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  "name": "Opinion | Spend, Baby, Spend",
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  "ogHTML": "Newsletter: All Things with Kim Strassel\n\nA newsy analysis of the workings of D.C. (and beyond), providing the inside track on both the overhyped and overlooked events of the week.\n\nSubscribe here, and read this week’s edition below:\n\nSpend, Baby, Spend\n\nIt’s go time in Washington for the GOP reconciliation bill, as House committees this week begin to flesh out their respective pieces of a plan to cut both taxes and spending. Which means Republicans finally must grapple with an ugly truth within the party of “limited government”: Most of them don’t want to cut spending on anything.\n\nBut it’s the cuts that must come first. Republicans have a solid idea of what needs doing in the tax realm, yet the final configuration will hinge on what they drum up in new revenue or offsets. Committees have each been assigned spending reduction targets, with an aggregate goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts (over 10 years). This is paltry: Federal spending has soared more than 50% since 2019, and the pandemic emergency is long past. Democrats bet that Republicans would lack the courage to dismantle their blowouts on entitlements, infrastructure, green energy, semiconductors and the like—and the left is again showing which side is smarter at the long game. Consider:\n\nThe Green New Deal: The GOP can at least agree that Joe Biden’s green-energy handouts—the architecture of the left’s Green New Deal—are wasteful and distortionary—right? Nope. Just ask the 21 House Republicans, led by New York’s Andrew Garbarino, whose districts are raking in the cash, and who recently wrote a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith demanding the party retain hundreds of billions of dollars of green tax credits. The move drew praise from groups like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby.\n\nThree cheers for Medi-fraud: Medicaid outlays have increased by 51% since 2019, and the program is outpacing even Social Security and Medicare—pumped up by state scams, Biden-era waivers, and the program’s expansion to populations it was never meant to cover. Yet Republicans are balking at any reforms, with a Politico story quoting one anonymous Republican claiming GOP leadership hasn’t yet adequately laid out “the rationale behind Medicaid cuts.” The GOP is scared even to follow Donald Trump’s embrace of ridding the program of simple waste and fraud. Twelve Republicans recently sent a letter to House leadership setting red lines on what they’d cut.\n\nOh, SNAP: Ditto a lack of spine to truly tighten the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, food stamps, whether with work requirements or changes to the federal-state formula or program rules. The new GOP argument against reform: The changes might hit GOP voters in swing states.\n\nChips and roads: Trump used his address to Congress to excoriate its 2022 $280 billion semiconductor subsidy-fest, yet Congress seems already to have rejected any effort to pare it back. Republicans have similarly circled the wagons around the district pork that flowed out of the 2021, $1.2 trillion infrastructure boondoggle.\n\nSidelining DOGE: The Trump administration will soon unveil its fiscal 2026 budget, through which it is expected to ask Congress to formalize many of the cuts and changes identified by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But nearly every item on the chopping block has a few GOP defenders, and already members are rushing to protect specific grants and programs that feed money to their states, businesses or other institutions. Here’s one example of how that protection works in practice. If Congress can’t stomach chopping a million-dollar grant here or there, how will it have the courage to pare Head Start, rental assistance or health spending? The additional problem: In this GOP’s minuscule House and Senate majorities, every member is king—and they all know it.\n\nDonald who?: A reality of today’s Republican party: Nothing happens unless President Trump drives it. Yet while the president pays lip service to spending reduction, and says he remains open to cuts, he’s failed to use the power of his office to make deficits a priority. Ditto Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.\n\nThe risks: It isn’t true that nobody wants cuts. The House and Senate both contain a contingent of spending hawks who are dead serious about using this bill to make honest progress on the deficit. They don’t get as much (positive) Beltway ink as pro-spenders, but their votes will be as necessary to get a bill over the line. The spenders’ game to date has been to keep pushing the process along, to get to a point where the cutters will have no choice but to swallow a final product. That gives a good indication of how serious the bulk of the Republicans Party is about reducing the size of government.\n\nWhat’s a “limited government” party to do after it has walled off cuts to discretionary spending, mandatory spending, progressive priorities, corporate subsidies, waste, fraud and abuse? Good question. And if not now—with the DOGE model and a bold president—when? This parochialism is among the reasons why Sen. Ron Johnson and fellow fiscal warriors keep pushing for a GOP budget review panel, to go through items line by line and force supporters to make the case for keeping them. They explain that the only way to realize serious reductions is by methodically reviewing thousands of programs and expenditures that currently run on autopilot. No one has agreed to do that yet, for the simple reason that Congress hates both hard work and hard choices.\n\nWere the GOP to engage in that process and truly cut items, it would have no trouble making the rest of its tax-cut numbers work. Instead, watch for weeks of headlines about internal fights over how to squeeze a dollar here and fiddle an account there.\n\nHarvard Ducks Again\n\nMost Ivy League universities have yet to admit that the Trump administration’s demands of them only came after years of universities’ own failures to self-correct. Two new Tuesday reports from Harvard task forces suggest that university still has a long way to go.\n\nThe good news is that the university finally published its 311-page task force report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, which (shock!) acknowledged antisemitism was real and rampant on campus and resulted in the harassment, doxxing and ostracization of Jewish students. It also acknowledged that certain faculty taught partisan and polarizing courses about the Israel-Palestinian conflict (though it made a point of saying that this was largely a problem of “nontenured” faculty). Press reports described the findings as “scathing” and “critical,” though the task force’s main findings were obvious to anyone paying minimal attention to Harvard over the past few years.\n\nHarvard had been under pressure from the Trump team to publish the report, given it was months overdue; its original deadline was the fall 2024 semester. And it was beset by controversy. One co-chairman, Raffaella Sadun, resigned soon after its formation, with a source close to her telling the Free Press that Sadun had found it “impossible” to get the task force to take antisemitism “seriously.” Another co-chairman was Derek Penslar, whom former Harvard President Larry Summers deemed “unsuited” to the job, in light of the professor’s history of “minimizing Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem.”\n\nHarvard was also criticized for choosing to set up a parallel Islamophobia task force, which on Tuesday issued its own 211-page report, finding that Muslim students and professors also felt “abandoned and silenced.” The effect of releasing both reports simultaneously was to allow Harvard President Alan Garber in an accompanying letter to claim Harvard suffered from an overall “bigotry” problem—thereby minimizing the antisemitism problem. So watch that space. The task force reports allow Harvard to tick a due-diligence box, but the real test will be what, if anything, it does about the reports’ findings.\n\nReclimbing the High Ground on Deportation\n\nThe Trump administration came out swinging this week with a new strategy to reverse a wash of negative deportation headlines: Refocus on those being booted, namely their alleged crimes. It’s a concerted attempt to keep the public onside, though its success will depend on the next stages of its deportation plans.\n\nBorder czar Tom Homan has been hitting the airwaves, talking up the administration’s “prioritizing” of deporting “700,000 illegal aliens with criminal charges.” To make the point, the White House erected lawn signs featuring the faces of what the White House described as 100 of “the worst illegal immigrant criminals” arrested so far. Each picture included a description of the alleged crime of the migrant, among them murder, rape, distribution of fentanyl, sexual assault of a child, and illegal weapons. The administration is also issuing and emphasizing its much-reduced border crossing numbers, while Trump signed two executive orders focused on “strengthening law enforcement” and protecting “communities from criminal aliens.”\n\nThe question is whether this focus on criminals can reclaim the headspace of Americans who’ve been hearing more than they would like about immigration battles, and that will depend in part on whether the administration continues playing loose with court orders on deportations, or deporting moms and kids. But the administration’s new border emphasis suggests that—100 days in—it understands the need to shore up voter support for key agenda items.\n\nBy the Numbers:\n\nBillions of dollars District of Columbia taxpayers will fork over for the privilege of a renovated RFK Stadium for the Washington Commanders, under a new deal agreed to by the district and the NFL team.\n\nLength in days Russian President Vladimir Putin is proposing for a unilateral cease-fire with Ukraine, to begin May 9. Believe it when you see it. Putin also announced an Easter cease-fire, only to violate it immediately.\n\nMonths former GOP New York Rep. George Santos was sentenced to federal prison for wire fraud and identity theft. Santos was caught defrauding voters and donors; Democrats won back the seat last year.\n\nPercentage of CBS, NBC and ABC evening news coverage of the president that was negative in Trump’s first 100 days, according to the Media Research Center. MRC says the number for the same period of Joe Biden’s presidency was 41%.\n\nState of the States\n\nAlabama becomes the latest free-market state to support independent workers by allowing tax deductions for contributions to portable benefits accounts. It joins a growing movement to give more contractors and freelancers the power to create and retain benefits that they can move with them from job to job. Hat tip to Libertas Institute, which has a nice rundown of the portable benefits movement here.\n\n(Un)Quote of the Week:\n\n“Judge \\[Hannah\\] Dugan, as a judge herself, apparently realized that and did what I hope any of us would do, which is standing up for members of our community who are being targeted by the Trump regime.” —Wisconsin State Rep. Ryan Clancy, after Dugan was arrested by the feds for allegedly aiding an illegal immigrant—in her court on charges of criminal battery—evade federal immigration agents.\n\nTrump’s 100-Day Opportunity\n\nBy Kimberley A. Strassel\n\nCopyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8",
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