For one night, Democrats and Republicans packed a Capitol Hill hotel Tuesday to celebrate a cause that has otherwise been abandoned in Washington: Fiscal conservatism.
Fiscal hawks are in political exile. The federal budget deficit is headed toward a trillion dollars for the 2019 fiscal year, but neither President Trump nor top congressional leaders have demonstrated any eagerness to curb it. In fact, they’ve acted on a bipartisan basis to increase spending.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, however, an organization with a long history of advocating for lower deficits, brought together the political bigwigs still publicly identified with the cause of deficit reduction for their annual dinner celebration on Tuesday night.
In attendance were former Federal Reserve chairwoman and current Brookings Institution scholar Janet Yellen; Sens. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican; former North Dakota Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad; and Vermont Democratic congressman Peter Welch, among others.
The organization has become “a bit of a punch line,” CRFB president Maya MacGuineas said jokingly in her speech. The steak and mashed potato dinner followed an open bar reception on the rooftop, where budget chatter and booze flowed side by side.
CRFB co-chair and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said during his remarks that the name of the organization itself, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, was a contradiction in the current climate.
Panetta added that, although the organization had had a number of successes and wins with the budget in the past, “the bad news is: It’s all gone to hell now.”
The attendees, though, still touted the role that CRFB plays in helping accomplish that goal.
“We do have a great deal of problems with our budget, but it’s not because of a group like this failing,” Paul told the Washington Examiner. “The group is necessary, even more necessary than it was before because Congress is so bad.”
Paul laid blame for the expanding federal deficit at the hands of the electorate and Congress instead.
“The problem is the electorate elects people who think that they want us to bring home goodies,” Paul said. “When I was first elected I said I’m not bringing home any bacon. But people don’t care, they just want to give people stuff and they don’t care about the consequences.”
CRFB, which was started in the 1980s by two former members of the House Budget Committee, just years ago enjoyed having its views shared at the highest levels of government.
The Tea Party-influenced GOP and the Obama-led Democratic party sought to lower deficits for much of the 2010s. And the CFRB and their data were cited frequently in reports about deficit reduction talks, and criticized by liberals who wanted greater recovery spending.
Once upon a time CRFB even had a warmer relationship with Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff and the nominal director of the Office of Management and Budget.
As a representative from South Carolina, Mulvaney was one of the biggest deficit hawks in Congress. He criticized his GOP colleagues for passing a budget that went around spending limits in 2015 to increase military spending. CRFB highlighted his commentary on their website in 2015. They even praised his appointment as OMB Director in 2017, saying that his nomination testimony suggested that he “will be a strong voice for fiscal responsibility within the Trump administration.”
More recently, however, CRFB has been critical of the Trump administration and its budgets that Mulvaney has presided over in the past couple years. For example, it faulted the White House for “budget gimmicks” in one paper, and in another called Trump and Mulvaney’s 3% economic growth target “pure folly.”
Earlier this year, Mulvaney himself did an about-turn and said that “nobody cares” about the ballooning deficit.
Panetta, who also was OMB director under Bill Clinton, while acknowledging that there is little support right now for balancing the budget, said that CRFB still has “credibility on the numbers, which is really important.”
“The credibility of the committee on these budget issues is something everybody respects, and that’s what counts,” Panetta said.
