When President Joe Biden released his fiscal year (FY) 2024 budget, the summary notes in the document claimed it would reduce the deficit “by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade.” While the $6.9 trillion budget proposal is called the “Skinny Budget,” it is lacking a key component that every president other than Joe Biden has included in their budgets — a detailed list of spending cuts.
When he was vice president, Biden led the negotiations for the Budget Control Act, which established spending caps and led to the inclusion of $1 trillion in spending cuts in President Barack Obama’s FY 2012 budget. Now, President Biden has introduced an out-of-control budget, which will increase the national debt to more than $50 trillion in the next 10 years. President Obama, like his predecessors dating back to President Reagan and his successor, President Trump, provided a list of spending cuts and consolidations, including “more than $340 billion in entitlement savings from Medicare and Medicaid, and $250 billion from other mandatory programs” in the FY 2012 budget and similar proposals for the rest of his term in office. President Biden has never produced any such list.
Rather than get the record levels of spending that have caused the highest inflation in 40 years under control, President Biden has proposed more spending to expand the size and scope of the federal government, including hiring more customer service officers for various departments and agencies. The president also expands the worst idea from the Inflation Reduction Act by subjecting more prescription drugs to price controls. These provisions have already caused research and development on several drugs to cease and will cause even more harm to innovation in the pharmaceutical marketplace by further reducing the numbers of future cures and treatments.
The budget also continues the administration’s efforts to tax the “wealthy,” calling for $5.5 trillion in taxes to pay for the spending increases. No one believes that these taxes will only impact those making $400,000 or less, as the president keeps promising. Instead, he should heed what he heard as vice president, when President Obama said, “The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession,” a sentiment shared by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
The president’s lack of spending cuts is not due to his failure to ask where they are, which he does frequently; it is his failure to find them, as they are readily available. Every year since 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has produced a report on duplicative and overlapping federal programs. The 2022 report identified 94 actions Congress and federal agencies can take to increase the $552 billion that has already been saved from implementing the recommendations provided in prior reports. GAO also provides a High-Risk List of federal programs that are vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, or programs that need transformation and issues other reports spotlighting duplicative and wasteful spending. For example, on May 31, 2022, GAO reported that there were more than 133 broadband deployment programs across 15 federal agencies. This report deserves special attention after Congress has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars that can be used for broadband programs through both COVID “relief” bills and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The Congressional Budget Office released two reports in December 2022 that provided 76 deficit-cutting recommendations for mandatory and discretionary spending. And Citizens Against Government Waste’s annual Prime Cuts report for 2022 has 555 recommendations that would save $3.9 trillion over five years, one of many non-governmental proposals with such proposals.
Instead of doling out trillions of dollars and creating new programs, the Biden administration and Congress should conduct a top-down review of existing programs to determine which are successfully meeting their objectives. Taxpayers should be encouraged that House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-Texas) called for a line-by-line review of the budget “to identify programs that do not require additional investments” and asking administration officials to explain to the committee “how every dollar in this budget would be used.”
The Appropriations Committee hearings and oversight of federal spending being carried out by other House committees should provide many answers to President Biden’s question of where to cut spending. And perhaps in his next budget, he will reinstitute the tradition he has ignored by making his own proposals to reduce expenditures by the federal government and avoid increasing the national debt to more than $50 trillion in 2033.
Tom Schatz is president of CAGW.