In a federal government seemingly incapable of sticking to the necessary and proper, 2024 interest payments on debt topping $34 trillion are set to surpass defense spending as well as Medicare outlays.
That ought to be a wake-up call as Biden prepares to send his fiscal year 2025 spending request to Congress on March 11, and as Congress continues battling over not just aid to Ukraine and Israel but still-unresolved 2024 domestic spending.
Not everything can or should be done in Washington, whose economic interventionism and cradle-to-grave custodial attitudes toward able-bodied citizens have created the debt crisis. Mere “waste, fraud and abuse” or “improper payments” are the least of it. Rather, Congress’s disregard of enumerated powers and its creation of swarms of officers wielding the carrots and sticks of subsidies, procurement contracts, societal transfer payments and more to the tune of trillions brought us here.
Biden routinely touts spending programs on infrastructure, for example, but particularly notable last year was Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitch Landrieu’s boasting of “over $220 billion in funding for over 32,000 projects, reaching over 4,500 communities in every state in the nation, all of the territories, and D.C.”
That mass of projects is bipartisan. One rarely sees downscaling or subtraction at a pace matching such unmanageable additions. The Food and Drug Administration’s long-awaited elimination of the Board of Tea Experts was a pitiful, almost laughable, exception. Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-Missouri) “Abolish Government DEI Act,” seeking to eliminate more than 40 “Offices of Diversity” (or similar labels) erected mostly since the pandemic, is one notable attempt to offset the zeal for expanding programs meant to become inextricable and self-serving of bureaucracy.
Congress is contemplating debt reduction and regulatory reform commissions, as it very well should. No matter how difficult, bipartisan buy-in must go beyond stop-gap solutions and expand to encompass repealing or amending decades-old enabling statutes, to privatizations, and to the abolition of departments and agencies responsible for bloated federal functions. Reassigning governance roles to states and civil society where they belong instead of elevating everything to the federal level is the task. In the pursuit, policymakers can acknowledge that many societal metrics (like K-12 educational achievement) are worsened or at least not improved by federal government programs.
The federal government’s actual constitutional requirements—such as the 10-year census, effectuating treaties, the post, coinage, or ensuring the “Assistance of Counsel” for “defence”—are relatively few. Debt warriors need to take that to heart.
As quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn noted that:
“Education was a thing to behold in the United States long before there was a Department. Likewise people had houses before we had a Department of Housing and Urban Development; they traveled before we had a Department of Transportation; they traded before we had a Department of Commerce. … A federal government with four cabinet officers would be a federal government doing what it has to do.”
Usually, there ought not be a law. Even cutting-edge sectors like telecommunications and (related infrastructures like EV networks), drones, driverless and electric cars, artificial intelligence and more are beholden to expensive and bloated regulatory agencies that pre-existed the innovations, and whose statutory authority to write rules for the new rollouts can be questionable.
Occasionally, policymakers do make a splash proposing worthy departmental eliminations.
For example Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) last year reintroduced a bill (H.R. 899) that, in its entirety, reads “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2023.”
That of course did not happen, but it’s a sound model to emulate because downsizing is not always inherently a partisan sentiment. Democrats, too, have sought abolition, rollbacks and significant reforms of, for example, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the National Security Agency. While the gripes may differ, DHS and NSA are among those that have caught the attention of Republicans, too
In recent months we saw GOP primary hopefuls such as Vivek Ramaswamy propose abolitions or reformats of bodies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI.
With respect to the chainsaw approach, in the 1990s, then-Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio) proposed eliminating the Departments of Commerce, Education and Energy (along with 14 other agencies), 68 commissions and 283 programs. The effort failed, of course, but the debt tsunami may force the issue sooner rather than later.
For the squeamish, “abolishing” tends to mean not outright termination, but returning authorities to the states. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at one time proposed, along with the the Kasich-era targets, abolishing the Department of Housing and Urban Development and nearly two dozen other agencies and commissions, often putting power in the hands of states.
The ambitious “Sunset Inefficient and Unaccountable Government Act” (H.R. 7334) from former Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Alabama) in the 115th Congress would have added to the aforementioned targets the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Labor, Interior and Transportation. Other bills over the last decade-plus have separately sought to terminate the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Safety Administration and more.
If Congress does not act even in the face of today’s necessities, a president has certain powers of executive branch reorganization and rollback, but this is not something we could expect from the Biden administration. By contrast, the Trump-era Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century: Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations proposed de-duping, shuffling and streamlining of various programs like food aid and safety, housing, and marine fisheries, as well as certain limited department-level consolidation (of Education and Labor). More regularly, the Government Accountability Office annually reports on program overlap, duplication and waste. But the big moves are going to require both parties in Congress.
Whatever occurs—and something must, since, paraphrasing the famous quote, “when something can’t go on forever, it’ll stop—the necessary and proper rather than the unnecessary and improper federal functions would in all likelihood best be returned to the states. Crucially, the money must remain with states (and taxpayers) as well, rather than making a circuit to Washington only to return as grants-in-aid that approach $1 trillion annually, assuming they have not already exceeded that level. Ending federal subsidies and grants-in-aid alone would solve many of today’s fiscal problems.
Challenges will include the usual political opposition, institutional inertia, and complexities of dismantling longstanding structures. But some of the legwork has been done by the likes of the Congressional Budget Office in outlining legalities, complications and budgetary effects of departmental eliminations and reorganizations. On privatizations and transfers of functions, a vast body of work exists on constitutionality and legal issues, as outlined, for example, by the Congressional Research Service.
Congress, in its deliberations over the coming weeks, needs to confront the reality of chronic trillion-dollar deficits and the economic/social ripple effects of the extraordinary interventions all that red ink enables. At this moment of what out to be alarmed reckoning, the bureaucracies have been granted unwarranted and unsustainable new leases on life in recent COVID and post-COVID legislation on infrastructure, energy, tech policy and even on—in a perplexing lack of self-awareness—“inflation.”
The solution for the overreach that has created our debt predicament is for Congress to say no to it. Legislators need to say “out with the old,” but also must avoid adding more of the unnecessary and improper new to their recent transgressions.
Whether initially bold or incremental, the federal government needs major new constraints. Policymakers can be strategic in selecting which departments or agencies to target, prioritizing for ejection those programs overlapping with what are or should be state or local government functions. They will need to build support among stakeholders and the public and ably communicate the benefits (like cost savings, increased efficiency, reduced federal intrusion and increased individual freedom).
The focus on reducing the size and scope of government should and must be a bipartisan effort; but the reckoning, whether a cooperative or confrontational one, seems unavoidable. We should all prefer cooperation.