ll of a sudden fiscal conservatives have become an endangered species on Capitol Hill. We’re down to a small handful of Congress critters who actually have any interest in shrinking the budget. In this era of prosperity and a federal treasury overflowing with gobs of cash, the pro-spending virus that long ago contaminated nearly every Democrat in Washington has now spread through the ranks of the Republicans as well. "You have no idea how bad it is," Congressman Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the last of the dying breed of budget hawks in Washington, tells me. "We have simply lost control of the budget process," he moans.

He’s right. Senate Republican Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici is now putting the final touches on an embarrassingly obese fiscal year 2001 fiscal blueprint that includes just over $600 billion in discretionary spending. Domestic discretionary outlays — for education, transportation, the Legal Services Corporation, the NEA, Goals 2000, corporate welfare, the Energy Department, and other such nonessentials — would rise by, hold on to your hat, 7 percent over last year. In the House, retiring Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich is heroically attempting to maintain a modicum of fiscal restraint, but he is being thwarted, not so much by the Democrats, but again by a posse of Senators who for some reason insist on calling themselves Republicans. If these left-leaning GOP Senators have their way, the Republicans’ budget will contain a higher price tag for domestic spending than even Bill Clinton and Al Gore requested.

We’ve heard this record all too often in recent years. My Cato colleague Stephen Slivinski recently calculated that from 1996 through 2000 the domestic budget has risen by 21 percent. It gets worse. According to Slivinski, total domestic discretionary expenditures rose by 9 percent last year. The Republican Congress thus approved a budget with the largest real increase in domestic discretionary spending in 24 years. If they add to this the 7 percent proposed spending this year, the 106th Congress will be the biggest-spending Congress since Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society modern-day welfare state. It almost makes one long for the return of Tip O’Neill.

The Senate budget is also notable for what it doesn’t contain: zeroes. No programs of consequence would be carted off to the federal graveyard under the Domenici proposal. In fact, if we look at the 65 major programs slated for extinction by the Contract with America, their combined budgets actually grew by a total of 17% over the past five years. This year, these fatted calves would add some more pounds. Reagan was right: the closest thing to immortality on this earth is a federal-government agency. George W. Bush has been correctly arguing for a big tax cut in this era of large and growing tax surpluses, by making the common-sense argument that "if we keep the money in Washington, we all know Congress will spend it." What Bush may not know is that a lot of the pols in Washington who are most prone to spend the money are his fellow Republicans.