At the beginning of April, scientists at the National Institutes of Health published a paper detailing a promising step in fighting gastrointestinal cancer — and pointing the way to treating other cancers. It came out the same day the Department of Health and Human Services announced massive layoffs that will not only delay that particular […]
At the beginning of April, scientists at the National Institutes of Health published a paper detailing a promising step in fighting gastrointestinal cancer — and pointing the way to treating other cancers. It came out the same day the Department of Health and Human Services announced massive layoffs that will not only delay that particular research (in some cases for patients who can’t afford delays), but handicap Medicare and Medicaid services, disease monitoring and prevention, food and drug safety, and the like.
Of course, this was just one example of the countless ongoing federal-budget cuts that are affecting the lives of ordinary Americans. Social Security can’t keep up with requests for help or advice from among the 73 million retirees it serves because its website keeps crashing and support staff at offices in every corner of the country have been laid off. Longstanding efforts to modernize and make the IRS more efficient have instead ground to a halt. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have hampered its ability to forecast the weather. Public libraries around the country are already struggling after grants approved last year were terminated.
There’s lots more, but you get the idea. There are two key points to remember in all this. First, all of these things were funded by U.S. taxpayers through the federal budget — which, as we’re already seeing, can have a real impact on the day-to-day lives of your friends and neighbors. And second, under our system Congress is supposed to be the final word on the budget, but it hasn’t weighed in on any of those cuts even though it agreed not that long ago to fund each of those programs.
I know a lot of Americans believe the federal budget has gotten too big and are happy to see it cut. But let me lay out how things worked in the past and compare it to what’s happening now. There’s a difference, and it’s one you should care about.
I won’t bore you with the details of the congressional budget and appropriations process, but the main thing to remember is that, once upon a time, there was an actual process. Committees held hearings so that they could hear from experts in a given field and so that rank-and-file members, representing every geographical and ideological corner of this country, could weigh in. In the end, all that expertise and public sentiment got funneled into budgetary line items, as members of Congress hashed out what they believed the federal government should actually be doing.
That process began to break down in recent decades, as congressional leaders for a variety of reasons found it easier and less politically troublesome to concentrate power in their own hands, and through omnibus bills and continuing resolutions make it harder for ordinary members — and, hence, the Americans they represent — to weigh in.
Now we’re in an entirely new stage: Cabinet officials and, above all, the staff at Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” are charging ahead with wholesale cuts to congressionally mandated spending and with little to no consultation with the members of Congress who enacted it. There is no question that pursuing budget cuts is well within the rights of a new administration. But the rushed and haphazard nature of what’s going on now will reshape American life — only without the thoughtfulness and public input that the old congressional budget process would have required.
What may be most striking about the times we’re living through is that we’re engaged in a vast and potentially disruptive experiment in gauging the impact of the federal budget on Americans’ lives. Massive budget cuts will have repercussions for years. And while Congress is now in the process of weighing in on what the next budget should look like, so far it’s only been in its broad outlines—House and Senate committees have yet to tackle the details. There’s a big gap between what the GOP majority in the Senate foresees and what the GOP-controlled House wants, but cuts are coming. And there’s no question that, as has already happened thanks to DOGE, they’ll be arriving in one way or another on the street where you live.
Lee Hamilton, 94, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.
Lee Hamilton
