A Once Frugal GOP Loosens Grip on Wallet

A funny thing is happening on the way to this fall’s budget deal: Once-frugal Republicans are spending oodles of money.

For all the talk of across-the-board cuts, spending caps and the sanctity of Social Security funds, the GOP-controlled Congress has proposed spending roughly $30 billion more this fiscal year than last. And in some programs, they even brag of outspending President Clinton.

It adds up to a fundamental shift in strategy, with Republicans backing away from the cause that swept them to control of Congress in the 1994 elections: reducing the size and scope of government.

“Nobody’s talking about cutting government anymore,” said Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that the 12 spending bills approved by Congress--plus the last one that the Senate takes up today--would provide about $603 billion for fiscal 2000, up from $574 billion last year. Some of the increase goes to defense, a traditional GOP priority. But it also includes proposals to spend even more than Clinton requested on Democratic mainstays such as education and health research.

Meanwhile, many of the programs that Republicans vowed to eliminate when they came to power--the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, funding for bilingual education--are alive and kicking. Of the 50 largest programs originally slated for elimination by the GOP in 1995, a Cato Institute study found half of them had larger budgets in 1999 than they did four years earlier.

“We have lost our courage in advocating smaller government,” said Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.). “The energy to continue this pressure on reducing government spending has been lost.”

Conservative Republicans can take some credit for slowing the growth of government spending in recent years. And government spending as a share of the national economy has dropped significantly: from 8.8% in 1990 to 6.6% in 1998. But as a party, the GOP has put the issue on the rhetorical back burner. Once the scourges of big government, Republicans now portray themselves as defenders of Social Security. Under that new budget strategy, proposed government spending would increase more than 5% over the fiscal year that just ended.

The shift is, in part, a matter of pure pragmatism. Republicans, eager to avoid conflict with a popular president, are putting more money in some spending bills to make it harder for Clinton to veto them.

But the change also reflects something more basic: Republicans’ smaller-government agenda, once central to their appeal to voters, has fallen victim to the booming economy and big government surpluses.

The change in circumstances is frustrating to some of the party’s hardiest fiscal conservatives, who sought in vain to keep Congress from overspending the $580-billion budget cap set for this year in the 1997 budget-balancing law. Still, many conservatives find a silver lining in the party’s new focus on Social Security. By pledging to craft a budget that does not tap into Social Security revenues, they argue, the GOP has found a more politically potent way to impose some check on the growth of government spending.

“Am I disappointed we haven’t met the caps? Yes,” said House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio). “But is it natural that with the surplus people will relax? Yes. At least we have found one restraining wall, and that’s Social Security.”

The heated rhetoric flaring around the current budget debate obscures just how small are the differences between Clinton and Congress, compared with the issues that divided them when Republicans first came to power, brimming with government-slashing fervor. Back in 1995, the new House Appropriations Committee chairman, then-Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), brought a machete to his first panel meeting to dramatize his commitment to cutting programs. Rambunctious first-term conservatives talked about pulling government programs up by the roots rather than trimming their branches.

That searing political experience made many Republicans more cautious about pushing for big spending cuts. Still, the shrink-the-government spirit was fervent enough that House Republicans produced an annual list of programs they had eliminated.

But once the budget was balanced, many Republicans groped for a new rationale for limiting spending. They began this year swearing fealty to the prevailing budget caps. But with a narrow majority in the House, it quickly became clear that they could not keep that promise.

Party leaders quietly shifted course and drew a new budgetary line in the sand: They would not spend so much that they dipped into the Social Security trust fund. That decision allowed Republicans to spend at least $14 billion more than they would have if they had stuck with the spending cap.

Spending bills the Republicans crafted would earmark some of that largess for the Department of Education, the agency the GOP once swore to abolish. Republicans provided an education budget of $35 billion--$300 million more than Clinton requested.

Spending for the National Institutes of Health would rise 15%, to $18 billion. Republicans pumped up transportation outlays from $39 billion last year to $45 billion, including dozens of local projects requested by individual lawmakers. Even if the 1% across-the-board cut the Republicans are now pushing is applied, those education, health and transportation budgets would see real increases in spending.

Still, Republicans’ Social Security gambit has helped them draw the line on even bigger spending increases than some Democrats might want.

In fact, despite overheated rhetoric from both sides during the current budget debate, Democrats and Republicans have moved closer to each other on the spending issue in the last five years.

“Here we are with the biggest budget surplus we have had since Eisenhower was president and, at least for now, you don’t see many Democrats clamoring for big new spending,” said Moore of the Cato Institute. “There has been a convergence of the two parties on the fiscal direction of the country, and that’s a big change from five years ago.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Budget Record

Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 election with ambitious plans to reduce the size and scope of government. But in the five years since, Congress has cut the budget’s discretionary portion only once--in fiscal 1996.

*Excludes $7.2 billion provided for emergency farm assistance.

*

Source: Congressional Budget Office

*