Lowry: The fiscal hawks in D.C. never win

It feels like 2013 again.

Back then, a beleaguered Republican Speaker of the House was forced into a government shutdown by firebrands in his caucus who considered him insufficiently pure.

A revolution in GOP politics has happened since, and yet a beleaguered Republican Speaker of the House was forced to the verge of a government shutdown by firebrands in his caucus who consider him insufficiently pure. The shutdown was averted.

The difference is that Mike Johnson — unlike his predecessor, John Boehner — wasn’t just dealing with an internal revolt; he also had the most powerful Republican politician on the planet and his extremely influential sidekick blast his handiwork, namely, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, respectively.

Johnson did make a misstep with the so-called continuing resolution to keep the government funded past a looming deadline. In negotiations, he let it balloon into a true monstrosity. What was supposed to be a stop-gap measure to avoid a government shutdown became a vehicle to pass new legislation in a last-minute, 1,500-page bill that no one was going to read.

The episode shows that Republican hostility to spending still exists a decade after Tea Party Republicans roiled the establishment demanding massive deficit reduction.

Now, though, this reflex has taken a new form. It is expressed in fierce opposition to “the swamp” — in this case, business-as-usual logrolling in Congress — and excitement about the prospects for Musk’s DOGE, the new Department of Government Efficiency.

The bipartisan agreement in Washington, D.C., to perpetually spend more money is indeed disgraceful, and DOGE could be a welcome force for new thinking. Yet, both of these are really beside the point when considering the red ink that one day — probably not tomorrow and maybe not even several years from now — could cause a horrendous fiscal crisis.

There are idiotic programs and senseless regulations aplenty, but the money that can be found in the federal couch cushions is relatively minimal. Most federal spending has strong public backing, and so a $6.8 trillion budget that looks like a juicy target is very hard to bring under control.

The math is as brutal as ever. Social Security and Medicare, together with veteran’s benefits and other health programs, account for more than half of the budget. One of Trump’s signature promises, of course, is not to touch Medicare and Social Security. Then, interest on the debt and defense spending take up about another $2 trillion.

What’s left is, in the scheme of things, a pittance, and even programs in this category have constituencies.

It is telling what else was happening in Washington during the shutdown threat. Congress was busy working to pass, on a bipartisan basis, the Social Security Fairness Act at a cost of roughly $200 billion over 10 years. It doesn’t matter that the legislation is a poorly designed giveaway to public employees that experts across the spectrum think is a bad idea.

This points to another similarity with 2013. All the drama is unlikely to alter our dreadful fiscal trajectory.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review