One of the knocks on Ronald Reagan, both by movement conservatives at the time and by present-day right-wing critics of the conservative movement, was that Reagan did little or nothing to stop the growth of the federal government. There’s a good deal of truth to that: Reagan didn’t dismantle any of the modern entitlement state, eliminate Cabinet-level departments, or otherwise raze significant components of the budget or a lot of parts of the regulatory state so that they could not resume their upward trajectory under future administrations. There are also reasons why: Republicans never had control of the House during Reagan’s tenure (they had a slim working majority his first two years by de facto coalition with conservative Democrats, but that majority was more solid on tax cuts and defense spending than on real budget cuts), plus Reagan had a lot of priorities, and he couldn’t get to all of them. A huge amount of his attention was focused on rebuilding the economy and winning the Cold War, to say nothing of beginning the process of remaking the federal judiciary.
All of that being said, Daniel Mitchell makes the case that Reagan’s record on domestic spending was better than we remember. He’s got charts and a video explaining his point, but this graph of domestic spending (non-defense discretionary and entitlements) as a share of economic output captures the bottom line:
