One look at the US budget proposals for 2026 would make a grade school teacher wince. It’s a mess in every possible way.
Defense is the big winner; everything else is cut back hard. “An 83.7% cut to base discretionary funding for the State Department and international programs” is mentioned. Housing and Urban Development is also slashed by $33.6 billion, notably in rental assistance.
As usual, there’s no indication of any funding for infrastructure or other long-neglected things. You can actually smell the economic ignorance in this budget.
Then there’s this whimsical little snippet, verbatim from the usafacts.org link above:
-55.8% from the National Science Foundation. This is an instant bullet in the guts for US technological superiority.
-54.5% from the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s the primitive conservative mindset at work.
-33.3% from the Small Business Administration. What a surprise.
-24.3% from NASA. China will sail past the US effortlessly.
The good news is that Congress is fighting back against these cuts. How effectively is yet to be seen. There are many aspects to these cuts and the fightback, as seen on this rather turgid link to specific issues.
Now let’s take a look at revenue projections vs spending:
A deficit of $1.9 trillion. That’s spending more than receipts.
99% of revenue comes from taxes, also according to usafacts.org. That means that any economic downturn can do real damage to revenue, effectively overnight. These numbers aren’t what you’d call solid in any sense.
Now let us linger perplexed, baffled, and bemused on Defense. The all-time sacred cow of US politics, and the toughest and most complex of spending issues.
US Defense has long been in a hole of its own making, and it doesn’t need to be told that. Everything’s too expensive, takes forever to produce if it’s produced at all, and constant increases to defense commitments aren’t making it any cheaper.
The cost base for this circus is again, as usual, blown out of the water before it starts. Obviously and monotonously, there will be more blank check demands on revenue, expanding the deficit.
I have to ask.
At what point do realism and fiscal responsibility happen? Defense is still based on 20th-century thinking, and far worse, on outdated industrial principles. US defense contracts are a vast tangle of huge numbers of separate suppliers crammed into acquisition plans, sometimes potty-trained by DARPA, sometimes not.
America has gone from “fustest with the mostest” to “sooner or later with the most expensive”. It’s not working.
An audit is a certification of the authenticity of figures at its most basic level. Figures have to be based on something other than wishful thinking. Auditors can also find and propose fixes. What’s clearly not happening is a top-level audit.
This budget can be safely described as definitively clueless. There’s no governance. There’s no whisper of an indication of modern planning.
This is the Congressional Budget Office’s economic outlook for the next ten years.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
Well may you weep.
