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News Release
July 24, 2000
Congress on track for biggest spending increases since late '70s
Study says "Republican Revolution" has failed to cut government; "dead"
programs live on
WASHINGTON -- Six years after Republicans captured Congress on promises of downsizing government, few programs have been eliminated and federal spending is surging at the fastest clip in more than 20 years, according to a new Cato Institute study.
"The 106th Congress is well on its way to becoming the largest-spending Congress on domestic social programs since the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office and Thomas 'Tip' O'Neill was Speaker of the House," say study authors Stephen Moore, Cato's director of fiscal policy studies (on leave), and Stephen Slivinski, a Cato fiscal policy analyst.
Total federal non-defense spending is projected to grow by 11 percent from 1999 to 2001, the largest increase since a 12 percent jump during the 95th Congress (1977-78), say the authors in "Return of the Living Dead: Federal Programs That Survived the Republican Revolution."
What explains this spending binge? Largely the "inability or unwillingness of Republicans to eliminate virtually any government program," Moore and Slivinski say. "Many of the more than 200 programs that the Republicans pledged to eliminate in 1995 in their 'Contract with America' fiscal blueprint now have fatter budgets than they had before the changing of the guard."
The authors examined the 95 largest programs on the GOP's hit list and found that their combined budgets had increased by 13 percent over the past five years. Indeed, since they were targeted for elimination several programs have staged a remarkable comeback. Congress has approved steep spending increases for "living dead" programs ranging from farm subsidies (162 percent) and AmeriCorps (248 percent) to bilingual education (80 percent) and Goals 2000 (112 percent). At the cabinet level, the GOP has spent more on the Department of Education than President Clinton proposed in two of the last three years.
"Congressional Republicans have been on a strange odyssey over the past five years," the authors say. "In 1995 they courageously tried to unplug, all at once, a multitude of federal government programs that don't work or are counterproductive. Having lost that battle to Clinton during the government shutdown, the gun-shy GOP has concluded that it mustn't shoot at anything at all."
"Return of the Living Dead: Federal
Programs That Survived the Republican Revolution"
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