Cutting Government Back to Last Year’s Size Shouldn’t Be ‘Impossible’ or ‘Severe’

As part of a deal struck between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) and the fractious House Freedom Caucus, Republicans in Congress have pledged to return federal discretionary spending to 2022 levels.

As a practical matter, that would require cutting about $130 billion out of the federal budget next year. But it’s probably more useful to think about the maneuver as an attempt to rescind the spending increases included in the omnibus bill that Congress rushed to pass in the final weeks of last year. That bill set spending levels for the 2023 fiscal year, so promising to return to the 2022 spending level amounts to a promise to undo that omnibus bill and not replace it with more spending hikes.

In a more normal place, this would be described as what it is: a promise to hold government spending level. The federal government spent about $1.7 trillion on discretionary programs in 2022, and Republicans are saying they’d like to spend the same amount next year.

In Washington, D.C., however, this is viewed with a combination of shock and horror.

The idea of shrinking the discretionary portion of the government back to the size that it was literally just a month ago is “impossible,” according to Politico reporters Caitlin Emma and Connor O’Brien (and their congressional sources), who describe the Republican plan to hold discretionary funding level as relying on “severe cuts” and say the futility of the exercise would “put Don Quixote to shame.”

Theirs is perhaps the most outlandish example of the deeply unserious world of fiscal policy discourse, but it hardly stands alone. The budget rules adopted earlier this week by the new Republican majority in the House lay a foundation for “massive spending cuts,” according to Roll Call. The Washington Post describes the budget plan with similar language, before noting a few paragraphs later that Republicans are merely se