Trump’s budget plan signals disregard for deficit, but it means little

President Donald J. Trump presented his annual budget Monday. America shrugged.

But just as important, Washington shrugged, too.

With expansive and expensive tax cuts and a refusal to tackle so-called entitlements – the Social Security retirement supplement and the Medicare health program for seniors – the discipline that Republicans traditionally brought to American budgets has disappeared in an era where the GOP controls the White House and both houses of Congress.

It didn't seem to matter.

Indeed, Monday's US$4-trillion budget plan is significant only in that the U.S. deficit will be about US$1-trillion, even when accounting for the President's plans to cut domestic spending. The administration presented no plan to balance the budget in the foreseeable future – a dramatic departure from Republican custom and practice.

"Trump hasn't ever talked or advocated a balanced budget," said Steve Bell, a former Republican staff director for the Senate Budget Committee. "He's for massive tax cuts, a large military, but he will not touch Social Security or Medicare. Most incumbents now believe that nobody cares about the deficit."

Canadian budgets are important moments – political events, with vital financial impacts and important social and cultural touchstones. Not so south of the border.

While Justin Trudeau's budgets, like those of Stephen Harper and Paul Martin, were considered landmarks in a Parliament Hill year, the Trump budget would be the topic du jour – and just for one day – only if there were nothing more dramatic to discuss on cable television. It turns out that in a capital still reeling from revelations about abuse by a top White House staffer and speculation about the future of the President's chief of staff, there are many topics more dramatic than a budget that means little and will have little impact.

Except for the fact that there is spending galore in the Trump budget – including US$200-billion toward a US$1.5-trillion infrastructure initiative that may attract bipartisan support even as it balloons the deficit.

Democrats will find appeal in this infrastructure initiative because it will provide jobs to the party's labour constituents. Republicans will find it congenial because it devolves much of the power and the decision to the states, rendering it consistent with the "federalism" impulse that has been a strong element of the party's orthodoxy since the Ronald Reagan years.

Another element of the Trump budget that will receive universal applause: US$13-billion to address the opioid addiction crisis. This has been an important issue for many Republicans, especially Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, whose concern over the issue prompted adjustments in last year's GOP drive to overturn Obamacare.

The President's plan to provide US$85.5-billion toward veterans' medical care will win bipartisan applause, but the US$18-billion toward constructing his wall on the Mexican border will prompt strong Democratic opposition.

Over all, however, the phrase "dead on arrival" inevitably will be attached to the Trump budget by lawmakers who have their own ideas, their own constituencies, and their own budget proposals. In fact, "DOA" has been a Washington staple since the first Reagan budget in 1981 – ironically, because Congress essentially took the Reagan budget it said it deplored and shaped it into reality with stunning dispatch.

After that, "DOA" has been an accurate assessment. The budget process is one of Washington's most arcane, and in fact spending by the United States government requires two sometimes parallel actions: authorizations (approval of specific spending initiatives or obligations) and appropriations (the formal act of setting the spending in motion). In the gap between the two there is plenty of room for negotiations – and mischief.

That is all for later. The President customarily gets one day (or in this case, a few hours) of reprieve from the political wars and then the opposing party, special interest groups and individual lawmakers feast on the budget, expressing pleasure with some (few) items, outrage at many others, second thoughts and emendations at still more.

In eclipse is the traditional Republican belief in thrift, a notion that has been a GOP staple for nearly a century. In the mid-1920s, President Calvin Coolidge, a flinty Vermonter spare of words and of federal largesse, embraced thrift as a secular religion. The Republicans of the next decade were aghast at the spending in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program to recover from the Great Depression. After the Second World War, Republican grandees such as Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio preached thrift to a country with pent-up spending desires and demands.

The Republican drift from this orthodoxy began with Representative Jack F. Kemp, of Buffalo, who believed tax cuts would stimulate growth and, in a presidential campaign in 1988 as well as in his role as GOP vice-presidential nominee in 1996, was openly skeptical of balanced budgets.

But today even his acolytes are wary of the extent of proposed Washington spending.

"I worry it may be out of control now, largely because of entitlement spending," former Representative Vin Weber of Minnesota, who was co-chairman of Mr. Kemp's presidential campaign, said in an interview. "No one shows much interest in tackling that."