The U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s stunning order Monday freezing hundreds of billions of dollars in spending triggered anguish, bafflement and anger in San Diego and across the nation after it paralyzed government programs and government-funded services relied on by millions of people. Concerns began to recede Tuesday when the White House began announcing more and more exceptions, then continued to fade Wednesday with the announcement that the freeze had been rescinded.
This gave way to pundits making many obvious points. They noted Donald Trump’s often-chaotic first term in office was also marked by dumb, avoidable mistakes. They concluded Trump’s legal advisers simply don’t care that decades of court rulings have held that there are limits on presidents’ ability to block congressionally authorized appropriations.
But what was lacking was an appreciation of why the spending freeze was imposed. It wasn’t just a poorly executed “I’ll show Dems who is boss” gesture by Trump. It foreshadows his istration’s , all-encoming crusade to cut federal spending as drastically as possible — with a chain saw, not a scalpel.
This will surprise those contrarians who say Trump’s popularity among non-Republicans is due in large part to the fact he for years has ignored the GOP elites who want to reduce spending on Social Security and Medicare or even privatize parts of the giant entitlement programs. This will also make small-government types chortle over the notion that Trump is actually one of them.
But the most revealing gap here is between MAGA populists and plutocrats — the GOP’s Bannon and Musk wings. Their H-1B visa fight is only a warm-up to their much-bigger coming battle: the attempt to extend the large tax cuts that mostly helped the very rich that Trump got ed in his first term, and, if possible, expand the cuts, whatever the consequences for less affluent MAGA Americans.
The key to pulling this off is the budget tool that Trump can use to head off a filibuster that otherwise could only be ended by a bipartisan vote of 60 senators. Under the complex budget reconciliation process — used to adopt Democratic initiatives (Obamacare) and Republican ones (tax cuts) alike — budgets can be adopted on a simple majority vote of both the House and Senate if a fairly credible case can be made that they are revenue-neutral.
How can Trump deliver the massive tax cuts he’s promised to the MAGA plutocrats who now fill his inner circle and to his family?
Only by simultaneously delivering spending cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars. If the cuts shutter programs that lift the quality of life for millions of people — if they stall urgently needed medical research — if they bring ruin to families which rely on federally ed nonprofits — so be it.
Exit polls didn’t show Trump winning the popular vote because he wanted the very wealthy to pay less taxes. They indicated that millions of middle- and lower-income Americans had come to the conclusion that the Republican nominee cared more about their hopes and dreams than many Democrats.
We hope that we are wrong. But we suspect these voters are about to realize the president is far more interested in realizing the hopes and dreams of the mega-wealthy — specifically, their goal of paying as little in taxes as possible — by any means necessary.
