Right Wing Russell Vought's (Not So) Secret Project 2025 Just Won

$4 Trillion in New Trump Debt Is EXACTLY What The Far Right Wanted

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When he ran for President in 1980, Ronald Reagan hinted at his strategy for shrinking the federal government: "If you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."

It was a simple idea: you can’t spend money you don’t have, so cutting taxes would cut spending, and less spending would mean less government. Reagan’s budget director David Stockman even coined a pithy term for it—“starving the beast”—that became a right-wing mantra.

The problem was that the idea was more simplistic than simple, ignored political reality, and didn’t work at all. Governments aren’t spendthrift teenagers. When they run out of money, they can just keep spending. And politicians have incentives to keep spending on popular things that people want: that’s what gets them re-elected.

So as Republicans kept cutting taxes every chance they got—mostly on the wealthy—they also kept spending more. As a result, the debt rose steadily during the Reagan-Bush years, then shrank during the Clinton years (under a Democrat who actually cared about a balanced budget).

It expanded yet again, by 37%, under the next Republican President, who also had a tax cut fetish, George W. Bush. (Yes, it also rose under Obama and Biden, as they tried to rescue us from the Great Recession and the Covid Recession).

By the end of the first Trump term, the far right saw the problem. Enter right wing-mantra 2.0: if you can’t starve the beast, put poison in its diet.

The Republican budget bill (I won’t use Trump’s stupid name for it, which polling shows actually fools 6% of independents into liking it more) adds $4 trillion to the debt. But here’s the key: that figure is actually made up of $3.4 trillion in new debt plus about $700 billion in additional interest on that debt. It’s those interest payments that are interesting to the far right wing.

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Look at this basic chart of federal spending from a couple years ago:

The federal budget is made up of about 2/3 “mandatory” spending. Those are funds that Congress has to spend by law, mostly Social Security and Medicare. When I worked in Congress in the 2000s, the rule of thumb was 2/3 goes to mandatory spending, and the remaining 1/3 goes to “discretionary” spending, which is everything else.

But now look at that yellow wedge that says “net interest.” That’s the amount of interest that we’re paying on the debt. That wedge has been steadily growing. And as it does, it’s eating into discretionary spending, which is now only 26%.

Here’s the clever political reality that the far-right undertood. No politician wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. Republicans won’t cut military spending—which is about half of our discretionary spending even before Republicans just added another $153 billion—and Democrats might want to but they’re afraid to be called weak on defense.

So to them—while they may pretend differently—more debt is great. As the debt goes up, interest payments go up. And as interest payments go up, the only thing that gets squeezed is the rest of non-defense discretionary spending.

That’s everything else that Russel Vought and his Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 cabal has desperately wanted to kill for years: health (Medicaid, ACA), education, veterans benefits, transportation, the justice system, and social services.

That is the sneaky agenda going on behind the scenes here.

Republicans did a lot of cosplaying as budget hawks in recent weeks, hemming over whether the Trump budget created too much debt. A few of them may have meant it. But in the basement bowels of the Heritage Foundation, they’re popping a cork today over all this new debt.

Because in the years ahead, it is going to keep leaking the interest payment poison that will slowly kill off the things that regular people need, and that they hate.

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This is a guest post from Blue Amp contributor Matt Robison--former Democratic Congressional chief of staff, campaign manager, and Newsweek columnist. Subscribe to Matt's Substack, Worth Knowing, to support and amplify indy media!

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