Let’s be honest: Congress was never really going to reform entitlements under House speaker Paul Ryan. The subject is campaign poison—the only way lawmakers would act proactively is if congressional terms were measured in decades instead of years.
But with the looming departure of the Wisconsin Republican, overhauling Medicare and Social Security is on indefinite hold. Ryan has been the most prominent supporter in Washington of this work, often perched alone at the far end of a very thin limb. It defined his tenure as budget chairman and made a B-level committee influential. It accompanied him to the speakership: “We will not duck the tough issues,” he said in his first speech on the job in 2015. And there is no tougher issue than entitlement spending.
On Wednesday, two and a half years later, he reflected briefly on his progress. “I’m extremely proud of the fact that the House passed the biggest entitlement reform bill considered in the House of Representatives,” he said, referring to last year’s American Health Care Act, which partially repealed Obamacare and reworked Medicaid. “Do I regret the fact that the Senate did not pass this? Yes. But I feel from all the budgets that I’ve passed, normalizing entitlement reform, pushing the cause of entitlement reform, and the House passing entitlement reform, I’m very proud of that fact.”
“But yeah, of course, more work needs to be done,” he added.
The thing is, there’s no one around to do it. Presidential leadership is essential to tackling entitlements, and Donald Trump is not interested. He explicitly promised not to cut Social Security or Medicare and once suggested that he could eliminate $19 trillion of debt with trade. It’s ludicrous, from an economic standpoint, but instructive about the man’s policy focus. As Steve Hayes wrote in a December interview with the speaker, “Ryan concedes that Trump is opposed to tackling the two entitlements that drive the national debt—Medicare and Social Security—but he’s determined to press his case. ‘We’re never going to give up on entitlement reform and the things we need to do to get the debt under control,’ Ryan says.”
Fiscal conservatives will no longer have a champion of Ryan’s sway in the Capitol come January—and it’ll be a long time before they have one in the White House.
This timeline is important. The speaker’s retirement announcement came two days after the Congressional Budget Office released its latest long-term spending projections. There was no news under the section labeled “Trust Funds” for people who read this sort of stuff regularly—just a reminder. CBO forecasted that the balances of the two largest trust funds, Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (Social Security) and Hospital Insurance (Medicare), will plummet in the next 15 years. “According to CBO’s most recent long-term projections, the balance of the OASI trust fund will be exhausted in calendar year 2031,” it wrote. The HI trust fund has until 2026.
By then, either there will be a Democrat in the Oval Office, or a Republican not named Trump will have been president for a year. What made Ryan unique among elected advocates of entitlement reform was his urgency. He wanted Congress and the White House and the American people to get ahead of the problem. Now, like his tenure, they’re out of time.
