The U.S. is a little more than two weeks away from potentially defaulting on its debts for the first time. And after another meeting between congressional leaders and President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday, there’s still no deal to avert such a catastrophic self-own. Americans who are even aware of the looming threat are sure that some eleventh-hour deal will prevent disaster, but there’s still a long way to go before House Republicans are willing to release their hostage.
Despite the party’s insistence that a slew of cuts is the only way to clamp down on Washington’s spending, not all areas of the budget are reportedly on the table. There’s little appetite among Republicans for any cuts to the defense side of the budget, which makes for a ludicrous mismatch between their stated reasons for this standoff and where their priorities lie.
Of course, it’s not the fault of Republicans alone that the national defense budget is a bloated $857.9 billion — or $8.5 trillion over the next decade. Defense funding has been one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement over the last two decades, even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended. But in negotiating last year’s annual spending bill, Republicans held firm against Democrats’ insistence on parity between military and nondefense spending and were the reason defense spending accounted for most of the $1.7 trillion package.
The omnibus bill came together with the knowledge that the incoming GOP majority would most likely move to rein in spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Last month, the House passed the Limit, Save, Grow Act as its ransom note, demanding, among other things, that the government roll total spending back to what it was in fiscal year 2022. That bill, tellingly, didn’t include details about just what should be cut to reduce spending by about $130 billion, but now the GOP is declaring spending at the Pentagon and potentially the departments of Homeland…
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