Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute explains for National Review Online readers why he’s not thrilled about the prospects for fiscal restraint in a new Congress run by Republicans.
The new Republican-led Congress has barely been sworn in, yet there are already troubling signs that Republicans are slipping back into their big-spending ways.
The election ballots had barely been counted in November when Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama suggested that the House abandon the ban on earmarks that it had enforced since 2010. The Republican caucus rejected Rogers’s proposal, but amazingly, 67 Republicans backed it. That more than a quarter of House Republicans would let congressmen slip pet spending projects into bills should have sent up warning flags everywhere.
Shortly thereafter, Congress approved the $1.1 trillion “CRomnibus” spending bill funding the government through 2015. While many conservatives objected to the bill’s continued funding for Obamacare and its failure to challenge President Obama’s executive action on immigration, it was less noticed that the spending measure locked in the December 2013 Ryan-Murray budget agreement, which partially reversed some of budget cuts from the sequester. The result is that spending will be roughly $21.6 billion higher in 2015 than it would have been if the sequester budget caps had remained in place. The budget deal also included an additional $64 billion for overseas military operations (including $5 billion to fight ISIS).
The sequester caps are scheduled to resume in 2016, but already some Republicans are looking to undo them. In the Senate, defense hawks, led by John McCain and Lindsey Graham, plan to make reversal of sequester caps on defense spending a top priority. And while some Senate Appropriations Committee staff have been quoted as saying this could be done by simply refusing to budget at the reduced spending levels, thereby eliminating the caps, Democrats would almost certainly demand increases in domestic spending to maintain the one-to-one ratio included in both the original sequester agreement and the Ryan-Murray deal (which increased spending for domestic programs such as Head Start, the EPA, and home weatherization in exchange for loosening the caps on defense).