How much should the United States spend on the nuts-and-bolts of government in 2018?

For years, Republicans have had an answer: less than $500 billion. Back in 2011, Paul Ryan, then chairman the House Budget Committee, proposed $454 billion in 2018 spending for “non-defense discretionary” items—which is Washington-speak for everything in the government that isn’t the military or required spending on programs like Medicare. And every year since then, the House GOP’s proposed nondefense spending for fiscal 2018 has hovered somewhere around that number.

But on Tuesday, when House Budget Chairwoman Diane Black unveiled her budget for 2018, they suddenly embraced a new, much higher figure: $511 billion.

What happened? For years, the GOP Congress has been making its budgets work with a kind of trick: It promises sharp cuts in nondefense spending in the future, but never actually executes them this year. That helps achieve a budget that theoretically balances within 10 years, a conservative priority since Ryan was Budget chairman. But when it comes to actual conservative goals of scaling back government for real, it kicks the can down the road.

The can they’re kicking—NDD spending, for short—is the most easily cuttable part of government for Republicans. GOP lawmakers shy away from cutting Medicare and Social Security, which are hot-button issues for older voters. And Republicans almost universally want more defense spending. So the soft underbelly of the budget is NDD, which really means everything else the government does, from national parks to veterans programs; from tax collection to teacher training programs.

For eight years, Republicans had an excuse for never really fulfilling their promises: Their budgets would be rejected by President Barack Obama anyway. But this year, they have some cover: President Donald Trump’s budget proposal was fairly severe, calling for $479 billion in NDD spending.

So why are they proposing more than $500 billion in 2018? Moderate Republicans have objected to huge NDD cuts, even though many have voted for past budgets that contained them. They have a good reason for such objections: The government’s nondefense programs are already pared to the bone, and even many cost-cutting Republicans aren’t willing to face the political costs of slashing them much further. In 2013, House Republicans passed a budget with just $414 billion in NDD spending and actually did try to allocate that money in individual spending bills—and it ended with a revolt among their members. GOP leadership eventually had to pull the transportation and housing spending bill from the floor. The message was clear: You just can’t run the government with the kinds of numbers they’ve been writing into the budget.

“Those discretionary numbers are set at unrealistic numbers from a policy point of view,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former head of the Congressional Budget Office. “So when they get to it, they say, ‘I can’t live with that’ and pop the number up.”

Said Holtz-Eakin, “Those are exercises for purpose of the budget resolution, but aren’t really policies.”

For the past 50 years, the government has spent an average of just under 4 percent of GDP on nondefense discretionary spending, a common metric that economists use to compare budgets over long periods. That number has been falling lately: Last year, that figure was just over 3 percent, and it is projected to fall to 2.5 percent by 2027, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (Since 1962, the first year for which data is available, it has never fallen below 3 percent.)

The $511 billion allocated in the House budget would be historically low: just 2.6 percent of GDP. The new budget also continues the practice of slashing NDD much more severely in the future; in this case, it would fall to just $424 billion, or just 1.5 percent of GDP, in 2027.

Except for die-hard conservatives, few people in Washington think such a reduction is remotely possible. But Republicans have found themselves in a bind: They promised to balance the budget in 10 years while increasing defense spending and not raising taxes. The budget doesn’t touch Medicare or Social Security within that 10-year window—so what’s left is huge cuts to nondefense spending, a tradition Black continued this year.

Even outside of the GOP’s cuts, domestic programs have struggled to continue achieving their missions under tight budgets. Nondefense spending as a percent of GDP has fallen by about 9 percent over the past five years, in large part because the 2011 budget deal put a cap on spending. The consequences are real: The IRS has had its budget cut by 20 percent since 2010, resulting in staff reductions of 14 percent. That includes a 23 percent reduction in enforcement staff, leaving the agency shorthanded to crack down on tax evasion, which costs the government an estimated $400 billion each year. The Census Bureau also doesn’t have enough money to properly prepare for the 2020 decennial, a government responsibility written into the Constitution. Funding cuts at the Social Security Administration have contributed to a backlog of more than 1 million disability claims.

The House GOP budget doesn’t specify funding levels for the IRS or Census Bureau; that’s the job of appropriators. Whereas the budget sets top-line spending numbers and doesn’t have the force of law, appropriations bills contain annual spending allotments for different programs and agencies and are signed by the president. In other words, the only numbers that really matter in the budget resolution are the top-line spending levels for the next fiscal year. As Rep. Mark Meadows, leader of the House Freedom Caucus, said Tuesday, “All the rest is creative.” In turn, during the Obama years, conservatives and moderates fought over the level of nondefense spending.

But, Meadows said, the 2018 House budget is different in a key way: Republicans have unified control of government, so they can make real cuts to mandatory spending—programs on autopilot like food stamps—without risk of a presidential veto—and, if they use the reconciliation process, without running into a Democratic filibuster. Now the problem is getting the whole GOP conference on board—both conservatives who really do support the cuts the party has been promising for years, and the rest of the GOP conference, which likes voting for balanced budgets but won’t vote for the specific cuts that make balancing possible. That has proved challenging; Republicans are set to vote on their budget next week, which includes an additional $200 billion in mandatory spending cuts, but GOP leaders aren’t sure it will pass.

“This is what happens when you are forced to wrestle with the real implications of tough budget choices,” said Jacob Leibenluft, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities who was an economic adviser in the Obama administration. “The truth is that congressional Republicans really haven’t had to do that for the past eight years.”

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