Some Good News on the Budget

Thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, the corrupting culture of budget earmarks has hit a big bump in the road. Even more important, government spending is no longer climbing quite as fast. To be sure, it is hardly a victory to hold the growth of annual appropriations to the rate of inflation. After all, many of the programs being appropriated should be completely abolished. Moreover, annual appropriations does not include entitlement programs, many of which are growing at twice the rate of inflation. But in a town enriches itself by transferring income and wealth from the productive to the special interests, even a slowdown in the rate of spending growth is welcome news. The Wall Street Journal explains:

On Thursday, White House budget director Rob Portman issued little‐​noticed guidance to all federal departments and agencies that no Congressional requests for spending should be accommodated unless they are “specifically identified in statutory text” — which is to say, the law. This may sound like it ought to be regular practice, but it’s a revolution in the Beltway. That’s because, in order to dodge the legislative earmark limits that Mr. Byrd has been bragging about, Members have been speed‐​dialing executive branch officials and asking them to fund their specific earmark requests out of agency budgets even though they were purged from the larger budget bill. This Congressional lobbying can be hard for the average federal bureaucrat to refuse, since he doesn’t want to offend those on Capitol Hill who control his budget. …this means the Fiscal 2007 federal budget could have the fewest number of these pork‐​barrel projects in many a year. By the way, thanks to efforts late last year by GOP Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to block a last‐​minute bipartisan spending splurge, the 2007 budget holds overall federal appropriated spending to the rate of inflation; recent years have often seen three times that.