Debt hawk to GOP: You're deliberately making this worse

President Donald Trump is worsening America’s ballooning debt with his proposed $1 billion ballroom, according to a recent account by a debt hawk.

“Senate Republicans have unveiled their plan to fund immigration enforcement and President Donald Trump's ballroom, and the proposal might take fiscal irresponsibility to a new record high,” wrote Reason reporter Eric Boehm on Wednesday. “The two bills included in the package call for spending nearly $72 billion. Remarkably, every single dollar would be borrowed.”

Citing the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of Trump’s recent immigration enforcement bill, Boehm observed it would “direct $38 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and spend $26 billion on various programs run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The largest share of the CBP funding is $19.1 billion to allow the agency to ‘hire, pay, train, and equip border patrol agents, officers, and support staff,’ according to the CBO. Another $3.5 billion will fund screening efforts at the border.”

Perhaps most controversially, Boehm speculated that “with how quickly the ballroom's price tag is growing, it seems likely the $1 billion included in the reconciliation package will soon be deemed insufficient.”

Yet regardless of the ultimate price tag for these measures, Boehm argued that the bigger problem is that they are not being directly charged to taxpayers, but rather added to a debt he characterized as dangerously unsustainable.

“Of course, saying that ‘taxpayers’ are paying for the ballroom is a bit inaccurate,” Boehm wrote. “Taxpayers aren't directly paying for any of this, because the whole cost of the bill—the ICE funding, the ballroom, and the assorted other things included here—is simply being added to the national debt.”

He added, “That is actually worse. If lawmakers believe the American people should have to pay for Trump's ballroom or for enhanced immigration enforcement, they should have the courage to propose tax increases that will cover the cost, or cut spending in other parts of the budget as offsets.” Additionally, because the CBO calculated that additional spending in the reconciliation bill will add $26 billion in borrowing costs over the next 10 years, “that brings the final price tag of this package to nearly $100 billion, once the interest costs are included.”

Boehm is not alone among fiscal hawks in raising the alarm about America’s growing debt. Writing for The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston argued that “unless we change course, the debt will only get worse—fast. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are on track to accumulate more than $24 trillion in debt over the next decade, for a total of $56 trillion—120 percent of estimated GDP in 2036.”

Galston added, “These numbers are so large that it is hard to grasp what they mean. One key measure is the cost of financing this swelling debt burden. Twenty-five years ago, interest payments on the national debt were 2 percent of GDP. This year they will claim 3.3 percent; a decade from now, 4.6 percent.”

Similarly Fortune business editor Nick Lichtenberg wrote in March that the government under Trump has hit an ominous milestone by having its debt equal its GDP.

“The milestone, confirmed in Wednesday’s Daily Treasury Statement, lands amid a politically charged moment: it comes roughly two weeks before the ten-year anniversary of President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to eliminate the national debt within eight years,” Lichtenberg wrote. “Instead, the gross national debt has roughly doubled since Trump first took office—it was $19.9 trillion in January 2017.”

Lichtenberg also referenced a Peterson Foundation study which projects the debt will exceed $40 trillion by the end of 2026.

“Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the crossing is what it costs just to carry the debt,” Lichtenberg argued. “Net interest payments on the national debt are projected to exceed $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026—nearly triple the $345 billion in interest the government paid in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. In the first three months of the current fiscal year alone, net interest payments reached $270 billion, already surpassing the nation’s defense spending for the same period.”

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