No the GOP isn't cutting costs any more than the Dems?

Voldemort and his party are completely FOS when they tell you they're interested in bringing some fiscal responsibility to Washington.

Spend, Baby, Spend

The real sticking point in the GOP reconciliation bill: Republicans won’t cut anything.

By Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ

April 30, 2025 2:33 pm ET

A newsy analysis of the workings of D.C. (and beyond), providing the inside track on both the overhyped and overlooked events of the week.

It’s go time in Washington for the GOP reconciliation bill, as House committees this week begin to flesh out their respective pieces of a plan to cut both taxes and spending. Which means Republicans finally must grapple with an ugly truth within the party of “limited government”: Most of them don’t want to cut spending on anything.

But it’s the cuts that must come first. Republicans have a solid idea of what needs doing in the tax realm, yet the final configuration will hinge on what they drum up in new revenue or offsets. Committees have each been assigned spending reduction targets, with an aggregate goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts (over 10 years). This is paltry: Federal spending has soared more than 50% since 2019, and the pandemic emergency is long past. Democrats bet that Republicans would lack the courage to dismantle their blowouts on entitlements, infrastructure, green energy, semiconductors and the like—and the left is again showing which side is smarter at the long game. Consider:

The Green New Deal: The GOP can at least agree that Joe Biden’s green-energy handouts—the architecture of the left’s Green New Deal—are wasteful and distortionary—right? Nope. Just ask the 21 House Republicans, led by New York’s Andrew Garbarino, whose districts are raking in the cash, and who recently wrote a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith demanding the party retain hundreds of billions of dollars of green tax credits. The move drew praise from groups like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

Three cheers for Medi-fraud: Medicaid outlays have increased by 51% since 2019, and the program is outpacing even Social Security and Medicare—pumped up by state scams, Biden-era waivers, and the program’s expansion to populations it was never meant to cover. Yet Republicans are balking at any reforms, with a Politico story quoting one anonymous Republican claiming GOP leadership hasn’t yet adequately laid out “the rationale behind Medicaid cuts.” The GOP is scared even to follow Donald Trump’s embrace of ridding the program of simple waste and fraud. Twelve Republicans recently sent a letter to House leadership setting red lines on what they’d cut.

Oh, SNAP: Ditto a lack of spine to truly tighten the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, food stamps, whether with work requirements or changes to the federal-state formula or program rules. The new GOP argument against reform: The changes might hit GOP voters in swing states.

Chips and roads: Trump used his address to Congress to excoriate its 2022 $280 billion semiconductor subsidy-fest, yet Congress seems already to have rejected any effort to pare it back. Republicans have similarly circled the wagons around the district pork that flowed out of the 2021, $1.2 trillion infrastructure boondoggle.

Sidelining DOGE: The Trump administration will soon unveil its fiscal 2026 budget, through which it is expected to ask Congress to formalize many of the cuts and changes identified by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But nearly every item on the chopping block has a few GOP defenders, and already members are rushing to protect specific grants and programs that feed money to their states, businesses or other institutions. Here’s one example of how that protection works in practice. If Congress can’t stomach chopping a million-dollar grant here or there, how will it have the courage to pare Head Start, rental assistance or health spending? The additional problem: In this GOP’s minuscule House and Senate majorities, every member is king—and they all know it.

Donald who?: A reality of today’s Republican party: Nothing happens unless President Trump drives it. Yet while the president pays lip service to spending reduction, and says he remains open to cuts, he’s failed to use the power of his office to make deficits a priority. Ditto Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

The risks: It isn’t true that nobody wants cuts. The House and Senate both contain a contingent of spending hawks who are dead serious about using this bill to make honest progress on the deficit. They don’t get as much (positive) Beltway ink as pro-spenders, but their votes will be as necessary to get a bill over the line. The spenders’ game to date has been to keep pushing the process along, to get to a point where the cutters will have no choice but to swallow a final product. That gives a good indication of how serious the bulk of the Republicans Party is about reducing the size of government.

What’s a “limited government” party to do after it has walled off cuts to discretionary spending, mandatory spending, progressive priorities, corporate subsidies, waste, fraud and abuse? Good question. And if not now—with the DOGE model and a bold president—when? This parochialism is among the reasons why Sen. Ron Johnson and fellow fiscal warriors keep pushing for a GOP budget review panel, to go through items line by line and force supporters to make the case for keeping them. They explain that the only way to realize serious reductions is by methodically reviewing thousands of programs and expenditures that currently run on autopilot. No one has agreed to do that yet, for the simple reason that Congress hates both hard work and hard choices.

Were the GOP to engage in that process and truly cut items, it would have no trouble making the rest of its tax-cut numbers work. Instead, watch for weeks of headlines about internal fights over how to squeeze a dollar here and fiddle an account there.