If you look closely, you can see some progress on cutting federal spending. At least that’s the conclusion of the respected Kim Strassel, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal before the Congressional Budget Office released its broad budget and economic forecast for the coming decade.
Strassel compared the past two fiscal years and found that “overall discretionary spending is down by $1 billion.” That’s “a rounding error in the federal fisc,” but she rightly adds, “when’s the last time anyone in Washington could legitimately use the word ‘less’ in appropriations totals?”
Any deficit progress is welcome, even if in only one corner of the federal budget. But that can’t obscure the bigger picture, which shows how little else matters until Americans and the politicians they elect get serious about major entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
Republicans deserve credit for realizing some savings, including through several high-profile reforms targeting “low-hanging fruit” in Washington budget parlance. For example, for decades conservatives called for defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which liberals regularly derided as “killing Big Bird.” As Politico reported in 2010, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Newt Gingrich all called for stripping subsidies for public broadcasting. It never happened — until this Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in CPB funding.
Similarly, many Republicans have long lamented the high cost of a bloated federal workforce, while doing little about it. Even Reagan, who promised to freeze federal employment, ultimately saw non-defense federal employment grow 5% on his watch. But the Trump administration last week touted private sector job growth amid sharp reductions in federal employment. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bragged that “federal employment has declined to its lowest level since 1966 — and the lowest level in recorded history as a share of the total workforce.”
The abruptness of that decline is remarkable. In just the past 12 months, federal employment declined by 324,000, a nearly 11% drop. That almost matched the 339,000-position decline across two Clinton terms, most of which came from post-Cold War military drawdowns. Remove those, and non-defense federal employment has fallen farther in the past year (-249,000) than it did across all eight years (-150,000) the Clinton administration spent “reinventing government.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill are now reviewing additional savings as part of possible “Reconciliation 2.0” reforms. Their framework promises “net deficit reduction of over $1 trillion” across the next decade, with the largest savings from narrowing noncitizen benefits. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) also wants to target welfare fraud, given dramatic abuses uncovered in Minnesota and elsewhere. Polls suggest that a majority supports addressing fraud in welfare benefits. Depending on the policy details, such legislation might be low-hanging fruit, too.
Meanwhile, newly released projections from Congress’s official scorekeeper confirm that such measures will simply not be enough to tame deficits in the coming years. Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected “the federal budget deficit in fiscal 2026 is $1.9 trillion and grows to $3.1 trillion by 2036,” due mostly to underlying trends but also last year’s tax and spending reform bill. Counting that legislation, modest growth in federal revenues will be more than overcome by “greater spending on Social Security and Medicare and growth in net interest costs.” As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget spotlights, spending on Social Security and healthcare alone will grow by trillions of dollars per year, rising from “a combined 11.2% of GDP ($3.4 trillion) in 2025 to 12.5% of GDP ($5.9 trillion) by 2036.”
Neither party has a credible plan to do anything about that, perhaps reflecting polls that indicate that most Americans prefer greater federal spending on senior entitlements. Liberal local politicians read the same polls. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just rode to power on promises of free buses and child care. Last week, his fellow democratic socialists in Los Angeles County released a manifesto of their own, calling for “a Green New Deal for public schools,” “single-payer health care,” and even “free on-site laundry services in schools.”
It is unsurprising that, as one analyst drolly puts it, “Congress has not been especially motivated to address the looming entitlement crisis due to the political risks involved.” That lack of motivation will continue to swamp any savings Congress might find from plucking every piece of low-hanging fruit within its reach.
THE U.S. HOCKEY TEAM KNELT AND THAT’S WHAT MATTERS
Matt Weidinger is a senior fellow and Rowe Scholar in opportunity and mobility studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
