It looks like they’re going to try…
Each new iteration of wingnut budget “expert” is more extreme than the last. Meet the latest GOP budget guru Russ Vought who now works for a Trump think tank (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and is the guy who was behind the Freedom Caucus’ extortion of Kevin McCarthy:
Vought’s agenda represents a major departure from traditional conservative ideas about balancing the federal budget. Once, former house speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the main drivers of federal spending, as the answer. Vought argues for something different. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the former president’s insistence that the popular federal retirement programs — which go to the middle and upper classes as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Republicans on the untested premise that the GOP can push to obliterate almost all other major forms of federal spending, especially programs that benefit lower-income Americans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.
Vought’s budget proposal calls for cutting $9 trillion over the next decade from thousands of domestic programs — slashing funding for government agencies, student loans, and anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care and food assistance — while urging Republicans to attack the “woke bureaucracy.” Vought even advocates for freezing military spending, which is still anathema in many GOP circles.
“I’m tired of this focus on Social Security and Medicare, as if you’re climbing a mountain and can’t make any progress on that mountain until you go to the eagle’s nest on the top,” Vought told The Washington Post. “You take these cuts to the American people, and you win.”
In the 10-year budget proposal he has circulated on Capitol Hill, Vought characterizes this approach as part of an existential battle for the soul of the country. The plan includes $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, the health program for the poor; more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act; more than $400 billion in cuts to food stamps; hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to educational subsidies; and a halving of the State Department and the Labor Department, among other federal agencies. While congressional Republicans have yet to release a budget plan, House GOP lawmakers are weighing cuts to these programs as a way to reduce the debt without touching Medicare and Social Security.
“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken. That is the central and immediate threat facing the country — the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish,” Vought writes in his budget proposal. “The battle cannot wait.”
Democrats note that Washington bureaucrats aren’t the only ones who would suffer under Vought’s spending plan.
“When you’re not willing to cut defense or entitlements, and you’re cutting everything else by 30 percent, you’ve created a huge opportunity for a strong political response from Democrats,” said former Kentucky congressman John Yarmuth, a Democrat who served as House Budget Committee chairman when Vought led the White House budget office. “The Republicans ought to be careful who they’re listening to.”
Vought was a polarizing figure long before the current debt limit fight. His tenure in the Trump administration was marked by controversy over his past incendiary comments about Muslims and a decision to implement a freeze on aid to Ukraine that put him at the center of the first Trump impeachment.
His new think tank advocates on hot-button culture war issues, such as “exposing critical race theory.” The group has not disclosed its funding sources, but its annual report says it took in $1.1 million in 2021. Vought recently told C-SPAN that the organization takes no corporate money and is supported by grass-roots donors across the country.
Most awkwardly for his current position: Vought oversaw enormous increases in the national debt as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. The debt ballooned by staggering sums on Vought’s watch: $1 trillion in his first year, and a whopping $4 trillion in his second, as Congress agreed on a bipartisan basis to spend trillions of dollars in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump repeatedly overruled fiscal hawks, like Vought, in approving the new spending.
Now, with a Democrat in the White House, Vought says he wants to use the leverage of the debt ceiling to force Democrats to rein in a federal bureaucracy that he views as abusing its power against American citizens. For example, he said, the government is spending money to detain people who participated in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We view our role as almost acting like a shadow OMB on the outside,” Vought told The Post.
Even some Republicans who admire Vought’s expertise say his budget blueprint is based on unrealistic assumptions. To make it balance in 10 years, for example, Vought’s budget also projects that the number of working Americans will increase by 14.5 million people more than Congressional Budget Office predicts, which would allow the American economy to grow faster, reducing the deficit by another $3.8 trillion.
Vought argues that Americans will pour into the job market because of cuts to federal aid programs, but his figures are almost certainly unrealistic, particularly because of the GOP’s opposition to higher levels of immigration, said William Galston, a former domestic policy official in President Bill Clinton’s administration who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a D.C.-based think tank.
“Russ is an expert. He knows the details; he knows the budget backwards and forwards,” said one former GOPofficial, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe a former colleague. “But he’s selling conservatives a fantasy, which is achieving a balanced budget without cutting anything popular.
“We’re going to balance the budget by ‘ending woke?’ Give me a break.”
They’re playing their usual games, pretending to care about debt when we know for a fact that they don’t since every time they have a Republican president they happily spend like drunken sailors. This whole exercise is designed to attack Democrats for spending on people who son’t deserve it — racial minorities, immigrants, city dwellers etc, who are taking the bread out of the mouths of Real Americans. Underlying this whole thing is a dedication to keeping taxes low for rich people by hoodwinking ignorant Republican voters into voting against their self-interest so they can express their racism and resentment.
They clearly haven’t done enough losing yet.