The Republican Congress is breaking spending records with almost no spending cuts in sight

The Republican-controlled federal government is setting new records for blowing out the national debt, and substantial spending cuts don’t appear anywhere on the outgoing Congress’ radar. This week the government released two different statistics showing how rapidly the federal deficit is still growing.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s monthly budget review for November 2018 found that that the first two months of fiscal year 2019 have yielded a deficit of $303 billion. On Thursday, the latest monthly report from the department of the Treasury showed that the deficit for the month of November 2018 alone was $205 billion — over $66 billion more than the same time last year.

With numbers this high this early in the fiscal year, the federal government will post a trillion-dollar deficit for the first time in its history quite easily before the end of this fiscal year in September, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government predicted back in March.

Meanwhile, the national debt clock is still growing, with a total just south of $22 trillion as of Friday morning.

Yet here we are at the end of the year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any meaningful effort to cut government spending in the upcoming spending package.

Additionally, Republican leadership has even given up on the spending-related agenda items of defunding Planned Parenthood or placing modest work requirement reforms on the federal food stamp program in the nearly $900 billion farm bill that passed this week.

At this point, it appears that the only way congressional leadership might manage to save any taxpayer money in the ongoing year-end spending negotiations is if they fail to negotiate the $5 billion in funds President Trump has demanded for a southern border wall.

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