GOP alarm bells about government spending don’t include huge military budgets

WASHINGTON ― House Speaker kevin mccarthy (R-Calif.) refused to cut military spending even as he portrayed the growing debt as an existential threat to the nation that urgently needed to be addressed in negotiations with the president Joe Biden.

“Defense should not be on the table,” McCarthy told reporters after a “productive” meeting with Biden at the White House on Monday in which no deal was reached on lifting the debt ceiling.

If lawmakers can’t reach an agreement, the federal government could default on its obligations as early as June 1. A default would be unprecedented, throwing the entire financial system into chaos and wreaking havoc on the US economy here and around the world.

republicans they have demanded major spending cuts in exchange for lifting the federal government’s “debt ceiling,” a legal limit on how much the government can borrow to pay the bills Congress has racked up over the years.

“The national debt is like a credit card,” McCarthy said foxnews recently, using his favorite metaphor. “Year after year after year, Washington keeps hitting the limit, so they keep expanding it. Now America’s credit card debt is higher than we’ve earned in an entire year. Shouldn’t we reevaluate how Washington spends its money?

When they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress in 2017, Republicans went on a spree of massive spending while cutting taxes — without making any fuss about the debt limit. In fact, they raised the debt limit three times without multi-year spending limit demands like they are asking Biden to agree to now.

A similar fight over the debt limit played out in 2011 under a different Democratic president, Barack Obama, who ultimately agreed to cut spending split evenly between defense and non-defense programs.

This time, Republicans insist on increasing spending for the military, veteran care and border security, meaning any cuts to other parts of the budget, like education, health care and safety net programs, would have need to be even deeper to meet GOP demands for full budget savings.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, that would mean the remaining areas of the budget would have to be cut dramatically, including the departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation and Agriculture, among others.

Meanwhile, US defense spending has swollen in recent years under Republican and Democratic governments. In 2021, Congress pressured Biden to spend nearly $30 billion more on defense than he had requested. The following year he proposed a further increase, from $780 billion to $813 billion; however, the Hill Congress pressured Biden to finally pass $45 billion on top of that, signing off on a record defense budget of $858 billion. This year, the Biden administration is requesting $886 billion in defense spending, a 3% increase that would set one of the the largest peacetime military budgets in history.

Biden may agree to some sort of deal with the Republicans that freezes future spending at current levels, which the CBO would then label as budget savings, including on defense, due to growing inflation.

But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (DN.Y.) indicated Monday that Republicans are unwilling to discuss freezing spending at current levels, calling it “an inherently reasonable position which many in our party might even be uncomfortable with.”

“House Republicans, your proposals have not gotten any more reasonable,” Jeffries added. “They have become more extreme.”