ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

Dull Blade: Farewell to OMB Director Mitchell Daniels, the budget-cutter who couldn't cut. (Daniel Gross, May 6, 2003, Slate)

And then there were none. Mitchell Daniels, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the last remaining original member of the Bush economic team, announced today that he would resign, probably to run for governor of Indiana. [...]

To his credit, Daniels intended to combat the rampant spending growth that had taken root in the late '90s. He seemed to relish being the administration's designated noodge. He loved talking tough. He mused about playing "You Can't Always Get What You Want" to callers on hold at OMB. Early on, he loudly turned down Donald Rumsfeld's requests for a massive Pentagon spending increase and deep-sixed a Federal Emergency Management Agency request for extra disaster relief in the president's home state of Texas.

But after Sept. 11, as "homeland security" became a catchall for both new unfunded mandates and pork-barrel spending, Daniels' cost-cutting efforts increasingly backfired. He justifiably earned opprobrium when, after New York's representatives tried to hold Bush to his promise of $20 billion in aid, he accused them of playing "a little money-grubbing game." Then he needlessly picked fights with free-spending appropriators on both sides of the aisle--notably Sens. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

But even as Daniels grabbed nickels and dimes, he did little to stop the mass splurge of Congress and his boss, the president. He was the designated budget-cutter for a president who had no intention of cutting the budget--a teetotaler riding shotgun in a car driven by a drunk. Congress continued to spend more. And President Bush approved every dollar of it. In fiscal 2002, overall spending rose 8 percent. And in this fiscal year, including the $80 billion supplementary war-spending bill passed in April, spending is slated to rise another 11 percent.

The failure of a series of very talented and well-intentioned deficit hawks at OMB--if memory serves, they include Cap Weinberger, David Stockman, Dick Darman, Leon Panetta and Alice Rivlin, in addition to Mr. Daniels--to make any appreciable dent in government spending would tend to suggest that it is not possible to do so. This makes a Balanced Budget and Line Item Veto constitutional amendment necessary and tax cuts imperative. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2003 7:04 PM