This week on Facing the Future, we heard from American University Professors Tom Kahn and Ron Elving on the first week of the Trump Administration and the budget battles predicted to lie ahead. To begin the show, Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson discussed the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) newly released 10 year budget outlook. The daunting projections move the United States into uncharted deficit and debt territory.
Demographics play a big role in budget projections because they impact potential economic growth and the finances of some of our biggest spending programs like Social Security and Medicare. Robinson discussed a new survey done by the federal government called the National Survey on Family Growth that might reveal a demographic paradigm shift regarding fertility.
“That data goes back to the early 1980s,“ Robinson said, “and when you ask women in the survey of different age groups, they would always say they’re going to have between 2 and 2.5 kids over their lifetime. That’s obviously an average. You can’t have half a kid, but if you average those who say they’ll have 2, and those who say they’ll have 3, you can come up with an average that’s less than a whole. The most recent data came out in December and what the survey shows is that for women under the age of 35 they all expect to have less than 2 children on average. With the older women it’s closer to 2, but by the time you get down to the group of women who are between the ages of 20 and 24 their expected births are now down to 1.5, which is below the replacement rate.”
This is significant, Robinson explained, because “when you get in that situation the burden of funding Social Security Medicare is magnified because you have fewer workers paying in relative to the number of beneficiaries. This will not affect the trust fund solvency date as much as it will affect the long-term cost of the program.”
Later I was joined by Kahn and Elving, who both serve at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. They discussed President Trump freezing funds through executive orders and more.
Asked about how the current administration will deal with legal battles ahead as a result of impounding funds, Khan said “It will absolutely be a challenge in the courts, and there’s nothing in the Constitution that gives the President the power to impound. Congress has passed legislation, and it has been challenged in the courts several times, and the courts have upheld the Congressional Empowerment Act. But again, I think it goes back to something we were talking about earlier, which is this vast expansion of Presidential power in addition to impoundment. We saw in President Trump’s first term that he spent money that had not been appropriated by Congress for a different purpose. And he moved that money to the [border] wall. It’s the imposition of an enormous amount of authority by this executive. It will be challenged in the courts. I think there will be some limitations on that.”
On the topic of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elving said, “They want to set something up that is not a commission, that is not a compromise group from Congress, such as we’ve seen in more recent years, but which would have real teeth and authority to step in [and] supersede the agencies, supersede the regular Congressional budget process, and just say, ‘No, we at DOGE have decided that that is not government efficiency.’ As we read the Constitution, Congress holds the power of the purse, so that’s an extraordinary assertion.” Elving concluded that, “It’s trying to put some kind of substance to this common theme of waste, fraud, and abuse, and test the theory of whether or not waste, fraud, and abuse can be sufficient to balance the Federal budget without cutting Social Security or defense, or anything else that people actually like.”
Hear more on Facing the Future. Concord Coalition Executive Director Bob Bixby hosts the program each week on WKXL in Concord N.H., and it is also available via podcast. Join us as The Concord Coalition team discusses issues relating to national fiscal policy with budget experts, industry leaders, and elected officials. Past broadcasts are available here. You can subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or with an RSS feed. Follow Facing the Future on Facebook, and watch videos from past episodes on The Concord Coalition YouTube channel.
