The 10 Worst Republican Budget Gimmicks
A guide to the gaslighting of voters.
Being an elected Republican today means navigating a fundamental contradiction: Voters love bold spending cuts in theory but hate them in practice. Surveys have long shown that Americans want deficit reduction and a smaller government. "Washington spends too much money" is one of the easiest applause lines in politics. But when asked about specific programs—Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans' benefits, infrastructure, education, border security, the safety net, and nearly every other federal budget item except, perhaps, the 1 percent of total spending going to foreign aid and NASA—the electorate demands even more spending. Across the spectrum, voters prefer to talk like Sen. Barry Goldwater and spend like LBJ.
Democratic lawmakers handle the voter contradictions by emphasizing their support for expanding popular programs and vaguely hinting that taxing the rich can pay for it all (it cannot). Republicans, by contrast, square the circle with budget gimmicks. They make grand pledges to balance the budget within a decade and push for popular budget rules to create the illusion of spending restraint. Then GOP lawmakers simply ignore their own rules and continue spending and borrowing as usual. The current budget and tax debates have become a festival of gimmicks—here are the GOP's 10 most egregious ploys:
- Fake Expiration Dates. When Congress passes an expensive new policy but wants to hide the enormous long-term cost, it often employs fake expiration dates. The 2017 tax cuts were always intended to be permanent, but to hide their true long-term cost, lawmakers set the most popular aspects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) to expire at the end of 2025. As that expiration date nears, Republicans are not only preparing to extend (and likely expand) these tax policies but will probably make them expire within five to eight years again to create the illusion of a 10-year price tag no higher than $4.5 trillion. As Congress continues to renew these popular policies, the federal budget will face a long-term cost that has never been fully disclosed or admitted.
- Current Policy Baseline. A corollary to the fake expiration dates above, this wonky term refers to Congress bypassing its own budget rules to pretend that removing the expiration dates has no deficit cost. The lawmaker two-step begins with Congress first making a new tax cut temporary, so that it requires offsets only up to the expiration date. Then, down the road, Congress simply eliminates the expiration date—with no offsets of the extended cost—under the argument that "extending current policies doesn't count as a new tax reduction." The result is a permanent tax cut that includes offsets only for the first few years. GOP lawmakers are considering using this gimmick to extend the expiring TCJA without any offsets.
- Fake Budget Resolutions. The new Republican Congress entered 2017 facing steeply rising deficits. The House of Representatives responded by passing and trumpeting a bold budget resolution aiming to save $6.5 trillion over the decade and balance the budget. Except the whole exercise was fake. It did not require Congress to actually enact the savings or even detail specifically how it could meet the targets. The budget was merely a set of numbers showing how the deficit would theoretically decline in the (extraordinarily unlikely) event that Congress enacted $6.5 trillion in 10-year savings. This did not stop Congressional Republicans from triumphantly declaring that they had in fact passed a balanced budget—and then proceeding to instead blow up the deficit with a $1.5 trillion tax cut, a budget-busting farm bill, and a 13 percent discretionary spending expansion. This 2017 example is no outlier, but rather one of many fake GOP budgets that have been produced over the last few decades.
- Rosy Economic Scenarios. Nearly every Republican budget relies on implausibly aggressive deficit reduction. One trick is assuming—with little to no basis—that a historic economic boom will suddenly generate trillions in new tax revenue. For instance, this year's House Republican budget assumes a permanent leap in economic growth rates that would require labor productivity growth rates to nearly double. This questionable assumption adds $13 trillion to the projected 10-year gross domestic product and $2.6 trillion in projected new tax revenues. Similar past rosy assumptions have repeatedly proven false, and this year's Republican budget contains no major policy changes that could plausibly produce this historic productivity jump.
- Discretionary Spending "Magic Asterisks." Another staple of Republican budgets is assuming that 10-year deficit-reduction targets will be accomplished by future Congresses drastically slashing discretionary appropriations by as much as nearly half of their share of the economy. For instance, this year's House GOP budget combines a $300 billion short-term expansion of defense and border appropriations with the absurd assumption that future Congresses will slice discretionary spending as a share of the economy one-quarter below current levels—to its lowest level since the 1930s. These future savings are never specified and never take place. The following year brings another short-term appropriations hike and promised future savings are again pushed out to another day that will never arrive.
- Fake Spending Caps. While Republican Congresses have been happy to give GOP presidents a blank check on spending, they have tried to clip the wings of Democratic presidents by pressuring them to sign laws setting tight multi-year caps on discretionary spending. After bragging about such caps, Congress then discards them as soon as the ink is dry. The 2011 Budget Control Act set strict spending caps that were almost immediately bypassed, with Congress ultimately canceling or replacing nearly half of the promised 10-year savings. The 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act also contained multi-year spending caps that Republican lawmakers and President Joe Biden agreed to regularly violate with expensive "side deals" before the bill had even been signed into law. Even now, as Congress negotiates the FY 2025 spending levels, Republican lawmakers have maintained that they will not allow the law's spending reductions to take place. The spending caps are public relations, not policy.
- PAYGO and CUTGO Rules. For most of the past 35 years, Congress has lived under Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) laws, as well as occasional Republican "CUTGO" rules. Together, these policies require that Congress fully offset any new tax reductions and mandatory spending expansions or face automatic "sequestration" spending cuts. While these restrictions have discouraged certain expensive proposals from being considered, Congress and the president have canceled every sequestration cut for the last three decades. Since 2015 alone, Congress has slashed taxes and expanded mandatory spending by $7 trillion with zero enforcement of PAYGO and CUTGO. As Congress prepares $4.5 trillion in new tax relief that will violate PAYGO, another cancellation of the law's enforcement is a foregone conclusion.
- DOGE's Fake Savings. Elon Musk pledged that President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would slash spending by $2 trillion in one year. In its first six weeks, DOGE has claimed more than $100 billion in spending reductions. The actual savings are estimated at just $2 billion (or 1/35 of one percent of federal spending), as the rest of the claimed savings have either never been detailed or are the product of basic mathematical and accounting errors—such as confusing an $8 million cut for $8 billion, canceling contracts that ended decades ago, and triple-counting the same contract cancellation. Moreover, impoundment laws prevent DOGE from reducing spending below Congressionally appropriated levels, allowing only a reprogramming of spending within a given program. DOGE is merely government spending cut theater.
- Pork Project Ban Ends. After a decade of embarrassing earmark scandals, including Alaska's infamous "bridge to nowhere" and lawmakers going to prison for auctioning these federal grants for bribes and campaign contributions, a Republican-led Congressional effort banned earmarks in 2011. A decade later, however, Republicans teamed up with Democrats to quietly bring back Congressional pork projects. While some anti-corruption controls have been added, history suggests that it's likely a matter of time before Congress returns to essentially selling government grants for campaign contributions.
- Balanced Budget Amendment. The more Republicans drive up budget deficits, the more they call for a balanced budget amendment. Such an amendment faces no path to approval from the required two-thirds of Congress and 38 state legislatures. And that's the point. Proposing a balanced budget amendment is an easy way for GOP lawmakers to look tough on spending and deficits while continuing to vote for new tax relief and spending expansions. The fact that virtually no lawmakers can specify any set of reforms to achieve a balanced budget—and that most instead continue to demand expensive new initiatives—exemplifies the emptiness of this proposal that exists mainly in campaign ads that are to be forgotten soon after election day.
The purpose of these budget gimmicks is for Republican presidents and lawmakers to look tough on spending and deficits without actually doing anything substantive to save taxpayer dollars. Republican voters get the illusion of deep spending and deficit reductions without anyone seeing painful tax increases or benefit losses. In a world of busy lives and short attention spans, it is not difficult for lawmakers to fool voters into believing deficits are being reduced.
But the economy will not be fooled. Congress can manipulate baselines, set fake expiration dates, and ignore their own budget rules—but they can't repeal the laws of economics or math. Deficits will continue to rise—from $1.8 trillion today to a projected $3.6 trillion in a decade. Another $25 trillion in 10-year borrowing will push interest rates higher and bury the budget under trillions in interest costs. And, perhaps most dire, the bond market will not be fooled. At some point between the national debt's current level of $30 trillion and the 30-year projected level of nearly $200 trillion (!), the bond market will likely tap out and stop lending money to Washington at plausible interest rates, triggering a possible debt crisis. When that happens, we may discover that all this time we were only fooling ourselves.
