From a Chainsaw to a Nail File

Not everyone wants actual liberty and the same can be said of reduced spending.

I’ve given up expecting the Republican party to ever cut a single dime of government spending. I no longer have the patience or the will to suspend disbelief and go along with it.

When we founded the modern day tea party we rallied together against big spending from Bush-era Republicans. Despite the media’s reframing of conservative criticism in the early aughts, the real protest predated Obama, though his ascension placed government spending — and our protests — on steroids.

After grassroots beat the establishment into a hole in the ground during the 2010 midterms, some things changed and Trump’s presidency absolutely would not have happened without it. Unfortunately, here we are again, back in the same position we found ourselves in 2004-2008 with the resurgence of the big spending Republican mentality.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” adds $2.3 trillion to the deficit and capped any tax cuts (“No Tax On Tips,” for example) at four years to achieve its current scoring.

Politicians hide behind the Byrd rule to avoid eliminating taxes on Social Security and pretend we don’t notice committee inaction to bring anything else to the floor. The Green New Scam is still partly funded. Planned Parenthood is still funded, although $20m of the half billion they receive annually is frozen.

POTUS is rumored to soon send a recessions package to Congress. The reported cuts included amount to .1% of federal spending, or about what we spend federally in one day.

Elon Musk is understandably disillusioned with the whole process, saying “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.” He voluntarily risked his businesses and reputation to avenge taxpayers with nominal austerity proposals but ultimately not even the world’s richest man could overcome the uniparty establishment.

Musk, who served as chief advisor to DOGE, told The Washington Post admitted he had underestimated the scale of “the federal bureaucracy situation,” calling it “much worse than I realized.” As the SpaceX founder retreats from Washington, he described the initiative as having become a convenient scapegoat for government dysfunction.

“DOGE is just becoming a whipping boy for everything,” Musk told the Post. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

Whereas DOGE looked to net $170 billion in savings just this year, the proposed rescissions request only targets a reported $9.4 billion for the next four years while also raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about tax cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill but not a lot of transparency on how many of those cuts are actually temporary so as to achieve a certain CBO score (reminder: CBO spits out whatever you feed it). A few of the major provisions which expire in 2028 (just in time for the next presidential election):

• Standard Deduction Increase: Boosted by $2,000 for joint filers, $1,500 for head of household filers, and $1,000 for others, effective from 2025 through 2028.

• Child Tax Credit: Increased to $2,500 from 2025 through 2028, reverting to $2,000 thereafter.

• New Deductions: Provisions for tip income, overtime pay, and auto loan interest are also set to expire after 2028.

Control F “temporarily” to confirm that here if you don’t want to take my word for it.

These expirations mean the CBO’s score reflects the revenue loss only for the years these cuts are in place, not beyond. The CBO’s initial estimate pegs the bill’s cost at $2.5 trillion over the next decade in terms of primary deficits. Remember — Democrats and moderate Republicans both believe tax cuts, rather than federal spending, cost.

Lawmakers have used temporary tax cuts before to manage CBO scores (Obamacare, for one, another example are the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which were set to expire after 10 years to fit within budget constraints—though many were later extended, increasing the deficit beyond initial projections since it wasn’t offset by a reduction in federal spending).

Some Republicans are trying to bright-side it, arguing that the temporary nature of the OBBB’s tax cuts serves the strategic purpose of reducing the scored cost upfront, while easing passage through Congress amid concerns about the national debt, and leaving room for future extensions. That’s the exact same argument they used in 2017 to make tax cuts permanent and here we are eight years later. The only thing permanent so far has been the debt.

We’re spending billions more at the Pentagon under the BBB. That’s fine when viewed through the correct perspective of enumerated powers, but bad when you accept that while defense spending is the only real job of the federal government, it isn’t a sacred cow and the Pentagon has failed seven consecutive audits, completing the first in 2017 over 20 years after Congress passed a law demanding that agencies audit themselves.

One idea floating around the Capitol is to use a pocket rescission (similar to a pocket veto) as a way to run out the budget authority in the 11th hour, but the outcome is risky and the strategy wasn’t successful during Trump’s first term but this is a new ballgame and voters seem keener this time around to politically rough up RINOs over their complacency.

Musk did what he said he would do, at great risk to himself. DOGE did what it said it would do. Republicans ran entire campaigns on immediately reducing spending. I spend broadcast hours detailing how Congress needed to hit the ground running and quickly work with Trump to codify his executive orders as he issued them.

Now the GOP is giving us excuses, exactly as they did in the early tea party days. I’ve heard all of the excuses before so have you. Rescissions aren’t subject to filibusters any more than reconciliation is, so the meager amount of flex in this bill suggests that more Republicans than not oppose including more and stronger spending cuts. That sort of pierces the hope of taking a second bite at the apple later this year.

The media narrative of a divide that doesn’t exist between Musk and Trump? Weak Republicans fed it with their inaction. The success of a Trump administration? Republicans are torpedoing it with inaction and cowardice. The House majority? Republicans are imperiling it — and heaven forbid if we lose the House and spend the following two years in another impeachment witch hunt.

I want this administration to be successful. I want to see the creation of a lasting legacy. Unfortunately, not everyone in D.C. is compatible with liberty. They want to be taken care of, they want a guarantee of happiness, which is what their definition of liberty promises. Same can be said of reducing government spending — many on the right talk a good game but when the going gets tough, they cower and capitulate. Weak Republicans will burn through every accomplishment these past four months and capitulate us into a Democrat-controlled D.C. come 2028 if they don’t get it together. We will watch what happens this week in the Senate.

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