President Bush made a pass at promising deficit reduction in his State of the Union address this week. But the $822 billion spending bill that passed the U.S. Senate Thursday is good reason why the public should be skeptical about promises that a new era of spending restraint in Washington is in the offing.
The bill shows all of Washington’s worst instincts at work. It is loaded with unnecessary pork-barrel projects in the $373 billion directed for discretionary spending. The true budget impact is masked by accounting gimmicks. It is embedded with controversial policy decisions that don’t belong in a spending bill. It drives deficit spending to new highs.
With this vote, Congress has approved $50 million to build an indoor rainforest in Iowa. It has served up $200,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and $500,000 for a trolley bus at Disneyland. All told, the bill contains 7,931 projects costing $10.7 billion. (That includes $17 million for 18 projects in the district of House Speaker Dennis Hastert.)
Tucked into the mammoth measure are significant changes in law that should have been debated on their own merits. There are provisions to relax overtime rules, delay labeling meat by its country of origin, ease media ownership restrictions and loosen record-keeping requirements on gun shops. Congress wanted this stuff to pass with minimal scrutiny.
This was a bipartisan effort. The Senate passed the bill 65-28. Senators Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) voted in favor of it.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) defended the spending bill as “a titanic achievement in fiscal restraint” because it supposedly holds growth in discretionary spending to 3 percent. The 3 percent figure, though, refers to budget authority–a number that’s easy to manipulate. For instance, Congress reclassified $2.2 billion of 2004 education spending into the 2003 totals. Presto! That, along with other accounting tricks, made the 2004 authorized increase seem smaller.
Measured by the actual outlays, a Heritage Foundation analysis finds, discretionary spending will increase 9 percent, from $824 billion to $900 billion.
President Bush will release his proposed 2005 budget next month. He has promised to hold the increase in discretionary spending to 4 percent. He has said that the government can cut the annual deficit in half within five years. Federal spending reached $2.1 trillion in 2003 with a deficit of $374 billion, and there will be even more red ink in 2004.
But he’s virtually certain to sign the massive spending bill approved by the Senate on Thursday. Does that inspire confidence that Congress will follow his bidding? Not at all.
