’s first budget is out. And it’s not great. For a start, it completely ignores the need for entitlement reform. Indeed, the word “entitlement” does not appear once. And the debt’s biggest ally, “Medicare”, only appears in the budget’s charts.
To borrow a Trumpism, this is sad. As I’ve explained, the failure to reform entitlements is economic insanity. It will bury the nation in debt, and restrain the opportunities available to future generations.
That said, the budget does have some positives. These include long overdue efforts to reform Social Security Disability Insurance, welfare programs, federal-to-state transfer payments, and farm subsidies. Recognizing the need to strengthen American families, it also provides new funding for parental leave programs.
Yet not everyone is happy.
One cut in particular is meeting fierce criticism: healthcare research cuts.
This spending is traditionally seen as a third-rail that deserves protection from cuts. And now that the tables have shifted, liberals and their allies are in uproar. Reading many of the media reports – supposedly objective – you’d think Trump had launched a Shermanesque assault on science. The Washington Post, for example, frames its report around a minefield of numbers and complaints by Obama administration officials. It explains that Trump’s cuts to National Institutes of Health programs will reduce those outlays from $31.8 billion to $26 billion. The billions are designed to stand out.
Of course, if we employ math and consider the net percentage change in that spending, the figure is a far less alarming 18 percent. Cuts to the National Science Foundation would stand at 11 percent.
That divergent approach to the numbers highlights our necessary sense of proportion here. After all, the budget is taking on persistent deficits and slowly drowning in debt. Every honest projection of spending and revenue balances suggests that things are going to get much worse. The simple truth is that each dollar government borrows must be paid back with interest. And that interest rate disaster is one that will eventually bite us.
The National Institutes of Health might not like budget cuts, but the money has run out.
Moreover, it’s not as if savings cannot be found. Thanks to the Obama administration’s profligacy, many research programs operate absent outcome-based justification. In short, they do not offer the potential to provide bang for the buck. And we have alternatives beyond throwing money at a problem. Reform laws such as the 21st Century Cures Act offer a cheaper approach towards improving health research. To truly address our national healthcare needs, we need to spend less money, not more.
So yes, this budget is far from perfect. It does not address the key causes of our national debt. Nor, unfortunately, does it push the Pentagon to cut wasteful practices in return for new spending. But neither is this budget a disaster. It recognizes that the era of limitless spending must come to an end. And it makes small steps to begin that journey.
Tom Rogan (@TomRtweets) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a foreign policy columnist for National Review, a domestic policy columnist for Opportunity Lives, a former panelist on The McLaughlin Group and a senior fellow at the Steamboat Institute.
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