By Ed Kilgore:
As the Trump era approaches, one of the great imponderables is how well the Trump administration will get along with a Republican-controlled Congress.
The latest signs are not good for a smoothly operating GOP trifecta government. To say that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and Tom Price, Trump’s Health and Human Services appointee, are not on the same page about how to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is a massive understatement. Looking beyond the Obamacare thicket, everybody’s plans on Capitol Hill for 2017 involve major reforms of corporate and individual taxes and also quite possibly undertaking a version of entitlement reform that would functionally wipe out the whole Great Society legacy of anti-poverty programs. Though no one knows exactly where Trump will come out on these broader budget goals, it’s no secret that the agenda his campaign suggests are about 180 degrees away from the debt-and-deficit-shrinking rhetoric so many congressional Republicans have deployed so often in the recent past.
Yes, there are ample grounds for the cynical observation that congressional Republicans only care about budget deficits when a Democrat is in the White House. But there is no question that conservatives really do want to pursue the decimation of “liberal” spending programs as an end in itself, and will agitate the air about debt and deficits to increase the pressure to do so, even if it’s opposed by a Republican administration. So how can the new Trump regime avoid this conflict early in its tenure?
Trump’s friend and adviser Newt Gingrich has a solution: Change the score by abolishing the only independent scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office.
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Thus, the CBO is providing a bright-yellow-line guide for Tea Party–style fiscal hawks centered in the House Freedom Caucus to throw a monkey wrench into Trump’s plans. As Gingrich accurately says, the quickest way to put the monkey wrench back into the toolbox is to abolish the CBO, leaving Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as the sole official arbiter of spending, revenue, deficit, and debt estimates. As budget expert Stan Collender notes, this would represent a staggering abdication of congressional independence
The Full Story (January 17, 2017)
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