When Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2016, the official Republican platform called for imposing “firm caps on future debt” to “accelerate the repayment of the trillions we now owe.”
When Mr. Trump sought a second term in 2020, the party’s platform pummeled Democrats for refusing to help Republicans rein in spending and proposed a constitutional requirement that the federal budget be balanced.
Those ambitions were cast aside in the platform that the Republican Party unveiled this week ahead of its convention. Nowhere in the 16-page document do the words “debt” or “deficit” as they relate to the nation’s grim fiscal situation appear. The platform included only a glancing reference to slashing “wasteful” spending, a perennial Republican talking point.
To budget hawks who have spent years warning that the United States is spending more than it can afford, the omissions signaled the completion of a Republican transformation from a party that once espoused fiscal restraint to one that is beholden to the ideology of Mr. Trump, who once billed himself the “king of debt.”
“I am really shocked that the party that I grew up with is now a party that doesn’t think that debt and deficits matter,” said G. William Hoagland, the former top budget expert for Senate Republicans. “We’ve got a deficit deficiency syndrome going on in our party.”
The U.S. national debt is approaching $35 trillion and is on pace to top $56 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. At that point, the United States would be spending about as much on interest payments to its lenders — $1.7 trillion — as it does on Medicare.
The United States has long borrowed money to fund government spending by selling Treasury securities to investors around the world. But the need to borrow money has exploded in recent years as tax cuts and increased spending widened the gap between what the federal government spends and what it takes in through taxes and other revenue.
Economists warn that if the debt burden grows too large, it will slow economic growth and could lead to economic instability. The International Monetary Fund said last month that the United States faced an urgent need to curb spending and raise tax revenue to narrow its budget deficits.
“Such high deficits and debt create a growing risk to the U.S. and global economy, potentially feeding into higher fiscal financing costs,” the I.M.F. said in an assessment of the U.S. economy.
At the first presidential debate between President Biden and Mr. Trump last month, the candidates sparred over who was responsible for the nation’s red ink. Mr. Trump claimed, without evidence, that he would have chipped away at the debt if not for the trillions of dollars he was forced to spend during the onset of the pandemic in 2020. Mr. Biden, who has proposed raising revenue by increasing taxes on the rich, argued that the nearly $2 trillion in tax cuts that Mr. Trump enacted in 2017 were to blame for the yawning deficit.
For years, Republicans have raised alarm about the national debt when a Democrat controls the White House.
In 2009, Tea Party Republicans employed fears about a looming debt crisis to derail President Barack Obama’s agenda, mobilizing in opposition to government bailouts for struggling homeowners and fomenting protracted fights over raising the nation’s debt limit.
Republicans in Congress tried several times to block Mr. Biden’s spending plans and waged a prolonged fight over lifting a statutory cap on how much the United States can borrow.
Yet that passion for austerity dissipated when Mr. Trump took office and Republicans passed a $2 trillion tax cut that was paid for with borrowed money.
A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Mr. Trump approved nearly twice as much borrowing — $8.4 trillion — during his time in office as Mr. Biden has so far during his term.
Maya MacGuineas, the group’s president, said she found it alarming that the Republican platform ignored the national debt and failed to offer any ideas for addressing the biggest contributors to increased federal spending — Social Security and Medicare.
“It is pretty astonishing to read the platform of a party that for years has talked about controlling fiscally irresponsible behavior, and find promises to cut taxes, promises not to fix Social Security and not even a mention of reducing the out-of-control national debt,” Ms. MacGuineas said.
Last fall, House Republicans unveiled a proposal to balance the budget over 10 years through deep cuts to discretionary spending and called for the creation of a commission to recommend changes to Social Security and Medicare, two of the biggest drivers of the national debt.
But such policies are unlikely to be enacted if Mr. Trump wins a second term.
“The congressional branch of the Republicans are quite devoted rhetorically to fiscal responsibility,” said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that lobbies for lower deficits. “What we’re seeing is maybe a divergence between the Trump people and the congressional people.”
He added that “when push comes to shove, they’ll pass the tax cuts and not pay for them.”
Mr. Trump has called for extending his 2017 tax cuts, which analysts estimate would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade. He has also proposed exempting income derived from tips from taxation, which could cost another $250 billion over 10 years.
The former president has offered some proposals for raising revenue and reducing spending to narrow budget deficits. He has suggested that more tariffs on imports would raise tax revenue, offsetting reductions in income taxes.
And in a campaign video last year, Mr. Trump said that, if elected, he would try to restore impoundment powers of the executive branch that would allow him to essentially seize money approved by Congress that he believes is wasteful.
“This is the only way that we will ever return a balanced budget — impoundment,” Mr. Trump said. “With impoundment, we can simply choke off the money.”
Still, impoundment is nowhere in the Republican platform, making it unclear how much the party itself is prepared to rally around that idea.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 prevents presidents from clawing back money appropriated by Congress without congressional consent. Mr. Trump could challenge the constitutionality of that law, potentially setting up a legal fight.
However, budget experts believe that even an aggressive use of such powers would have only marginal impact because they could not be applied to “mandatory” spending programs such as Social Security or the mounting interest costs associated with the debt.
If Mr. Trump wins and succeeds in enacting a fresh round of tax cuts, he is likely to argue, as he did in 2017, that they will spur sufficient economic growth to pay for themselves. Economic research has shown that while those tax cuts did spur business investment, they did not pay for themselves.
The director of the Congressional Budget Office, Phillip Swagel, told lawmakers this week that the 2017 tax cuts “by far” did not pay for themselves and neither would extending them.
Mr. Swagel, a top economist during the George W. Bush administration, warned that “the fiscal outlook is daunting.”
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