A woman stops to take a picture of the national debt clock in midtown Manhattan, Thursday, May 25, 2023. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
It may be hard for the Gen Z crowd to accept, but there was a time when Republicans in Congress believed in fiscal responsibility — restraining government spending and working to limit federal debt. Sadly, all most Gen Zers have ever known is big-spending Republicans.
Within their short lifespans, Gen Zers have seen the annual federal deficit — the amount of money the federal government spends more than its revenue in any given year — grow from $.44 trillion in 2015 to $1.78 trillion in 2025. And the U.S. Treasury says the federal deficit for fiscal 2026, which ends Sept. 30, has risen from its initial projection of $1.8 trillion to $2.17 trillion with six weeks to go.
Today, the federal debt — the accumulated amount of yearly federal deficits — is $39.9 trillion, double what it was only 10 years ago. Democrats have long been proponents of a big-spending government. Most Republicans have now joined their ranks.
It wasn’t always that way. A Republican-controlled House and Senate was able to achieve a small budget surplus from 1998 to 2001, when Democrat Bill Clinton was president.
During the Obama presidency, Republicans retook control of the House of Representatives in 2011 and the Senate in 2015. They forced spending reductions, and the annual federal deficit declined for four years in a row, from $1.3 trillion in 2011 to $440 billion in 2015.
A Gen Zer might reasonably ask what happened between 2011 and 2015, when the federal deficit steadily declined?
In 2011, the Republican-led House passed the budget “sequester,” an across-the-board spending cut. Congress created the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which was tasked with finding a broad, bipartisan deficit-reduction package. If the committee failed to agree, automatic budget cuts would ensue in 2013, which is what happened.
As the Committee for a Responsible Budget reported at the time, “From 2014 through 2023, the sequester and its extrapolated savings will cut primary spending by about $940 billion and interest by about $200 billion.” These “cuts” weren’t just slowing the rate of growth, which is what Washington usually means by a budget cut. These were actual spending reductions.
But Republicans and Democrats soon began looking for ways to sidestep the mandatory cuts, and the budget deficit began growing again. It rose every year in President Trump’s first term, exploding to $3.13 trillion in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Biden tried to spend every penny Congress or the Supreme Court would let him, even after the pandemic was over. After a decline from his 2021 pandemic-spending blowout, the federal deficit rose each year for Biden’s last three years. And that included a period when Republicans controlled the House.
Today, Republicans in the House and Senate have been very reluctant to try to constrain Trump’s spending explosion. The Senate mustered a little courage to say no to Trump’s $1.8 billion compensation package, tucked in a $72 billion spending bill, for those he thinks were unfairly prosecuted after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. And some Republicans have balked at a few other items.
But these rejections are just tinkering around the edges. For most Republicans, it’s “full spend ahead.”
However, there are big-spending headwinds on the horizon. When Treasury recently sold $25 billion in 30-year bonds, it had to offer 5.216 percent interest to attract enough buyers — the highest interest rate since 2001, according to Bloomberg. Interest on the federal debt is now 15 percent of federal spending, second only to Social Security and Medicare. And the president wants $1.5 trillion for defense — nearly twice the $804 billion for defense in the 2026 budget.
There’s another problem. Bloomberg reports that AI hyperscalers — big tech companies like Amazon and Alphabet — and other investment-grade companies have sold nearly $1.5 trillion of bonds this year to finance AI and data-center spending, pushing up interest rates and potentially crowding out demand for U.S. debt. At some point, investors may conclude that lending to Amazon, Alphabet and other major tech companies poses less risk than the federal government.
In March 2025, Trump told a joint session of Congress, “And, in the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the Federal budget. We’re going to balance it.”
No, we aren’t. Not anytime soon. Republicans used to be serious about controlling federal spending, but that was before Trump and the age of big-spending Republicans. We may soon find voters and the economy demanding they return to their conservative roots.
Read the original article on TheHill.com