Congress Plans To Spend $1.5 Trillion This Year, Continues To Pretend the Deficit Doesn’t Matter

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Congress has reached a bipartisan agreement to hike spending across the board.

Lawmakers unveiled a $1.5 trillion spending package on Wednesday morning that would keep the federal government funded through the end of the fiscal year by hiking spending on just about everything. The plan “would substantially boost funding for the military and nearly every non-defense agency, growing domestic spending to $730 billion, an almost 7 percent increase over current funding. The measure would boost national defense coffers to $782 billion, about a 6 percent increase,” Politico reports.

The 2,700-page bill also includes $14 billion in “emergency funding” to help Ukraine, including $3.5 billion for new military equipment to be sent to Ukraine—because apparently the Pentagon’s $782 billion budget isn’t big enough to include that—and another $15 billion in COVID-19 relief funds.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D–Vt.) hailed the agreement as “the largest increase in non-defense discretionary spending in four years.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Shelby (R–Ala.), the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, lauded the package for including “dollar-for-dollar parity for defense and non-defense increases,” adding that the bill “effectively addresses Republican priorities.”

Just yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the federal government ran a $475 billion deficit over the first five months of the fiscal year, which began in October. That’s an average of $3 billion per day. And while it’s true that this year’s deficit is unlikely to be anywhere near the record highs of the past two years, the CBO’s projections show persistently high deficits for the rest of the decade and beyond.

That projection, of co