Cut the budget, not the Constitution

I had the opportunity, during the second Bush administration, to engage in advising struggling democracies in a project then known as “democracy building.”  It was enormously fulfilling work, and I saw real progress in places like Indonesia, Cambodia, and Angola in educating inexperienced elected officials in the rudiments of legislative organization and procedure. It was paid for primarily by USAID.

Foreign aid is commonly called “soft power” because in addition to winning friends for democracy, as I was assigned to do, U.S. foreign aid is primarily responsible for about 40% of worldwide humanitarian assistance.  Aid from the United States in the form primarily of food and medicine to the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people unquestionably saves lives, and our humanitarian actions also help build good will for Americans around the world.

As I think I have come to understand his way of thinking, President Trump fails to see how the U.S. can benefit, transactionally, from rescuing the world’s poor, so why spend money on them?  

By his thinking too, public projects are better accomplished by private sector contractors. From the strict standpoint of project efficiency, he might be right; but from the standpoint of preventing waste and fraud, probably not.  Little waste and fraudulent government spending can be recovered as a result of firing middle income government employees.  That’s not where the money is. It appears to me that the skimmed and squandered big money is in government contracts. 

In the gangster era of the 1930s when the legendary bank robber, Willy Sutton, was supposedly asked why he robbed banks, he promptly replied “cuz dat’s where the da money is.”  Well, Elon Musk, in addition to being the world’s richest person, is probably its largest contractor.  He knows where the money is. Does anyone think, in his role as budget czar, that he will crack down on himself?

In his new non-position in government, Musk is making a range of government decisions that historically and constitutionally have been the responsibility of Congress.  The congressional acolytes of Trump are blithely letting him.  Our constitutional division of powers, and the power of the budget, are mere niceties to the majority in Congress who remain in total terror of Trump. 

Congress won’t do it, but with a newly grown spine, it could claw back the huge tax cuts that have fattened the fortunes of America’s wealthiest 1%.  

Americans certainly agree with the goal of getting control of the federal budget. But probably not by laying off middle income public employees and further impoverishing the poor here and abroad. Such an approach is morally wrong, and wouldn’t touch our astronomical national debt, anyway. Cracking down on the trillions owed by the pampered, protected and richest tax cheats would make a real dent in it.

Many years ago, I adopted the view of Abraham Lincoln that government should only do for the people what they can’t do for themselves. It’s still a view I hold. If Old Abe, the founding President of the Republican Party were back with us today, he could never understand how his Grand Old Party is so ill bent on adding to the mountains of wealth of those who are better able to do for themselves than any other human beings in history.      

Bob Brown is a former Montana Secretary of State and state Senate President. He lives in Whitefish.