Fiscal conservatives lately have argued that the federal government should spend as it did before COVID-19 ruined everything.
Thankfully, the global pandemic is a speck in the rearview mirror. Only a few diehards cling bitterly to their masks and grow misty with lockdown nostalgia.
Restoring spending to its trajectory in Fiscal Year 2019—the last before COVID wandered out of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology—could be treacherous, even for die-hard budget hawks. January 2025’s domestic-discretionary baseline for FY 2026 is $1.897 trillion. In August 2019, it was $1.332 trillion. Adopting the latter would require a one-year, $565 billion spending cut. Similar hefty disbursement reductions would continue every year thereafter. Such belt-tightening would hurt. The Congressional Budget Office would have to hire a staff anesthesiologist.
Why not roll spending back to the future? A less painful target would be the outlay totals that CBO foreshadowed for today — but in summer 2019. Congress should write checks at the pace that CBO anticipated for FY 2026, before Earth shut down, and massive expenditures for ventilators, vaccines, Paycheck Protection and the American Rescue Plan Act drained the Treasury.
Rather than CBO’s January 2025 prediction of $1.897 trillion in domestic discretionary spending for FY 2026, in FY 2019, it foresaw a mere $1.622 trillion in such expenses, starting on October 1. This reasonable fiscal discipline would save taxpayers $275 billion this year. For FY 2027, the relevant figures are $1.951 trillion, $1.661 trillion, and $290 billion—the latter in lower costs.
From FY 2026 through FY 2029, this exercise would curb planned spending from $7.883 trillion to $6.725 trillion. This would spare taxpayers a whopping $1.158 trillion. Rather than bomb America with those Benjamins, as if via B52s, this sum could underwrite national-debt reduction, deeper tax cuts, or a big, beautiful combination of both.
President Donald J. Trump and Congressional Republicans could prioritize spending beneath these lower ceilings. They could ax programs that are properly reserved for the states, duplicative, or downright idiotic. They could maintain or even increase expenditures that are effective or nationally important.
While defense, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid deserve strict scrutiny, this idea would leave them untouched. Democrats will scream falsely that this initiative would endanger Grandpa’s entitlements and throw Grandma from a train. But Democrats lie more than rugs. Republicans should ignore them and govern.
“Alas, as Elon Musk has ruefully discovered, cutting spending is harder than pulling teeth from an angry hippopotamus,” free-market stalwart Steve Forbes tells me. “The far Left running the Biden White House were smart in making sure that plenty of red states got lots of Green New Deal money. That’s why so many Republicans were reluctant to seriously whack these appropriations. And all too many GOPers got frightened by Democrats demagoguing Medicaid instead of going on offense.”
“The GOP’s appetite for reductions even on this scale is small,” Forbes added. “But such an approach could well prod the senators to do better than what the House did — and that would be splendid under the circumstances!”
Heritage Foundation financial economist E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. is more sanguine about this concept.
“Anything we can do to rein in spending is a win in my book, and this definitely makes economic sense,” he says. “Rather than return to 2019 levels, this plan would also be much more politically palatable to a wider number of congressional Republicans who (stupidly) hesitate to cut spending. Today’s cost-of-living crisis is a direct result of the last five years of blowout spending in Washington. We may not be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but this at least prevents squeezing out more.”
Antoni continues: “Using a forecast that predates the spendthrift Biden Administration implicitly acknowledges how wasteful those four years were, and the need to omit those anni horribiles from any baseline budget.”
The Senate should shove COVID-19 down the memory hole and start spending as if that virus never escaped that Red Chinese laboratory.
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