Waiting for a huge popular mandate, while avoiding bipartisan effort, will achieve little.
Waiting for a huge popular mandate, while avoiding bipartisan effort, will achieve little.
H ouse Republicans who are upset at passing another continuing resolution without major spending cuts have a right to be. Spending reforms won’t happen if Congress keeps passing continuing resolutions instead of actually making budgets that specify what will be cut and how.
Spending reforms also won’t happen because of some great Republican wave that creates unified government with a massive popular mandate for spending cuts. If Republicans are waiting for that, they’ll be sadly disappointed.
Spending cuts are rarely popular with large enough of a segment of the electorate to create such a majority in the first place. The broadly popular part of the Republican message on fiscal policy is in cutting taxes, not cutting spending. Politicians use their power to reward their friends and voters in office, and both Republicans and Democrats have friends and voters to reward with fiscal goodies.
A majority of voters correctly say they believe spending is too high, but then when asked what they’d like to see cut, they say foreign aid and that’s it. As I noted when such a poll was published in March, majorities actually say spending on Medicare and Social Security, our two largest budget-busters, should be higher while simultaneously saying that overall government spending should be lower. Public opinion on this topic is incoherent and often mathematically impossible to enact.
It’s also currently impossible to enact spending cuts that some Republicans want because Republicans only control one chamber of Congress, and only with a slim majority. They have amply demonstrated how difficult it is to govern themselves with so small a majority, let alone craft spending cuts that the Senate and the president will agree to.
Speaker Mike Johnson essentially did the same thing that Kevin McCarthy did: He relied on Democratic votes to pass a continuing resolution with no major cuts to avoid a government shutdown. As NR’s editorial said, Johnson was really left with no other choice right now. Shutdowns don’t result in spending reforms, and they don’t help Republicans politically, either.
When true spending reforms happen, it won’t be because some brave conservative fighter pushes it past dissenting progressives on the strength of a huge popular mandate. It’ll probably be spurred by some kind of crisis (perhaps the coming mother of all fiscal cliffs in 2025), and it’ll need to be bipartisan if it has any chance of actually working.
Republicans talk a big game about spending cuts when they’re in the opposition, but they don’t do much to shrink spending when they’re in power. The Trump administration still saw huge deficits before Covid. The profligacy is not for lack of warning from budget experts, economists, or the Social Security trustees. Spending just keeps going.
Until it has to stop because of a crisis. And the bond market doesn’t really care which party is in power when the crisis happens, so politicians will have to work with whatever coalition that exists at the time to respond to it. And to sufficiently satisfy the bond market, which thinks beyond the next election, any true reform will need bipartisan buy-in, so that bondholders know that the next election won’t undo the reform.
This happened in Sweden, for example, where parties came together to reform the country’s unsustainable social-security program. Successful fiscal reforms in Canada happened under a Liberal Party government in the 1990s. Ireland also made successful fiscal reforms under several different governments. These reforms all involved spending cuts, but they didn’t happen because a pro-spending-cut party won a big election. They happened because there was a fiscal crisis that demanded action, and they succeeded because they had broad buy-in from across the political spectrum.
Fiscal conservatives won’t get the reforms they want when the good Republicans vanquish the evil Democrats and force spending cuts through a sea of progressive tears. Successful fiscal reforms require buy-in from across the political spectrum to reassure bondholders that their investments are safe no matter what happens on Election Day. Something like a bipartisan commission to recommend fiscal solutions, a proposal that Speaker Johnson has said he supports, could be a good start to lay the groundwork for such reforms. But it will, unfortunately, probably take a crisis to get politicians to actually implement the changes necessary to get spending under control.