It’s Time to Take Unserious Presidential Budgets Seriously
The president’s fiscal 2027 budget is out, and I have two reactions. The first will sound familiar: Like so many budgets before it, this is not a serious effort to put America’s government on a sustainable path. The second is more important: It would be a mistake to dismiss it as just another unserious document. That is exactly how we got here.
Start with what the new budget does and does not do. It’s not a comprehensive fiscal plan. It covers only about one-third of federal spending, focusing heavily on discretionary choices and largely ignoring the autopilot spending that drives our long-term debt.
The headline item is defense spending. The administration proposes a jump of $445 billion to reach $1.5 trillion. That’s a 42 percent increase in one year, the largest since the Korean War, raising defense spending to roughly 4.4 percent of GDP.
This is not a onetime surge that will simply recede when things calm down in Iran. It’s an expansion of the spending base. Bureaucracies and procurement contracts do not shrink after a buildup. And procurement cycles, contracting, and industrial capacity do not scale quickly. The Pentagon cannot efficiently absorb that kind of increase overnight.
So, whatever one thinks about our national security needs, this budget commits the country to trillions in additional cumulative spending layered atop existing obligations. The fiscal commitment is permanent even if the operational absorption is slow.
The rest of the proposed budget is largely cosmetic. The Trump administration calls for cutting roughly 10 percent from nondefense discretionary spending, but these are the same kinds of proposals that appear every year of Republican administrations and rarely survive Congress and the appropriations process. They are politically easy to announce, difficult to enact, and — if they were to survive — insufficient to change the fiscal trajectory.
More importantly, this budget avoids the core problems. It proposes no meaningful reforms to Social Security or Medicare, the drivers of our debt. It offers no comprehensive tax plan. It does not present a coherent 10-year path for deficits or debt. It is, in effect, a partial spending request without any underlying fiscal architecture.
Republicans must choose. They cannot implement endless tax cuts, raise defense spending by 42 percent, and also refuse to reform Social Security and Medicare. Something has to give. Cutting foreign aid, trimming waste, or reducing immigration-related expenses won’t begin to close the gap in any meaningful way.
Democrats face the same reckoning. They cannot be the party of expanded entitlements, climate spending coupled with degrowth demands, student debt relief, and the preservation of every program without pushing America further toward a fiscal disaster. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not a fiscal plan. The arithmetic does not come close to closing a gap of this magnitude even under the most optimistic assumptions.
The presidential budget relies on overly optimistic assumptions of its own, the likes of which have characterized federal budgeting for decades. Economic growth projections of around 3 percent are treated as baseline despite a workforce that is barely growing and policy choices that actively constrain the labor supply. That would require sustained productivity growth at levels we have rarely achieved outside of exceptional periods. AI may well boost productivity, but assuming that it will deliver decade-long 3 percent growth is not serious budgeting.
This is not merely an accounting problem. When markets do not believe official growth projections, they immediately revise down their expectations for future tax revenues and therefore expect smaller future fiscal surpluses. Those revised expectations are reflected in bond prices and, ultimately, in the price level. Optimistic budget assumptions produce bad spreadsheets and can erode fiscal credibility in real time.
Meanwhile, the bill is already arriving. Interest costs have nearly tripled since 2001, and within a decade, they will consume nearly one-third of federal tax revenue. Within a few decades, interest could absorb closer to two-thirds of annual taxes — and that’s under relatively benign assumptions about interest rates.
This is the quiet crisis unfolding. It is the interaction of too much debt, rising interest costs, and persistent political unwillingness to act.
Knowing all this, it would be easy to treat this budget as one more unserious document and move on. But that would miss the point, because it is not an outlier. It is part of a pattern that has been building for years and has only accelerated since the Great Recession.
That pattern must end. Year after year, presidents of both parties submit budgets that avoid necessary tradeoffs. Year after year, Congress fails to impose discipline. And year after year, the debt trajectory worsens, imposing a growing burden on the vibrancy of the private sector.
Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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