Biden Budget: More Federal Spending, Please

P residential “budgets” are among the most deceiving documents to come out of Washington, D.C.

Presidents don’t set budgets; they only sign, or refuse to sign, budget-related bills from Congress. Thus when the president releases his budget — or a more limited “discretionary funding request,” as President Biden did today — it’s best seen as a sort of wide-ranging wish list, one in which not all the items are necessarily even proposed with a straight face. The previous president, after all, once “balanced the budget” by assuming yuge economic growth and proposing big cuts to the safety net, neither of which had any prayer of happening.

Biden’s new outline, though, is a little more interesting than usual, thanks to everything else going on at the moment. It reveals the president’s spending priorities, which are especially important at a time when his party controls both houses of Congress. And, by way of comparison, this limited one-year funding request reveals just how grandiose Biden’s other plans are.

In some ways this is a predictably boring document. It doesn’t have anything to do with the major entitlement benefits that we’ll eventually need to reform — Social Security, Medicare, etc. — as those are considered “mandatory” rather than discretionary spending. And as a one-year funding request, it also doesn’t include Biden’s longer-term domestic-spending goals, such as those laid out in the recent infrastructure proposal, or his plans to hike taxes. It’s chiefly about funding for federal agencies, including defense.

But it does emphasize some Biden priorities. Restraining spending is, of course, not one of them: Nondefense spending rises an incredible 16 percent. Meanwhile, defense spending grows 1.7 percent, a hike that only offsets inflation — an apparent concession to the left wing of the Democratic Party that might land poorly in Congress.

Elsewhere, the request throws lots of money around in the service of liberal goals. Climate-change initiatives get $14 billion. The Centers for Disease Control, which lately has been focused on the public-health impact of racism, gets about $9 billion “to restore capacity.” Schools get a billion bucks to provide mental-health aid to the students they messed up by shutting down. The Internal Revenue Service gets a boost too. Central America gets hundreds of millions of dollars in the hopes of discouraging out-migration.

Perhaps most alarmingly to those of us who care about federalism and the Second Amendment, the Department of Justice gets millions of dollars to, among other things, “incentivize State adoption of gun licensing laws and establish voluntary gun buyback pilot programs.”

And so on and so forth, for 58 eye-glazing pages. Child-development grants. R&D spending for health care. Bigger Pell grants for college students. More housing vouchers. A year’s worth of big spending on various types of infrastructure. At the agency level, the Department of Education sees its funding rise an astounding 41 percent, while the Environmental Protection Agency gets a 21 percent boost.

But again: None of this binds Congress in any way. The Senate is evenly divided, so, at minimum, Democratic moderates will have to get on board with the final budget. Meanwhile, Joe Manchin is still opposed to weakening the filibuster and overusing the reconciliation process, so Republicans should have some leverage too. This is just a sort of window into the administration’s big-spending desires.

It’s also, though, an interesting contrast to some of Biden’s other proposals. The entire request here — not just the 16 percent increase to non-defense spending, the whole request — is $1.5 trillion. That’s enough to keep funding the federal agencies for a whole year and to give money to Biden’s proposed new pet projects. It amounts to roughly $4,500 for each person living in the U.S. (In 2019, the whole federal budget — including the mandatory spending on entitlement programs — totaled about three times that.)

By contrast, the COVID bill this year, passed on top of our normal spending and all the COVID relief enacted throughout 2020, amounted to $2 trillion by itself. Biden’s infrastructure proposal also comes in around $2 trillion, which could rise to $4 trillion when his next domestic-spending proposal is on offer later this year. That’s something like $6 trillion in spending total if Biden gets his way, enacted in a single year (though spent more slowly). It’s $18,000 in extra spending for each person in the country, and would be paid for with a combination of tax hikes and new debt.

Fortunately, it’s not too late to stop this spending binge — because, once again, the president does not get to set the budget by himself. We need to worry not so much about what Biden wants to do, but about what Joe Manchin will let him get away with.